A film that invites introspection

Film review: Mañanita

MANILA, Philippines — The scenes from Paul Soriano’s Mañanita can pass for existential landscapes not easily decipherable to the common eye.

The main character looks like she is in the middle of despair and forced to retreat on the seemingly empty side of God’s little acre. The trees around her look like they were weighed down by past volcanic eruptions and the leaves shiver as it were like some helpless afterthought.

Then you finally see the sniper. You can see from her eyes and from what’s left of her face that she is a woman. She is beautiful from what you can see. But the other side of the countenance reveals something mysterious about her past.

Was she a victim of violence? Did she do something hoary as to cause her separation from military service?

The viewer of Mañanita is at once belabored with long silences and virtually no dialogue from the solitary gunslinger. In her abode, she is restless and prone to endless contemplation. Then she takes to her favorite beer and takes intermittent swigs until she feels a desire to take a walk and figure out her existence?

Truth to tell, watching Mañanita is an exercise in patience conservation. You don’t watch it when you had a tough day. You don’t watch it after entertaining murderous thoughts after seeing senators act like clowns in the halls of the senate.

For the most part, it is a kind of film that invites introspection. What is this restless lady up to? Why is she consumed by something that seemed strange to her being?

The silence surrounding the protagonist is overwhelming and yet there is no sign a resolution of an idea or an image is forthcoming.

The message to the viewer seems to be: take her for what she is. No ifs and buts about it.

The air of mystery surrounding this female sniper is indeed palpable you keep shifting from your seat trying to figure out what’s bothering her.

Some flashbacks reveal she is up to an act of revenge but when she sees ordinary people seemingly living a simple and happy life, she has another thought coming.

Even her landlady is confused what she is up to. “Ano kukunin mo ba ang kwarto?” When she nods, she leaves in a huff finally relieved that she able to decide pronto what she wants to do with her life. At least on that day.

The most revealing and highly positive thing about Mañanita is that it produced a character named Edilberta and Bela Padilla more than did justice to it. It is a tough role indeed and looking at her scenes for two and a half hours without loss of focus, you realize that she was prepared to make something substantial about her part. Like it or not, it is a role of a lifetime. The character grows on her and she gives us a hint of her unhappy life without verbalizing. That in itself is a major feat.

Like the character, director Paul Soriano is following a solitary journey and content to watch Edilberta connect with people around her. She goes to this billiard hall full of able-bodied men and knows that some of them inwardly desires her. When one loner becomes a bit too persistent to ask if she just lives around the neighborhood and would she be game to it, she shows her other face which must have been her link to an unpleasant past. If she did succumb to his desire, it would been a good relief from what looks like an endless solitary journey.

But even a token bed scene is out of the question. The film seems to tread on pure, solitary journey devoid of mundane concerns.  Even the choice of music doesn’t give a hint of what is in store for her. With those long shots of mountains and valleys, a strain of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony would have done something to enhance the solitary spirit.

At the outset, direk Paul knew he was doing something without the least intension of pleasing the ordinary moviegoer. “I am the sole audience of this film,” he had said in one presscon and added what the film expresses is pretty much his real self.

True, Mañanita is that kind of cinema daring that doesn’t cater to mainstream taste. It is the filmmaker to himself although he said he’d be happy if his vision for this film is shared by lovers of cinema.

For the most part, this film will make for interesting discussion in cinema fora. It is indeed refreshing for its unusual storytelling.

But whether it will edify, entertain or invite solitary life is up to the moviegoers.

Yes, no doubt about it, Mañanita is an interesting slice of pure cinema which will find easy acceptance in arthouses.

But everybody knows the cinemas in our shopping malls are not exactly show windows for daring films.

That this film was made at all is a tribute to the director’s unusual sense of film imagination.

(Produced by Ten17P and Viva Films, Mañanita  which features a short but memorable part for Ronnie Lazaro  opens in cinemas Dec. 4.)