Angels: In the clouds with feet on the ground

This review of Angels will focus on the most important aspect of filmmaking that is often taken for granted: filmmaking as a form of truth-telling.

Most films generalize experience. Rhetoric and razzle-dazzle push emotional truths into the background. Characters deliver sermons and spoonfeed a film’s ideas. Technical obsession reduces deep feelings into flashy camera movements or editing tricks. Angels refreshingly makes attempts to move away from these limiting presentations of life.

Several honest moments arise from the film. For these moments alone, it deserves to be seen by as wide an audience as possible.

The lucky witnesses to these moments packed the U.P. Film Center on March 14 where the film was screened as part of the 14th International Women’s Film Festival. The film premiered earlier at the 2001 Cinemanila International Film Festival as part of Star Cinema’s now-defunct digital film division.

The gap between the two public screenings puzzles me. I wonder why Star Cinema does not push for a wider release of the film. Its digital video format may limit its screening venues, but Star Cinema can always transfer it to the standard commercial screening format of 35mm film or find other alternative public screening venues.

I do not wish to give away the entire experience of the film, though I will need to cite specific scenes to illustrate the film’s honest moments.

The film is based on the true-to-life story of the Gonzalos family. It leaves traditional story structure and documents the day-to-day living of a family where the father and mother are blind masseurs. It shares their happy moments, as well as their struggles.

Angels avoids most of the trappings of bad melodrama in Filipino movies. No evil force oppress helpless victims. The film does not classify people into categories of good or bad. People do not feel sorry for themselves, and they do not allow us to feel sorry for them. Their strength of character humbles. They try their best to get by in life. They succeed. They make mistakes. They possess a certain degree of dignity, respect and control over their lives. In other words, they are not caricatures. They are human beings.

Instead of sitting back and making pat judgements, the film dares enter the perspectives of these people. The filmmakers seem to actually care for them.

On occasion, the film does fall into sentimentality and emotional clichés. But these instances are few. Another problem I have with the film is that for a few laughs in some scenes, it presents a Visayan regional stereotype in the person of a maid.

It treats the blindness of the father, Rudy (Nonie Buencamino) and the mother, Angie (Gina Alajar) not as a curse. In Taoist fashion, the couple converts this weakness into strength. The lives of the blind are indeed different on sensory levels, but they share the same emotional and spiritual concerns of all people. Thus, their blindness is not the focus of the films. Rather, they are unique individuals who just happen to be blind.

The film also touches on our limited perceptions of the blind. It shows how we sometimes unconsciously or deliberately perceive them as less than people.

The next door neighbor argues constantly with Angie on how to best raise her family: ten-year-old Jonathan (Michael Angelo Caangay), five-year- old (Joan Tan) and mentally-impaired 16-year-old Cherrylou (Wena Basco). A jeepney driver tests the "conceited" Rudy’s mettle by dropping him off in harm’s way at the bottom of a vehicle underpass. The couple visits a police station and the policemen on duty comment about blind people also being malibog.

This also connects with another important truth: the difference between how we perceive ourselves and how others perceive us. Going back to the jeepney scene, Rudy declares confidently to the jeepney driver that he can take care of himself. The jeepney driver interprets this as arrogance.

It is commendable that the film does not present in a patronizing manner the physical limitations of Rudy and Angie and the mental limitations of Cherrylou. Nor does it sensationalize or exploit them for a teardrop or two.

Instead of relying on exaggerated dramatic issues, the film finds its drama in the ordinary parts of life most people take for granted: like a family fighting to stay together despite the difficulties. Parents who want only the best for their children. Children wishing their parents do not interfere too much on their affairs.

It also tells the truth about people with good intentions, the limitations of these intentions and the gap between the desired result of the intentions.

A rich woman tells Jonathan she wants to adopt him and take him to the US. But just the thought of leaving his family frightens and saddens the boy. In tears, he politely refuses her offer. The woman does not force the issue. In a beautiful, subtle manner, she expresses her loneliness, frustration and feelings for the boy through her own tears.

After eavesdropping on one of the family fights, the next-door neighbor brings in two social workers with equally good intentions. Rudy and Angie perceive this as outside interference in their family affairs. In most other films, this would degenerate into a court battle for custody of the children. Here – inside their own living room – the family stands together in a dialogue with the social workers.

Angels points out some differences between parents and children. Two scenes best express them: Jonathan rails at his parents in frustration and declares that he does not understand why they are being so strict with him. Next, with the threat of separation hanging over their heads, Angie asks Jonathan for reassurance that he wants to remain with his family.

Finally, commercial movies usually pass of cutie pie midget adults as children. Angels is the first Filipino film in a while that for the most part portrays children as children.

Children at play are loose and spontaneous. They enjoy sound effects, chases, mock fistfights, mock gunfights, and video games. Their dreams are different from adults. They pick cartoons over the evening news. In addition, Angels also shows the children’s true feelings.

In one scene, Angie gives Jonathan a spanking. In retaliation, he overturns their living room furniture to impede her movement. She trips on a chair and falls to the floor. Grimacing in pain, she asks if he did this because of the spanking. He does not answer, but he sheds tears of remorse. He rushes to her aide.

The fact that the film stems mostly from the actual experiences of the Gonzaloses greatly contributes to the level of honesty it achieves. The writing and directing tandem of Ricardo Lee and Ellen Ongkeko Marfil and the rest of the Angels cast and crew deserve much praise.

In a film industry that churns out sexploitation films that pass themselves off as art, long-winded sermons in film clothing, shallow teeny-bopper fluff, visual exercises that reach the heights of stylistic and technical brilliance but at the bottom of empty flash, Angels is a rarity. It is a film that tries its best to tell the truth about people and life, and does so most of the time.

(Note: Angels will be shown at 9:30 p.m. on Cinema One, Channel 22, on Wednesday, May 21.)