Marilou Diaz-Abaya's Starfish
Sa Pusod Ng Dagat (1997)
This Abaya-directed, Abaya-produced 1997 oeuvre was written by Jun Lana, for which work he bagged the Grand Prize (Screenplay Category) at a Manila literary contest called the Palanca Memorial Awards. It must first be noted here that this yearly contest, put up by the Philippine philanthropist Carlos Palanca, is highly regarded by the readership-poor Philippine literary community, so that one cannot undervalue the respect one gains from winning a slot in that contest's yearly roster of winners (one who laughs off literary contests maintain at the same time a high regard for film festivals which are also highly regarded worldwide by a discriminating audience even while these remain competitions).
I mention all this because Lana's work is as much a literary triumph as it is Abaya's cinematic precious achievement. At the outset, let me say that Sa Pusod might have been Lana's conscious magic-realist version of the Jorge Arago-penned Ishmael Bernal realist classic Nunal Sa Tubig. Parallels abound (character actor Pen Medina's role vs. George Estregan's in Nunal; the teacher; the tourists; etc.). This is probably the reason why Abaya, who also had a hand in line-producing (casting job) the film, took in Elizabeth Oropesa for this epical work, to maybe sort of create a contextual take-off from her major role in Nunal. But beyond that, how do the two films differ?
Both are set in an isolated small fishing island. Both films' motifs are seemingly ripe material for any expressionist take on the silent tragedy of poverty, as Bernal's film subtly was. But as if to consciously expand on that subtlety alone, Lana's and Abaya's concept here consistently kills any social realist reading direction. The casting of Ronnie Lazaro, for instance, for the role of the fisherman father who dies at the start of the film, however incredible it may look, might have been Abaya's funny way of throwing out the window all takes on the story that may so much as resemble the inevitable socialist reading on the classic Ronnie Lazaro-starrer, the Tikoy Aguiluz social mural Boatman.
In Sa Pusod, no problematic is settled with a finalizing violence elliptically invoking another resolution by violence, everything is somehow plainly resolved by nature's and time's own way of forgiving or rounding off things to each's poetic justice. It's as if Lana/Abaya had memorized the Fellini formula for painting murals of reality and life sans the usual Marxist "class consciousness." And what other mode/style with that formula may have more of a double-edged function for our times than what the Latin-Ams call magic realism? For while magic realism may attain for a writer with political motives a stylistic trojan horse for accessing the elusive interest-span of a potential third-world superstitious readership (with whom subject-interesting-to-them alone may not suffice), it -- as a literary phenomenon -- also hits another fort. In an artistic atmosphere that may every now and then need a respite from all the Marxism, the feminism, the environmentalism, the catharsis, et cetera, Magic Realism (ironically perhaps, being a sort of developmental communication vehicle) in its best practitioners almost always elevate fictional situations into views of things and everything from above and all over, panning and dollying on all of life's sorrows and beauty, touching on life and death, deceptions and discovery, and so on and so forth. In short, it begins as a developmental communication journey and ends up as a metaphysical view. Magnificence here, a la Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Jose Saramago, is dangled.
What is depicted is not really a story or a place or a situation, then, but a philosophy, or an understanding of life's mysteries and pains as things that we can laugh at in the end ("O, kay sarap mabuhay," says the narrator at Sa Pusod's end, after everything). In such a treatment of a story, any story, women -- for example -- might see their assigned place among the dirty laundry and so on, but always without the urban angst of feminism (horror of horrors that must be to Abaya who directed the gender-conscious films Moral and Ipaglaban Mo). The consolation we get from seeing such stereotyping is witnessing a people's (say, a village's) acceptance/understanding of, or even forgiveness for, any character anomaly present in the landscape as quite as much a part of nature's enormous design as everybody else is (the lead character Pepito's anomalous comadrona role, the village prostitute Maya's ambitiousness and infidelity, a man's extraordinary libido, the village shaman's reliable and likewise suspect knowledges, a woman with a snake child, even non-Catholic witchcraft and suicide, are all "understood" seemingly). After all, in such a magic realist landscape, not one is really presented as perfectly wise, not even -- if he's "lucky" -- as perfectly lucky.
Sure there are downsides to this genre. To project a semblance of distance, one may go the way of the dead narrator as in the gothic American Beauty; otherwise, as does Sa Pusod, you may have to simply locate your story in the past, in Sa Pusod's case the '50s. The downside? Well, here we're not sure if a concrete small-town road, as against a more credible asphalt one, should be in it. But such imperfections require less than a small sacrifice on our passion for technical perfection to be able to enjoy priceless glimpses of life like this film, glimpses they may be on metaphysical telescopes that watch distant stars' (or starfishes') perfections, away from our daily vigils on the hot stars of political flags. (VSV III)
Copyright © 2002, 2004
Vicente-Ignacio
S. de Veyra III. All rights reserved.
Readers are welcome to view, save, file and print out single
copies of this webpage for their personal use. No reproduction,
display, performance, multiple copy, transmission, or
distribution of the work herein, or any excerpt, adaptation,
abridgment or translation of same, may be made without written
permission from the author. Any person who does any unauthorized
act in relation to this work will be liable to criminal
prosecution and civil claims for damages.