Corporate Watch
By Amelia H. C. Ylagan
In the sepia haze, muted rays of suspended light paint a grisaille of the old Marasigan mansion in Intramuros. Bitoy Camacho remembers how it was when his friends Candida and Paula, spinster sisters, insisted to live there before the outbreak of the War — in the cruel reversal of fortune that unfairly tempted compromises of values and tradition.
Don Lorenzo Marasigan, the patriarch, was a once-famous painter — “El Magnifico,” he was called. Now self-exiled to the solitude of his upstairs bedroom, was he aware that his impoverished daughters would not sell his last remaining painting to pay for mounting utility bills? The rich older siblings Manolo and Pepang do not anymore live in the ancestral house. Stupid, they say of Candida and Paula! Sell this dying old mansion! Pepang has a ready buyer (who would give her a handsome commission).
Sell that painting — an American prospect will pay $10,000 (P20,000 at that time), their boarder, lover-boy type Tony Javier urges the two old maids. Many art critics and collectors want that last painting of El Magnifico: a puzzling self-portrait where he was the poet Virgil’s epic hero Aeneas carrying his ailing father Anchises (also depicting Marasigan, as an old man) on his back as they run from the burning city of Troy. Of course Tony will earn a commission from the sale, and he seduces the more vulnerable Paula to make sure the deal will happen. The buyer has doubled the offer to $20,000, and economically deprived, love-starved Paula elopes with Tony and the painting.
The three-act play of the late National Artist Nick Joaquin, Portrait of the Artist as Filipino has been performed hundreds of times in the original in theater and in adaptations in radio and film over six decades since it was written in 1952. At the 43rd Metro Manila Film Festival (MMFF 2017), Ang Larawan (The Portrait), based on the 1997 re-staging of Ang Larawan, the Musical won five of 12 categories, including Best Picture; Best Actress (Joanna Ampil playing Candida); Best Musical Score (Ryan Cayabyab); Best Production Design (Culturtain Musicat Productions: Girlie Rodis and Celeste Legaspi); and the Gatpuno Antonio J. Villegas Cultural Award plus the Special Jury Prize (Nick Joaquin, posthumous).
But the MMFF winnings of the 2017 Ang Larawan, though much to be jubilant about, seem to have unmasked some persistent tension in the Filipino soul that is precisely the message (or question) of Nick Joaquin’s undying Portrait of the Artist as Filipino.
“The year’s Best Picture (Ang Larawan) lost 15 theaters even before the awards night and (only) got relatively better patronage after the festival jury’s verdict. It had better audiences in middle upper-class turfs (Rockwell, Glorietta and Gateway) but suffered poor patronage notably in the provinces…the result of the recent MMFF awards night is a classic case of division between jury’s choice and the ever-changing public taste. Cineastes that include most members of the jury see the festival as a showcase of cinematic excellence while the masa see it as a chance to be entertained after a year of “bad news” ending in death in the highways, in the shopping malls and in the high seas (Pablo A. Tariman in The Philippine Star, Dec. 31, 2017).
Escape from reality (when reality is unpalatable) is the favored theme of popular art and literature — a happy ending is almost always expected by the audience. In the ending of Ang Larawan (2017) the “Unseen Character” Don Lorenzo Marasigan, the patriarch, the painter, the “Pius Aeneas” in the enigmatic portrait, unexpectedly descends from his bedroom isolation and joins the coterie of society guests and his family gathering in the sala of their primped-up old mansion for the feast of the Virgen de la Naval. (Co-producer Celeste Legaspi said in a text message that “that warm and emotional reunion provided a great jumping off point to [the impending] WWII). But it was somewhat a disappointment to see the blood and bones old man Marasigan replace the idealistic inferences to the unseen character that stood for the jealous and faithful respect for history and its values and tradition. It seemed iconoclastic to the portrait of the young Aeneas carrying the old Anchises on his shoulders (probably a take-off from the famous version by the Italian Renaissance painter Federico Barocci in the Galleria Borghese in Rome) that a pyrrhic victory was impliedly won by the Past over the Present.
Even the famous portrait was never actually shown in Nick Joaquin’s original play. Fr. James B. Reuter, renowned for his extensive work and accomplishments in Philippine theater saw in Nick Joaquin’s work “a vocation to preserve the beautiful values of the Filipinos; to preserve the memory of the great things Filipinos have done; their suffering, their courage; their patient, cheerful endurance; their love for one another; their laughter, their tears, their hopes, their dreams. He wanted to tell us that we are standing on the shoulders of great men; that we should not forget the warm hearts and the sacrifices of our ancestors; that we should treasure, and honor the beautiful gifts they have left us” (philstar.com May 8, 2004).
The final dénouement or “tying-up” of Joaquin’s Portrait/Larawan is really when Paula runs away from the manipulative womanizer Tony, and comes back to the old mansion — announcing that she has destroyed the portrait. Symbolically, the tension and conflict within the soul has ended. No more the “ifs and buts”, and the “howevers” that the money-valued painting stood for. No more temptations to compromise Beauty and Tradition, and the basic values of Filipino culture. From then on the portrait would exist solely in the mind and soul of Filipinos as the “Unseen Character” analogous to the “Pius Aeneas” in Graeco-Roman epic history who revered the values and traditions of the ancient peoples that became the foundation virtues and principles of human existence in a harmonious world.
But is Larawan relevant to the country and Filipinos, in 2018?
A snapshot of the country as of last year-end might probably call the sepia photos that Bitoy Camacho saw in his mind, of the old Marasigan mansion in Intramuros. Let the unseen portrait of a modern-day Aeneas carrying on his shoulders his old but steadfast moral and ethical values. Save the people, and run from self-immolation by the corruption of moral values, and as in Virgil’s Aeneid that described the subsequent decay and fall of mercenary Rome.
Mercenary. That is the fatal word that defined the conflict of selling or not selling the painting and the ancestral home in Portrait/Larawan. Compromises for financial security and economic progress in our country in international business and trade relations must not be the covetousness and deviousness of the Tony Javier character and the other opportunists who wanted the painting in Larawan. The end-justifying-the-means is always immoral even in the aggressiveness of a rabid drug war. Let the seeming political bullying end, as with the human rights abuses so loudly whispered about. The looming constitutional change happening this 2018 scares us too much for its eerie simile to Don Lorenzo Marasigan’s last painting being sold.
We pray to the Virgen de la Naval to protect and save us from ourselves, in 2018 and always.
Amelia H. C. Ylagan is a Doctor of Business Administration from the University of the Philippines.
