Lav Diaz's Unfinished Business
Hesus, Rebolusyonaryo (2002)
Never mind the packaging, although it already shows the inappropriateness of Mark Anthony Fernandez for the role of Hesus. Bad casting, and consequent bad acting, is operative in this film -- worse probably than in an earlier Diaz film, Serafin Geronimo: Ang Kriminal ng Baryo Concepcion (starring Angel Aquino). At the movie's start, opened by an actor playing the role of the republic's President and a voice talent playing a female foreign correspondent, bad acting for the rest of the movie is already ominous. It's a little sad to think that two of Diaz's extraordinary stories and scripts should end up as bad movies under his own direction, mainly by virtue of this bad acting.
As for Diaz's far future-set story and script here, suspension of disbelief also has its problems, what with the exaggeration of local artists' and writers' influence on impending Philippine history, even if it's set in the future. As regards Diaz's direction, the choreography can sometimes be puzzling, the gunfights almost incredible (at times ludicrous), and Diaz can't seem to find alternatives to a B-movie budget's denial of ample locational establishing-shots (just so he may escape in turn an interiors-driven story drift). And though sometimes Diaz would compose his frames like a painter, often the frames would look no better than a TV soap's composition, nowhere near a Carlos Siguion-Reyna of, say, Ligaya Ang Itawag Mo Sa Akin or a Lino Brocka of Insiang or Maynila.
But let's go back to the actors. Fernandez doesn't seem to talk like a young ideological warrior from the working class. He talks more like, uh, Fernandez, or any of his real-life barkadas from showbiz or high school. Joel Lamangan as Colonel Simon behaves here more like a melodramatic and uncertain actor from amateur theater than a colonel, creating a crazy (and a bit faggoty) military persona -- although I'm not saying that's not realistic. This reflects on Diaz, perhaps on Lamangan likewise, as a poor actor's director in dire need of an assistant director for acting.
And going back to Diaz's script, while it's a happy occurrence to witness finally a Philippine director in love with poetry, music, and painting, a love reflected -- however unconvincingly -- in Hesus' character, yet that a colonel should even put high value on his prisoner's passion for such things is highly unacceptable. The nearest awareness Filipino colonels might have of Filipino poetry, much less the ability to recite them, would be in videoke lyrics. (And, incidentally, shouldn't the "malapot na gatas ng Liberty Evap" read as "Liberty Condensada" instead, rhyming aside?)
But certainly jewels are to be found in this film, apart from the story's overall concept which -- though probably facile -- was the sort that no one wanted to touch for Philippine cinema until now. As a film hinged on the thesis that history repeats itself, Hesus' best nostalgic simulation here of a Marcos-era martial law atmosphere I found in a tiny element of the film, namely the recurrent background audio as soundtrack that sounded a lot like a radio-advice show (the "Dear Kuya Cesar" kind of thing). For if anyone knows his '70s days better than the rest of us, it's usually one who remembers the so-called bourgeois media of the '70s with its focus on escapism, contentment-preachings, comic relief, religiosity, and fantasy (Diaz, I believe, used to write for a comics magazine, the equivalent in print of radio soap dramas). Also here is the assurance that Hesus, Rebolusyonaryo is indeed retro as future politics, as shown in the character of Hesus' friend Tasyo (Arvin Jimenez), the '70s-emulating painter figure with the long hair and rock and roll leanings covering a complex of political awareness and drugged comicality.
The biggest gem of all, the one that makes this film hang on my necklace of a significance list, is the film's very story concept (somewhat akin to my story "Who Cares For Markets?" from my online book of stories Vexed [Down With Grundy Publisher, 1999] and my long-overdue novel-in-progress Novel-of-Sorts, by the way). Set in the future, the year 2010 to be exact, the film almost precisely repeats the martial law days of Ferdinand Marcos. And it does it from very convincing angles, as if Diaz might have been a former rebel/"subversive" himself. It then introduces the hypothesis echoed by the film's theme song (by the band The Jerks), that perhaps history just repeats itself, as it were. "Ulit lang nang ulit ang kasaysayan." A hidden argument might be in the thought that maybe it's so because a lot of the same old problems remain unresolved. The media has again become irresponsible and bourgeois (sounds familiar?) that an ambitious militarist found in this yet again an excuse to take over the institution. A variation on a second coming after a first forgetting.
Quirkiness somehow spoils the flow. For one, the audience is left to figure out the psychological-warfare tactic called the "Colonel Simon Gambit", which is probably all right. But then comes the comic inserts in the dialogue, or were these to push in the Pinoy character as an afterthought? Irksome too was the scene where Hesus' blind girlfriend (Donita Rose) went to "see" him in a lakeside squatters' zone, talking in front of a kid in a basin taking a bath like a PC screensaver. Sayang, this might have been used as a transition symbol for what Kumander Miguel (Ronnie Lazaro) said to Hesus near the end, "nagbabalik, umiikot ang kasaysayan."
This last from Ka Miguel was in reference to the 2010 rebel cause's impending movement towards factional division, Diaz' obvious referencing of the NPA divisions of the 1980s and the Katipunan's divisions in the late 1890s. "Bakit kailangang maulit?" the rebel Hesus naively asks, in the manner of his namesake's asking why he has to die on the cross. Ka Miguel, the former professor, answers knowingly, "mababago mo ba ang takbo ng mundo?"
In this answer lies the movie's overall design that may have claimed national significance for this film, a significance perhaps that would go in the direction of creating a warning to the present. And I'm referring to the present that still blindly asks what the blind Donita Rose asked our top rebel Hesus, "kailan ba ito matatapos?"
Unfortunately, the movie ends with the Hesus poem that contrives pictures of rural contentment against a backdrop of oppression, and the contentment and the oppression have not been amply illustrated in the movie to lead us to anger. And so we ask this movie the same question we posed towards The Lord of the Rings (The Fellowhip of the Rings): "Kailan ba ito matatapos?" (VISV III, September 2002 - April 2004)
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