Sa North Diversion Road (On North Diversion Road, Dennis Marasigan, 2005)

Road trip

Never seen Tony Perez's Sa North Diversion Road (North Diversion Road) onstage, but easy to see why this is a perennial theater favorite, constantly being restaged: it's the story of ten couples, of different social classes, occupations, and temperaments, driving at different times down the same road, dealing with the man's infidelity to the woman. The metaphor is obvious--life's a long road taken by different people undergoing differing experiences, with different destinations along the way. The pleasure is in the execution, a dramatic tour de force for two.

Easily the best thing about Dennis Marasigan's adaptation of the play is just that: it adapts the play, served straight no chaser, making minor changes to exploit the medium of film. Flashback sequences inserted when necessary, mostly in the beginning, to ease us from the usual film narrative to the more radical one of theater (funny how theater with its spatial and temporal restrictions seems more adventurous than cinema when it comes to plot structure). On a tiny budget he achieves a variety of lighting schemes and music to accompany each story, from austere dark and piano score (suggesting Ingmar Bergman angst) to sunny farce, the characters' thick Bulacena accents adding rhythm and melody. There's a silent slapstick interlude (one of the film's comic highlights), a '70s Bohemian laugh-a-thon, even a science-fiction segment, with two intellectuals decked out in stark white (a nod to THX 1138?) overanalyzing their relationship to death.

Marasigan rises to the Hitchcockian challenge of spending almost the whole ninety minutes in a car's confined space and still keep it visually interesting-- resorts to a variety of angles and cuts fluidly to differing beats (from languid long shots to nervous quick cuts) depending on the story; keeps the storylines distinct where it could all easily become confusing.

But the glory of the film is the director's work with the actors. The film is a duet with John Arcilla and Irma Adlawan as the ten troubled couples, and where Marasigan supports them with lighting and music and costumes and the occasional prop (a bag of watermelon seeds, for one, which seem to transcend social class and background as the snack of choice), most of the work and effects are created through the actors.

This may be bias but with the exception of a few segments, seems to me that Adlawan sets the tone and carries the picture. She either dominates the scene or is Arcilla's equal, and as we run through the stories we get a collage of impressions of the people portrayed: sarcastic, witty, furious, tender, heartbreaking, the characters merging to give us the full bewildering range of the human soul.

Arcilla gives support, no small thing (never thought 'supporting performance' ever meant inferior, only that in story structure it's nominally subordinate). He keeps up with Adlawan's bewildering cornucopia of characters, matching her every change of mood; when  given his own aria--the despairing husband dealing with his mentally incapacitated wife--he's simple, direct, devastating. One of the best films, Filipino or otherwise, of 2005.

First published 1.5.06