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THERE is
a very daring film showing right now. It is called
Ploning. It is daring in the true sense even if it
does not even have any sex scene in it or any images
that would require the Movie and Television Review and
Classification Board to sit en banc and have us shaking
from the decision it will render. Films can be brave for
the themes they embrace, the advocacy perhaps that
develops in their wake. Yet, when a film is brave enough
to go noncommercial, and when it is not scared to walk
us through the slowest and sweetest of remembering, then
it is a film to reckon with. Like a new dance that is
showing new steps, the people behind Ploning
remind us that there are many ways to tell a story. The
film dares to tell us the magic of eternity, the truth
about fidelity in a dance so old, we look at it and ask
ourselves: Can I connect with this?
The
title is as effacing as an old photograph. It is as bare
as a recollection, and as touching as the simplest tales
told by women who grow old never tiring of love,
questioning fate while not getting angry when the forces
of the universe seem to not favor their own desires.
Ploning,
first of all, is a woman’s film and a woman film. From
this perspective, I like the promises of the film. You
sense it at the beginning.
SIMPLY GRAND.
As the woman
described as someone who makes people forget the absence
of rains, Judy Ann Santos as Ploning justifies that
hyperbole for everything about her in this film is grand
and sweeping.
Film
critics usually do this, offer ways on how to improve
the film. Let me step up a bit and offer a way to read
this film. Remove the men in the film—for most of them
are bad distractions anyway—and you have a wondrous
story unified by grandness and sincerity that only women
in love are capable of.
I wish
the film had stayed there, in that site of loss, because
at the end, the film and its women will eventually
compel us to take in the greatest truth: The ephemeral
is only for those who do not question the world around
them.
Yes, the
film does stray. There are too many loves to tell and
too many lovers to narrate their respective love
stories. Stories grow roots and we are carried onto an
endless search. Who is telling the story, I ask myself.
Whose
story indeed is being told by Ploning?
The film
initiates our travel by memory via Ploning.
Somewhere, we stumble upon a child, Digo, and his family
composed of a loving brother and a mother loving also,
but terribly sick. In this home, there is no father but
the mother, Juaning, claims there is happiness there,
with her children. In this town, everyone is part of a
family. Or so it appears. In Ploning’s home, her father
is almost not there and then he is gone. In another
household, Tomas, the son of Intang and Ploning’s love,
has disappeared. Another woman, Celeste, comes to this
distant town to claim herself. She leaves, but comes
back again. At the end, she gets a name, Seling, given
by the town.
This use
of loss and waiting, and acceptance is the thread that
connects the many myths and facts surrounding the
persons in the town. Sometimes, this thread gets
disconnected and disentangled when the film allows many
narrators. Nature in its blissful surplus could have
been enough as links between the stories. It is there in
the sea captured tremendously in shades of powder and
dark blue, in skies and clouds that run as commentary to
the passions of this small community. But somehow the
screenplay appears to favor a more expository approach,
in a pattern of two people in a dialogue, each line
opening up confessions and more recollections. This is
the apparent weakness of the film—but for some reason,
it is also its charm. Layers and multiple layers of
perspectives, some details left out for a character,
some details explained for the other.
One has
to catch this internal rhythm of the film, ride on it
like the languid waves around the island. The film is
structured as a meandering walk across time. In this
place are names that people choose to remember or
forget. There is only one full story in the film, that
of Ploning, who waits for a love that may not return.
She waits because on that island, separated it seems
from the rest of the world, not to wait is the end of
all things.
Ploning
could have been a didactic piece in the hands of less
mature filmmakers. But Nico Dante Garcia, the director,
and Benjamin Lingan, who cowrites the screenplay with
Garcia, have the dexterity and self-assurance of old
hands. They play around the metaphor of memory and,
unafraid, give us a story that must be savored for its
pace. There is no rush. Remember, this is the place
where people wait, and the only frenzy would come when
people grieve and die. Or question their faith in a
divine that is there with the rains.
The cast
of Ploning has an uneven feel. One reason could
be that some of them are new in the trade or old in the
trade. Daunting but done anyway, the film opts to have
subtitles for the Cuyonon dialect spoken by the
characters, with some of the actors sounding like they
were reading from transcripts. Still, these are minor
quibbles.
The
women in the film are enchanting when gathered in twos
or threes. This brings us to what some in the local
media refer to as “moments.” And the film has many of
these moments. A great moment happens when the four
women talk about life and love and pain as they prepare
cashews to be cooked. As they crack the nuts, they
engage in a verbal joust, poignant and funny as only
women can be when they see life passing by.
Yet
moments do not make a film. Performances that stay long
after the film has ended and the lights have gone up in
the moviehouse always compensate for certain flaws in a
film. In Ploning, these characterizations are
articulated by the camera works of Charlie Peralta and
Marissa Floirendo, which call to mind of the style of
Latin-American filmmakers. Plants are extremely green
and bountiful in this film. Drops of rain and shards of
light splinter and break and shower upon the faces of
actors in scene after scene of visual splendor. The
editing by Danny Añonuevo accomplishes something that
the story has to do: remind us that a person is there
even when he is not there.
If
somebody had told me beforehand that the character of
Mylene Dizon is going to grow old into Tessie Tomas, I
would have questioned the decision. I am wrong: the
laid-back Celeste years after is transformed into the
Seling of Tomas. Without prosthetics, the character of
Celeste is a sadder, wiser but also happier Seling. We
see a person not growing wrinkles and changing before
us; we see a woman shifting in her heart, growing with
and in her destiny. Thus, when Tomas as Seling embraces
a man from her easy youth, the film surges with a rush
of emotions that we have been holding back for a long
time.
At the
core of this film as memory is Judy Ann Santos as
Ploning. It is an achingly beautiful performance. As the
woman described as someone who makes people forget the
absence of rains, Santos as Ploning justifies that
hyperbole for everything about her in this film is grand
and sweeping. Walking across town and holding out her
hand for the young boys to kiss in respect, talking to a
lovestruck young man and consoling him with an
invitation to dance, standing at the door with her face
drenched in tears as she listens to her father talk
about forgiveness, Santos compels us to remember her
character in a film that has what Pablo Neruda calls
“the sumptuous appeal of the tactile.” Which is good for
a film that is about things that are gone and those that
have not still come around.
Ploning
comes from Panoramanila Pictures, an independent film
group. |
