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THE
ASIAN VALUES DVD REVIEW
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Tikoy
Aguiluz’s Tatarin (Summer Solstice, 2001), based on
Nick Joaquin’s play of the same name, is about the oldest and
longest-running war known to man, the war between the sexes. Joaquin’s
problem then was how to make this war relevant again to jaded audiences
(the play was written in 1975); his solution was to set the play
in the ’20s, when male-dominated Western Culture was just beginning
to tremble. Aguiluz’s adoption of Joaquin’s stratagem
is, I think, a smart move - this way he captures the very roots
of the war (or at least of the 20th century edition of the war)
as waged by our grandparents and great-grandparents; he photographs
the combatants at a time when the battle is still urgent and raw,
the stakes desperately high.
And the battle
lines are drawn, of course, around a married couple - Don Paeng
and Dona Lupe Moreta (Edu Manzano and Dina Bonnevie), on the evening
of the Feast Day of St. John the Baptist, on the third night of
the Tatarin - a pagan ritual where for three days out of
the year women hold ascendancy over men.
I can’t
think of a better Filipino filmmaker than Aguiluz to evoke the living
past - especially in a production like this, where immersion in
a long-gone age is crucial to the success of the film. Combining
the considerable resources of Viva Studios (which are usually poured
into banal glamour productions) with his keen documentary filmmaker’s
eye, Aguiluz (with the help of production designer Dez Bautista)
evokes the remarkably authentic, miraculously detailed world of
the Moretas - from the flourmill that produces their dried noodles,
to the ’20s-style kitchen hard at work on dinner, to the luxuriously
appointed family mansions with their incredible painted ceilings.
And it’s
not just a matter of having an enormous production budget; it’s
the intelligence to pick out this particular detail, the wit to
shoot from that particular angle - then the judiciousness to cut
it all up so that you only glance at the images, and are left wanting
more.
On
the set of Tatarin.
But more than
the ability to recreate a historical period, Aguiluz (again, with
the help of writer Ricky Lee and editor Mirana Medina) is able to
streamline Joaquin’s play, to focus on the struggle between
Don Paeng and Dona Lupe. The three have tinkered with Joaquin’s
married couple, made delicate adjustments, crucial revisions - the
Moretas, for one, have lost all warmth and affection for each other,
where in the play they still show signs of tenderness. Don Paeng
has become a psychologically immobile, sexually impotent monster
(kudos to Edu Manzano for the courage to portray such a thoroughly
unlikable man) while Dona Lupe (Dina Bonnevie, in possibly the performance
of her career) has become more submissive, more withdrawn (the better
to highlight the climactic reversal when it comes).
Then there
is the dialogue, which has been pruned, made less explicit, made
more functional than decorative. Besides the careful pruning, Aguiluz
manages to locate the drama in the moments when words are not spoken
- through shots that encapsulate in a single image the tension of
the scene, like the one where Dona Lupe’s foot is kissed by
Guido (Carlos Morales), with Don Paeng watching from the balcony.
Don Paeng, the shot says to us, is ascendant by virtue of his standing
in the balcony, but is also rendered remote and helpless by the
distance.
Then the Tatarin
ritual itself. Moved offstage in the play, the ritual occupies
center stage in the film: a wordless, 10-minute orgy of pulsing
drumbeat, flaring torches and convulsing women. Aguiluz wanted the
sense of a real location turned theater set, and he got it - the
dance, staged at the foot of an actual balete tree, feels nightmarish,
surreal. And obscene - though nudity is at a minimum, there is no
lack of lewdness to the drumming and dancing, which at times is
reduced to frank rutting. "Pagan" is a polite and inadequate
term for what happens at the foot of the balete tree.
Tatarin
feels more lighthearted than Aguiluz’s earlier works, if
only because he doesn’t end the film with a life-or-death situation
(meaning: the protagonist didn’t die). More, it’s the
first really comic film Aguiluz has ever directed, and he handles
the material with admirable lightness and vigor.
Note: Cinemaya
Magazine, Issue # 54-55, Winter-Spring 2002. The article also appears
in Noel Vera's Critic After Dark: A Review Of Philippine Cinema
(BigO Books).
Click here to order.
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