Chrysalis
Auraeus Solito's Busong (Palawan Fate)--which is enjoying its international release--is arguably a failure--but what a failure! At first glance it's incomprehensible, slow, apparently confused; it's also ballsy, impassioned, impossibly beautiful.
The
film's first half is the most difficult to sit through. We are
introduced to Punay (Alessandra de Rossi), whose skin is speckled
with mysterious boils and open lacerations (it's not clear whether
they are some form of disease or inflicted wounds), and whose feet
are so raw they literally cannot touch the ground--she's borne aloft
on an intricately woven hammock (with a delicate mosquito-netting
canopy, no less) by her brother Angkarang (Rodrigo Santikan), and she
seeks a cure.
We
eventually meet a woman (Bonivie Budao) who helps carry Punay for a
while, telling her story; at one point the woman is warned that the
sacred Amugis tree growing nearby--an impressive evergreen that grows
to the height of around seventy-five feet--should not be harmed
(besides the spiritual significance its bark and sap have medicinal
properties). Of course her husband is a logger, and his chainsaw
roars hungrily for hardwood to chew on...
The
pacing is leisurely--perhaps too leisurely; Solito's attempts at a
mysterious air (Who is she? Why is she so afflicted? What does she
intend to do about it?) are rigorous to the point of
asphyxiation--you hunger for even the tiniest crumb of exposition,
maybe a relaxed moment between the two siblings, even a vulgar joke
or two.
What
sustains the viewer and keeps his eye drinking in the film (in heavy,
gasp-inducing draughts) is Solito's unblinking camera lens, capturing
the unbelievable beauty of Palawan. It's not just photographing the
surrounding greenery--any Travel Channel cameraman can do that--but
Solito (with the invaluable help of cinematographer-filmmaker Louie
Quirino, who also lensed Rico Ilarde's Beneath
the Cogon and Altar)
captures the infinite variety and expressiveness of the landscape, a
mystery and majesty that gives this film (would give any film I
imagine) more magic than it can handle, almost. At one point a
character crossing the screen stops, presumably startled by the
richness of the verdant growth and deep blue sky, and you can't help
but nod silently in agreement. Shakespare once described Cleopatra
thusly: “age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite
variety;” one can imagine the Bard confronted with Palawan, and
struck speechless.
The
film comes into its own with the third story, told by the fisherman
Lulong, whose boat was confiscated because he fished in private
waters--he and his son must cross from sandbar to shore on foot, and
the waters are filled with poisonous stonefish. Lulong of course
knows the fish's true name, which protects him from its venom; he's
left unprotected however from abuse by the bodyguards of the rich man
who now owns the area...
Solito
stages the moment with surprising speed, and one appreciates the
venom with which he expresses his anger at the landowner; in one of
his previous works, Basal
Banar, he documents
the abuse wealthy landowners in Palawan often inflict on both the
environment and the indigenous tribespeople. If anything the venom is
perhaps too intense--what this and the previous story lacks is some
kind of empathic imagination for all
the characters of the story, including the villains (the landowner
here is painted in effective if broad strokes; we do feel sympathy
for the logger's wife, but barely understand the logger himself).
If,
say, Solito were to fill out the landowner's character--give us the
man's point of view, not necessarily endorse it but give it the same
intense sympathy he gives the fisherman--it would give the ironic
resolution to that storyline more bite. Likewise if the logger and
his wife were more thoroughly fleshed out (when you think about it,
they have the most complex predicament: they make their livelihood
from destroying the surrounding forest that is their home) it would give their storyline
more resonance, more relevance.
One
doesn't really need to outline what one means--full empathy is amply
demonstrated in Solito's fourth story, that of Aris, a shaman's
apprentice who left to live in Manila and has come back to his
native land. Aris (a thin disguise for Auraeus Solito himself) is
easily the most richly realized figure in the film, with his ambivalent
straddling of the modern and the traditional, the urban and the
rural, the rational and the mystical. He's abandoned his culture at
one point, has come back with happiness and at the same time
regret, having lost loved ones in his absence.
He
meets Punay and in the single loveliest moment in the picture
attempts to cure her: her boils and lesions bloom with hatching
chrysalis, actual dormant creatures swelling out of their hardened
shells to bloom into butterflies. It's an amazing moment--if Solito's
many loving shots of nature evoke Terence Malick (with Malick's sense
of reverential awe), this is Solito's Malick-crossed-with-Cronenberg
moment, a monstrous miraculous mutation of both prosthetic art and actual biology...no you can't fake that delicate pulsing, the
insistent pushing out and spreading of fragile, not-quite-dried wings.
This,
finally, is the Solito we've been waiting for; the Solito of miracles
and wonders, effortlessly produced; this is the Solito of his
animated short Suring
at ang Kuk-ok,
arguably his most extraordinary work to date, a low-budget yet
effective cross between the enchantment of nature, and the
enchantment of imagination. One draws in one's breath (the way one
doesn't in Hollywood superproductions and their ridiculous digital
effects nowadays) and wonders: how did he do
that? And can he do it again?
Busong
is as noted before not a complete success; it is flawed, it is
difficult to follow; it is, on the other hand, the genuine expression
of a genuine artist, bounding forward in his art and not looking
back; it is a stumble and step, more courageous and thrilling than
any number of less flawed, less ambitious films I've seen in the past
few years. I look forward to the full blooming of this chrysalis, and
await his next work.
5.30.13