Bona (Lino Brocka, 1980)

(When Christian and I saw Bona, I had been in Los Baños for five days running, and my mother had not been subtle with her threats of physical violence. So a ready parallel,  although I haven't been fetching Christian water, doing his toenails, fixing the leak on his roof, etc. I think I am Bona in this relationship; lovelorn, dramatic, though not, obviously,  petite.)

Bona: definition of "done for"

The least that can be said of Bona is that it asks (though never fully answers) age-old questions: about the nature of fanaticism and celebrity worship; about our penchant, our capacity for self-destruction and martyrdom; about the inevitability of and the need for a final reckoning, an accounting of things, and what we are left with in its aftermath.

That the film opened with almost documentary-like scenes from the Black Nazarene procession is an almost naked admonition to see the upcoming narrative in such light: religious, devotional, undergirded by faith. The camera, godlike, then finds Bona (Nora Aunor) among the throng, before cutting into another plane of adulation, consecration, and mythmaking: a movie set. Again, a ready parallel, and in the juxtaposition, we see not only points of similarity but opportunities for one to inform the other and, consequently, subvert each other's values.

Which is to say, in the laid out framework, we see Bona's worship of Gardo (Philip Salvador) as all too human; only in this case, Bona has religion, while everyone else are good-for-nothing atheists. What of this human need, then? Ostracized by her family and relentlessly questioned of her motivation, Bona is not the one deprived here; it is us, who don't understand.

Fixing his roof? Time to reexamine things. Maybe.

For Bona and Gardo took on their roles with such willingness and ease that any questioning can be rebuffed by the sheer bluster and, barring that, "nature:" another familiar operation in religion, especially in light of recent discovery of a "God gene." It is perhaps too much to claim that serving Gardo is hardwired in Bona's brain, although we are made to believe that leaving him had never been option, in the same way that the attraction was never fully accounted for, as the film began with things already in full precarious bloom. (Christian notes that the film takes pains to show that Bona is "sane" by virtue of her interaction with her neighbors. I agree. How crucial is it to rule out madness, though, really, how is the act of loving not madness? Jume-J. Neil!)

Much has been said about the maternal resonance of Bona's doting and the clear infantilism of Gardo's receptiveness; here I think there is ample chance to examine the power relations that govern the uneasy (but also easy) relationship. Who, really, possesses power here? Is it Gardo, the object of adulation, the beneficiary of a beck-and-call servility? Or is it Bona, bringer of sustenance (food), heater of bathwater (cleansing), and steadfast guard of the house from intruders (that is, other women)?

Gardo: he of the sensitive skin and weak lungs

In the final, cathartic scene, we get our answer: how tenderness can be weaponized, how devotion empowers the devotee much more than the devoted upon, how the one who loves is the one who lives.

But even outside the entanglement, we know that their capacities for humanity are oceans apart. Bona is solicitous, whereas Gardo is self-centered. Bona feeds stray puppies on a movie set, while Gardo kicks a lolling cat he encounters on the street. Bona quickly gets along with her new neighbors, while Gardo at one point rips a neighbor's door apart after he is mocked for being forever a bit player. Whereas Gardo can do no more than momentary flings and short-lived pipedreams, Bona looks forward to a life; Bona loves. (It is not as if Bona is unaware of such faults, Christian says; in several scenes, we witness her witnessing Gardo make a fool of himself).

"Gusto ko eh," she tells Nilo (Nanding Josef), one of the many voices of so-called reason in the film (a stand-in, too, I suppose, for the viewers; and, decades later, would play an old doctor in the Yam Laranas horror flick Patient X, which we saw the previous day). "Hindi ako napapagod. Hindi ako nagpapaalila." 

Fine, if you say so, Bona. But during Nilo’s wedding, when her happiness becomes visible for the first time, we get a glimpse of her without Gardo, and she is at her most radiant. More radiant, even, than in that lovely scene when she talks about an apocalyptic dream of fire while bathed in the glow of Manila Bay's sunset. Drunk and clutching a bottle of San Miguel, Bona dances in absolute reverie around a bonfire, to the creepy taunting of singing male neighbors. The "losing" of oneself to love is clearly paradoxical.

So there you go: fire, intoxication, dance. There is little to gain in accusing Bona of being intoxicated with love, of being consumed by fire, of going through the motions. As with most things, our weakness is also our greatest strength. Deprived of everything, Bona's final act of contrition (Christian may have a problem with this word) is an affirmation – not a repudiation – of everything that she did. Here is a love that aspires to endure, razing anything that will block its way; even, as we have seen, the beloved. And we realize it is not about him. The beloved has not been, will never be, the point.

PS. To be sure, a conflation is at work here. Did she really love him? And what of this essentializing? Doesn't love feed off specificities? On this note, love you, Christian!

Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas, 2007)

(A word on the "point" of this blog. The point, which is to say, the difference, this space aspires for, aside from the obvious assessment and cataloging for posterity, is to problematize the import of a romance-tinged but discursive movie-watching experience on the appreciation of film; whether the banter, sometimes digressive but necessarily gesturing toward articulation and therefore processing, shapes the formation of opinion; whether the occasional hand-holding, by way of heightening sensory awareness, amplifies and/or distracts from the material currently under perusal. Joke! We just enjoy watching movies.)

Peace is stronger than love.

The supreme achievement first: my attention span, which runs all but 17 seconds, survived this film, a 140-minute Everest of long shots and minute, glacial movements, where the unfolding of things is austere and laborious. Christian lists Carlos Reygadas' Silent Light as among one of his top five favorite films of all time, so obviously, I cannot dislike it. (I can debate him until kingdome come and I will still sound like an idiot). With that in mind, this display of cinematic bravura couched in alternately cosmic and domestic plains is, surprisingly, a pleasure to watch: a phrase one doesn't normally ascribe to movies that subject viewers to two-, three-minute shots of rain pummeling on windshield or cows' udders being milked.

Such is astounding precisely because the premise of the film is old hat: the head of a Mennonite family is besieged with a crisis of love, the "source" of which, a friend counsels, might be "sacred." In short, he's married and falls in love with another woman. But what is old hat is stripped off to its naked sinew: outside the agitation of moralistic finger-wagging, in the calm, bare space of rural Mexico, the question on the fallibility of what we think is love is distilled to its painfully ambiguous core.

Crayola.

Which is to say, everyone suffers in the love triangle, which maybe a separate, wholly disapproving point on romantic love. Most striking is the behavior of the "other woman," whose deadpan post-coitus pronouncement - "Peace is stronger than love." - is the most breathtaking line I may have heard in any movie, coming at a point in the narrative where the toll of the infidelity is starting to manifest, in subtle, though well-acted, fashion. (The film utilized non-actors, Christian volunteered).

And in the film's climax, a transaction between the long-suffering wife and the tortured mistress takes place, defying all realistic expectations. In preparation for such an ending, Christian had offered copious warnings. But when it comes, the unfolding is exhilarating and poignant (the type of cinematic moment when one couldn't help but hold your boyfriend's idle hand). And what rescues it is a theistic, or at least cosmological, framework under which the film operates.

There is no overstating the centrality of such a spirit in looking at Silent Light. Watching the lengthy opening sequence, Christian had to admonish me several times to pay attention, a curt tsk-tsk if I was being particularly listless. It was all done in one take, he said, while remarking on the allusion to the beginning of time itself, of darkness giving way, in agonizing pace, to light, to scenery, then, finally, to the human space where the drama is set to unfold.

The evocation of the Genesis at this juncture is beneficial, for as early as here it absolves the formalist ruckus that this film will likely generate for its frequent violations of editorial handling in the narrative mold. The long shots, for one, are saved from the predictable accusation of cosmetic and existential inanity: superficially, an act that merely admonishes viewers to, you know, stop and consider the rain drops, consider the udders. To what end? the impatient viewer will ask. Once on a theistic framework, that question becomes almost moot.

For in Silent Light, there are frequent demonstrations of a quiet order against which the transgression is set. There is suggestion of an omnipresence in terms of camera work, an austere and demanding attention to scenery. There is frequent interplay between light and darkness, alluding to an age-old dichotomy. There is an insistence on the immutability and irreversibility of time, on the sequential order of things, that life proceeds in this manner and you cannot undo things. There is a treatment to people that is almost condescending: they hardly move, staring into space, tortured in the most private of spheres.

And so, when the final scene comes, and the viewer recognizes that it’s the exact reversal of the opening sequence, the framing of the story is all but too obvious: our world is a stage, in transcendentally huge proportions, and the final act of redemption, once one recognizes its inadequacy, indeed its humanity, is paradoxically still love, for peace and love are one. Cue: holding hands.