The film was made at an odd juncture in O'Hara's career. He had just enjoyed small success with his previous pito-pito melodrama Babae sa Bubungang Lata (Woman on a Tin Roof, 1998), a multi-storied, multi-charactered behind-the-scenes look at Filipino filmmaking, described by one of its actors as "a eulogy for the Filipino film industry." Bubungang Lata functioned as both expose of abuses and exercise in nostalgia, freely mingling the realism of the filmmakers' hardscrabble lives with the supernatural presence of their predecessors (younger incarnations of aged actresses, dead husbands come back to life).
Pangarap was a different creature altogether-- a brief, deftly sketched precis of Philippine history from just before the assassination of Ninoy Aquino Jr., through the toppling of dictator Ferdinand Marcos and rise of Aquino's widow to the office of President, and beyond. Along the way it depicts both military atrocities and the at times even more extreme violence inspired by those atrocities.
The film (set in Negros Oriental) touches on Negrense mythology, particularly the kapre: a huge, hairy manlike creature that stinks of piss and likes to prank people.
It tells the shared story of Nena, daughter of a wealthy haciendero, and Jose, son of one of the haciendero's employees.
If the film doesn't end up as an incoherent mess-- not saying it doesn't, not entirely-- that's because O'Hara manages to tie almost everything together into a genre-defying Gordian knot, where mythology and history are just differing aspects of the same sociopolitical and cultural landscape, and a young girl's love can assume the features of both angel and devil simultaneously.
This was when O'Hara was introduced to digital nonlinear video editing, which has apparently liberated him-- his cutting here at times resembles the shuttering of a single-lens reflex camera, at times the febrile consciousness of a young girl's mind, free-associating ideas and emotions into a single narrative.
Occasionally O'Hara throws an image of the text being read onscreen, and one is reminded of Robert Bresson's Journal d'un curé de campagne (Diary of a Country Priest), where we hear the priest mouthing the words, we see the words being written in his diary. The idea seems to be less about reinforcing ideas, more about reveling in the physicality of poetry--the scratch of pen on paper, the feel of rhymed rhythmic words rolling off the tongue.
The film is also a celebration of Filipino poetry.
At one point Nena's mother Mrs. Montilla (Hilda Koronel) recites Florentino Collantes' "The Gift," part of which I (roughly) translated:
We loved like the heaven and earth
like the land and the sea
a bit of distance with no point of contact
sipping bitter tears.
I remember my lifelong love
and how he lay ailing
and how I said that if he ever died
I would quickly follow
The daughter would inherit this love of poetry as she grows up. But the times being what they are she's drawn to darker more unsettling fare, such as Amado Hernandez's fiery lines about political prisoners (again roughly translated):
The guardian’s eye flash like lightning
on the locked door no one may approach;
the convict in the next cell howls
an animal roaring in his cave.
Each day passes like a chain dragged
across the floor by bloodied feet
each night a mourning shroud draped
over the coffin of a prison cell
Sometimes someone's footsteps pass,
the links between shackles rattling;
the sallow sun briefly reveals
a thousand wraiths spewing from the dark.
Sometimes the night's peace is shattered
by alarm--an escape!--gunfire;
sometimes a voice cries out
and in the courtyard gallows someone dies
The girl grows up, faces her demons, conquers them (but not, as we shall see in the film, entirely); she becomes involved in the region's violent politics, though not as deeply as her childhood sweetheart, who has a bounty worth thousands on his head for the death of soldiers. Her speeches are admirably progressive, but-- in what I find to be a curious response to the young man's rebellion, her poetry is more personal than radical (these lines written not by a famous Filipino poet, but by O'Hara's niece-- again, a rough and likely incompetent translation):
At the graveside of childhood
in this yard of red-stained and fetid soil
the dying is done
The final breath was deep
and deliberate
because the heavens do not mourn a man
and begrudge tears to a garden reserved
for standing, stagnating saints
orphans begging by cemetery stones
But the dead understand
Behind their buried putrefaction
is wailing and pleading
The indrawn wind is spent
bearing offerings and gifts
mere petals
from two stone markers
from a yard
full of red-stained and fetid soil
Remarkable coming from a young woman but not her best; those are recited at film's end, the tale of two brief lives captured in a handful of words.
I was asked once, after a screening of this film (by the late Nika Bohinc, if I remember right), why would children be frightened of the spirits of the forest when all they have known is innocence and joy? I had an answer then, a fairly good one I thought, but having mulled it over, feel this reply is better: that what children know is so very little compared to what they can see going on about them, and even with their handful of knowledge (or, rather, because of it-- what was Socrates' definition of a truly wise man?) they sense danger and darkness beyond their small, secure circle. Children can sense and see and in this way know (even if they are not sure of the particulars); thus equipped, and not incapable of imagination, they can fear. When they become flawed adults (a budding poetess and crusader, a feared rebel killer), their knowledge increases and the width of their circle widens; but the darkness is never completely dispelled, and the fear never really goes away.
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