Christian Jil R. Benitez
At the heart of existent populism is its plain irreverence to the body, especially of those who are excluded from what is commonly projected as “ordinary.” As such, surveillance has then become the predominant grammar of our times (nothing new, really, but definitely magnified today because enabled by facist structures in place): to be a brown trans woman in the “great American” landscape, to be a grimy young man in tattered clothes in streets of Manila—these often mean being seen right away, the body being subjected to forms of violent scrutiny. Vision has always been a question of power, and yet frequently left uninterrogated: in the contemporary Philippine cinema, to represent the ordinarily excluded often means simply turning the lens toward them, subjecting them to the same gaze. Attempts to render the “real” (another term generally overlooked) recurrently ends up idealized: a woman who finally confronts her perpetrator regresses to romanticized docility, throwing away the gun; the suffering of a child amid the war-torn Mindanao is skirted around and through melodrama.
If contemporary Philippine cinema is to insist itself as relevant these days, for us, the Filipino audience, in the middle of the current regime, such similar gesture of “representation” does not certainly suffice. Perhaps all the more crucial now is an attempt to articulate what often cannot-be, which is to say, to render visually what cannot appear, because always elusive to our current surveilled vocabularies.
Isabel Sandoval’s Lingua Franca (2019) is such “drama of interiority”: Olivia (Sandoval), an undocumented Filipino caregiver who hopes to formalize her U.S. citizenship through a paid marriage, encounters Alex (Eamon Farren), the grandson of Olivia’s client. The two, of course, end up in an emotional quandary: despite their amorous relationship, Olivia’s gender identity remains a secret to Alex, whose work in the slaughterhouse metonimizes his heteronormative predispositions. Therefore, in Olivia, the body is experienced in double precarity: unsafe outside the house, to the eyes of a racist nation-state; and at the same time, insecure inside it, to the possibility of a potential love turning away.
This intersection informs the intelligence of Lingua Franca: because the body has to render itself “ordinary,” it is permitted the chance to conceal itself, at least in the diegetic milieu—Olivia in half-light with a mug on hand, Olivia on bed in her night gown, Olivia in the living room against flower prints, Olivia in the front seat of a car, Olivia in Brighton Beach with Alex. Even Olivia sitting among the church pews with her friend Trixie (Ivory Aquino), plotting their weddings just so they could obtain permanent residencies, is made familiar: the explicitly political, what could have easily been a turn toward the melodramatic, becomes a typical conversation among friends. And when Olivia attends Trixie’s wedding, there is not much of a disclosure of her disappointment, envy, or longing, five grand short as she was from fully paying her own arranged marriage.
Sound is most muted in the film because disappearance is also taking place; performance is tempered because it must vanish at the same time. In other words, like any work of art that has been carefully crafted, the film is an irony at work: while in its method it cannot let the body escape from the cinematic gaze, it also offers the same body a veil behind which she can somehow hide, if not clothe herself in other possibilities. Lingua Franca therefore points to the very artifice that is cinema: the body bared on the screen is not yet naked; the heart revealed is not yet itself. The most sensual of shots is diaphanous, as there is still much to be revealed.
And so, in Lingua Franca, regardless of the seeming inevitability of it, love as accustomed is ultimately refused: a slow dance turns out to be captivity, as Olivia and Alex obliquely confide their truths. In the end, when Alex finally offers to marry Olivia after failing to secure an arranged marriage for herself, she can only say no and walk away. And yet, what seems to be a plain rejection might as well be construed as a devoted confession: that for Olivia, the body—her body—cannot be left to owe to anyone; or that perhaps, her desires resist having anything to do with the duress inflicted by institutions, as well as their vocabularies. Here then is an affect, which is also a lacuna, that only the film in its visuality can intimate.
Sandoval would gently remind us that despite its honest protrayal of her “vulnerability, anxiety, and uncertainty about being a minority” shortly after Trump’s election, Lingua Franca is “not an autobiographical film”—although at the same time, such denial ironically admits the very likelihood of the film’s being perceived as such. While this perception can be easily attributed to the fine realism that the film has rendered, it is crucial to underscore here that the necessity for such refuting might as well be taken to be a form of graceful insistence: for perhaps, it is also to say that Olivia’s body is hers, as each of the body of our trans kins is also their own. This way, Lingua Franca is intuited to be a corpus that bridges, one that is politically personal between Olivia, Sandoval, and all of us who dare take time to understand her being a woman. It is a closeness that is beyond and underneath what has been insisted upon us by our time’s violent vicissitudes.
Thop Nazareno’s Edward (2019) presents another possibility for such intimacy: a coming-of-age film that charmingly balances wit and drama, it follows Edward (Louise Abuel) in his stay in a public hospital in Manila as he looks after his father (Dido de la Paz). There, he spends the days with his friend Renz (Elijah Canlas), running errands for the nurses, racing on wheelchairs, secretly drinking and smoking on a balcony, and placing bets whether the newly-arrived patients in the emergency room are dead or alive. This playful routine in the otherwise dreary hospital is soon interrupted by the arrival of an unnamed young woman (Ella Cruz), whom Edward wagered to be alive. Later on, after being assigned by the nurses to temporarily look after her, Edward befriends the young woman, who he later learns is named Agnes.
Eventually, of course, Edward falls for Agnes. This trope, however, is complicated by the very masculinity that inhabits the rite of passage, for Edward’s is a boyhood that is also compelled to outgrow itself the soonest, situated as it is in the present duress of urban poverty, poor public healthcare, and the current regime. With these intersections, Nazareno’s earlier exploration on formations of masculities in Kiko Boksingero (2017) is furthered in Edward: more than an inquiry on the makings of man when the figure of the father is practically missing, Edward simultaneously considers such transition in a milieu that rarely values life, especially of those who are most divested.
Halfway through the film, after being called out by Agnes for his grimy neck (“Puro lupain, napakaraming lupain!”), Edward finally wakes up early the next day, in time for the designated shower time in the hospital. As the water falls on him, his body is then intuited to be not entirely his, dedicated as it is for his puppy love. Because for a deprived youth like Edward, the body is all that remains to be his currency in a society that always accounts: it is his body that he sits beside his father and lays under his bed, as his only caretaker; it is his body that he pushes Agnes’s wheelchair with to show her the distant port; it is also his body he lifts gallons of water with to earn few coins from and amity with the nurses. This body is what he presents everyday, as to perform what will be his sense of self—as a male, a boy, a son, a friend, a suitor, a citizen.
It is also the same body that Edward projects—through Abuel’s sympathetic embodiment—as the cinematic moment that is Edward for us to behold. This foregrounding of the body, fortunately in Nazareno’s adept technique, renders the namesake character to be less so much of a cardboard character—and thus, a convenient mouthpiece for a hasty, and often erroneous, argument—than a rounded one: through Edward’s entirety, possibilities are explored, as how the hospital transforms into a playground, if not a home, no matter how temporarily. However, lest this be mistaken as a sheer idealization of the dire present as to “represent” the “real,” it must be critically syncopated as an insistence on the prospect of things, uncertain as they are, in the midst of the daily Philippine traffic.
Edward, in other words, is an attempt on resistance: that a body like his is to be meditated upon and with, instead of being merely treated as another number in the senseless statistics of the Philippine nation-state. At the same time, it is modest enough to admit its ordinariness, surrendering the most crucial of betting to us: at the end of the film, hopeless as he was with his worsening condition, Edward’s father decides that they would be going home soon. That night, Edward lies among other nameless caretakers, a body among many other bodies, crying himself to sleep. Whatever happens next—that whether he and his father live or die—remains uncaptured, unsurveilled, suggesting us the work left for ourselves: to find a new grammar for what can possibly lie ahead.
This is perhaps the most significant reminder to the contemporary Filipino cinema that both Lingua Franca and Edward embody: that the act of creating can be also a form of caring to the material, through its judicious consideration in the very method of creation. It is here that we can intuit the criticality of the figure foregrounded in both films—that of the caregiver, whose condition is all the more precarious because their potentially dearest of relations are alienated: Olivia’s mother back home, and Edward’s absentee brother, who are both reachable only through cellular technology, rendering Olivia and Edward to be desolate despite being with other bodies. Who looks after those who belabor care as their primary currency?
It is this ordinary, and thus brutal, evisceration in the everyday that the looming presence of an old house and the abbatoir in Lingua Franca, and the hospital and the morgue in Edward press upon us. And yet, through attentive performances of the body, with range and depth that exceed typical “representations,” the films intimate that resistance in its most tender of form is still imaginable. Although these do not—cannot—promise an outright recovery of the body often disregarded by our times, the films do propose a crucial possibility: that perhaps, through such approach to cinema, vision can be brought back to our own bodies and situated in our ordinariness. That we may even see each other somehow, finally, eye-to-eye.
Due to unforeseen circumstances, the 30th Annual Circle Citations for Distinguished Achievement in Film for 2019 is now scheduled on the first quarter of 2021 as a virtual event. The list of nominated and winning films can be found here.
Young Critics Circle Film Desk 