THE stories are simple enough: a prostitute facing the camera and baring her body and soul for documentation; a middle-aged woman, lonely and falling for a younger man; and a woman enduring drought and poverty in some God-forsaken place just so she could take care of what appears to be a family.
The proposal of the production (via press releases) is not simple enough: the film is a “film for women made by women film directors.” Shall these women provide the voice for the silenced gender? But then again, I always remember what feminist intellectuals always say: If the voice—women’s voice—has been silenced, how can we be sure that what we are giving them is their voice?
How then does/will the discourse of three women directors contribute to the fulfillment, the fruition (terribly sexist noun) and the completion of woman? Papaanong maging ganap na babae ang babae? Women characters are always tooled to satisfy the phallocentric storytelling of male writers, male directors or even gay male filmmakers.
So, does the film seduce, bait, promise or threaten?
What the film does tell is the story of women using the male-dominated instrumentalities of society. Let us speak like men trying to make women appear good and heroic. I can almost hear them. Indeed, the women directors use the visual language that male-ordained narratives have popularized. So there is the prostitute, and the middle-aged woman, and the peasant.
The prostitute is once more the obsession of someone interested in penetrating her depth. The media functions like the great phallus once more. In the film, the person with the camera and the questions play the innocent one. The woman in front of the camera is brazen. She smokes and smolders. She threatens the sanctity of marriage because she does not uphold any of its virtues. What she flaunts are her vices.
The older woman is more accessible. She is marked by her boundaries. She is not imprisoned by any conventions but she is under the control of our society. She will try to get out of the frame of motherhood, which lasts even when fatherhood beside her has decayed off. She has to remain on the pedestal so we do not fall.
The peasant, the poor woman, is at the extreme end of this imagination. She can live amid the aridity. She is the beast of burden eternal. She belongs to the land. Reconfigured to the point of abstraction, this woman is lovely because she blends with the plants and the ground.
The three stories of women are texturally different from one another but the three women directors construct an unprecedented interweaving among them. The three tales are disparate but the leading performers are compelling that what we get is not a sum total of episodes but a single sweeping tale.
Boots Anson-Roa, a veteran in the finest sense of the word, is the widow in the story called “Kaibigan.” Her drama unfolds like the shifting of clouds: nuanced.
Relatively ordinary in atmosphere, the scenes of Ms. Roa conjure magic in the most mundane moments. A glance at the good-looking young man and the saddest, sweetest dance are all it takes for us to be with her in her aloneness. In the end, she decides to do what is best for us all. In the end, her guilt we own as much her burden. Rica Arevalo is the writer and director of this story.
Mercedes Cabral as the mother/prostitute sums up all the stereotypical performances of the wrong woman and adds more, an introspection that is almost intellectual. With a face that is like mortal sin, if I may rephrase an old line from a film, Cabral knows that the camera will never be in love with her strong beauty.
What is left is for her to make love to the camera, or better yet have sex with it. This is a prostitute that offers no explanation but only a request that her children love her for she is also a mother. It is also triumph of a performance, one that announces the arrival of a major actress. At the end, the interviewer asks the character of Cabral what her name is. What she utters becomes an ink-blot of sort. Take the name for what it is. If you feel it is a political commentary, then it is.
If you think it is a facile use of metaphor, then so be it. But go back to the mouth that spits out the name. The label is what we have become. Ignore it we cannot.
Ellen Ramos is the visual raconteur in the landscape shadowed by the character of Sue Prado. Dried twigs and an aridity that is both lyrical and malignant are part of life in the isolated lot of two sisters. Prado’s young woman goes about her tasks uncomplaining. This betrays our own ignorance of poverty in this land. The rains that come at a time when everything else in the life of the young woman has failed become the true blessings.
This is the feminism strangely and maybe fortunately closeted in the film, which manipulates the absence or presence of men in women’s life. In the prostitute’s home, the presence of a man hurts; in the widow’s home, the arrival and the departure of men are all that matters for us; and in the drought-stricken village, the men are distant and gone. Only the rains and the heavens will save women. Scary proposition. Political.
Sue Prado’s performance here proves that her Urian for the many characters in Raymond Red’s Himpapawid is no fluke. She truly disappears in the role. She also does not count her close-ups. In most of the scenes, Prado’s face is darkened but Ramos has placed her gracefully in the chiaroscuro of the events, and it works supremely. The emotions that are wracked when Prado takes the rain on her face are real.
I cite the cinematography of the film, especially the part of Ramos. I have never seen a film so visual that words are almost superfluous.
For a film like this, seemingly separated into three, the audience will have the tendency to discuss which story is the best. How can there be best when they are all different.
What the film ably celebrates is what the Belgian feminist Luce Irigaray said about the complexity of womanhood, as “this sex which is not one.”
The film Ganap na Babae is from Hubo Productions, led by film director Will Fredo. It opened the recently concluded Cinemalaya Independent Film Festival.
