By Maria Jovita Zarate

MOVIE REVIEW
Himala: Isang Dayalektika ng Ating Panahon
Directed and edited by Lav Diaz
Running time: 7:05 min

ON April 21, Lockdown Cinema, a loose organization devoted to raising funds for displaced movie workers, ran a two-hour live streaming of tributes to National Artist Ishmael Bernal’s Himala. Dubbed Gabi ng Himala, it featured, among others, re-enactments of the more memorable scenes of Bernal and screenwriter Ricky Lee. There are hits, and there are misses. More of the latter. Whoever thought of putting in and directing Nadine Ilustre and Marian Rivera to re-interpret Nora Aunor’s Elsa should be made to explain to the schoolmaster why they thought they could tinker with a masterpiece. Ano ba?

In between are discussions surrounding the relevance of Himala to these times, and how the movie’s themes and tropes still resonate with the nation’s current state of affairs. Those were highly discursive moments, especially with Ricky Lee talking about his sources and influences, and directors pitching in a piece of thought. Or two. Blah-blah.

So much for the banal. So much for platitudes.

Give it to Philippine cinema’s auteur to rise above the throng and illustrate how re-telling and re-imagining can still be stretched by not confining the deed to the strictures of the text and its temporal context. In Himala: Isang Dayalektika ng Ating Panahon, Lav Diaz invokes dialectics, precisely, as tensions of the past and the present — thesis and anti-thesis — and the frictions and fusions that arise.

In his retelling, an ensemble of actors and non-actors were shot individually, watching Himala from the confines of their domestic spaces in the time of state-imposed quarantine. They are watching Elsa’s last scene, where she was to address the townsfolk of Cupang, Himala’s mythical town of sin and sadness.

We hear Elsa yelling to the crowd: “Ipinatawag ko kayong lahat, dahil may gusto akong ikumpisal…” (“I called on you because I have something to confess…”). Until the shots are fired and pandemonium ensues. It’s a disembodied Elsa, and what is on Diaz’s screen are the serial scenes of individual viewers and their bodily responses to the scene. Gestures speak and the bodily movements are small and hardly perceptible.

The development is subtle, until Elsa says “May ipagtatapat ako sa inyo…” (“I have something to reveal to you…”) and the slouched body of the viewers at that moment further dips down and reaches for the back support, until we realize Bernal’s 35-second Chekhovian silence flowing through Nora Aunor is now in Diaz’s hands. And Lav wields that silence and takes it as his own. We hear the fatal shot until the chaos of panic, experienced only as sounds of shrieks, wails and cries for help, but those viewing it on screen heave a sigh, take deeper puffs with a cigarette, twitch, crease that space between the eyebrows, or take an empty gaze into to some unknown far-away.

Movie actor John Lloyd Cruz takes the coup de grâce as we see him watching the tail-end of the chaos, audio slightly reduced now. He takes a sigh, throws away the mobile phone from where he was watching, and fixes his gaze outside. The leaves of the tree outside his window are quivering. Then he stands up, approaches his real-life son sleeping on a mattress, plants a kiss and exits frame, and we are left with the image of the child, almost stirred to wakefulness. But not yet.

The last frame is an abandoned street, overtaken by lahar, reminiscent of Himala’s Cupang in its wretchedness. Presumably this is new footage captured from the recent lahar storm in towns adjacent to the Taal Volcano. In its steadiness, the camera captures the faint and the feeble — a leaf crossing the street, the edges of a black garbage bag trembling by the sidewalk, branches and palms fluttering, and perhaps, because it is imperceptible, a grain of sand rising and falling, rising and falling. Give it to Diaz (and of course his lensman) to make the barren and the bleak luminous, and turn it into a silent testament to all that is terrible and traumatic in our history.

And still not yet, because in not so many words, Diaz leaves a salient reminder that like the quivering leaves outside the window of John Lloyd’s home, the truth trembles, illusion reigns, and the body politic, like the currents of the summer winds, remain inert and waiting. Everything about Himala: Isang Dayalektika ng Ating Panahon is vintage Diaz — the silence is his fortress, the steadiness of his vision and his camera in his previous works of eight or nine hours is now leveraged in a seven-minute work. He calls our situation now as delubyo (“deluge”) — a torrent of lies foisted on the nation, on an entire people. Diaz is angry as he was in his recent films. He should be. And, yes, some of us are as angry. But strangely something else drowns our anger.

Himala: Isang Dayalektika ng Ating Panahon can be viewed on the ABS-CBN Facebook page,

https://www.facebook.com/ABSCBNnetwork/videos/443645549800580, streaming at 1:46:00.

Maria Jovita Zarate teaches at the UP Open University.