“After all, I believe that legends and myths are largely made of ‘truth,’ and, indeed, present aspects of it that can only be received in this mode; and long ago certain truths and modes of this kind were discovered and must always reappear.”
—J.R.R. Tolkien
A VILLAGE locked deep in a valley is going to be visited by the dictator. In that place, its lone barber has died in his sleep. Despondent, his wife takes over and becomes the prominent barber in town. Somewhere, a woman is lovely and depressed. Somewhere, a wife is battered and made pregnant by her cruel husband.
Tales abound in Jun Lana’s Barber’s Tales. You can tell the tales and retell them, put them in any position and yet the world makes sense. The reason for this is that these stories deserve their validity not through histories but through a composition that shades the border between fantasy and political commentary.
In Barber’s Tales, the small tales are true but somewhere in these tales are other tales, unyielding to our common notion of what is factual and what is fictive. In the town, the location of which always comes with the reminder of its isolation, the barber shop is where all people converge. Jose is the barber but he is no raconteur. The tales come from other people and the events these people find themselves part of.
Jose is stern with his wife, who serves him like he is the true master of the house. Jose is the master barber to this wife who apprentices also in her husband’s craft. Jose, however, is also the master in this marriage where the wife is servile and scared. There is no love in the husband’s voice when he asks something from the wife. The house reeks of tension. We fear for the safety of this woman in her own home.
When Jose dies, we are left to contend with Marilou, a widow who seems to have nowhere to go, until she decides to be the next barber in town. She tries first with the good priest who is satisfied with her style. The other men would not trust a woman with their hair. One day, she is asked to see the mayor who learns about her skills gained from her husband. The mayor is happy with the haircut and soon there are customers in the old barber shop. Interesting that the mayor, all chauvinism and power, will trust a woman to cut his hair. In Barber’s Tales, as in the so-called kuwentong barbero, the term for the gossip shared, as well as ribald jokes, the tales are caught in between the real and the unreal. The stories in barber shops are usually an all-male assault at society and the women who weaken all communities with their femaleness.
The narrative of the film saves it from being merely fabular or metaphorical. The film does not dwell on the metaphor of communities fooled by their leaders who hide from them the truth of an ugly government. There are characters who are well aware of the fairy tales spun by a vicious king and an insane queen in the palace. These characters like the young student Edmund, who quits his studies to join the revolution in the mountains. He is able to gather more men and they talk about truth in the barber shop, the place where lies and life’s exaggerations are constructed.
Then one day, Edmund disappears . Then one day, a beloved person in the villlage is killed.
The character of Marilou is not at the center of the tales, for there are so many tales. But her barber shop and her conversion from an almost dumb woman to a popular barber are, in themselves, containing the true elements of a barber’s tale. Contentious and charming, the story of Marilou is a wonder to read. As played by Eugene Domingo, the character is almost catatonic in her coping with the loss of a man, the same loss of which produces her presence. But there is a terrifying strength in those resigned postures, in that nonconfrontational stance. We know that this woman will either break down or break out of the village, and break out she does—but not in the grand, sweeping Greek manner but in the firm and ordinary stroke of a barber’s knife.
Marilou’s journey from someone who does not believe in the revolution and fighting for social upheaval is one of the staunchest elements of the film’s screenplay. It is a slow, gradual awakening and deaths are the source of life in this woman’s rebirth into a new ideology.
Marilou asks Edmund to remain a good son to her friend, for that is all that she knows. The home, after the school, is the best place for sons, declares this woman timid as a woman for a long time. But the village has a silence that will not last long. As the killings of people continue, Marilou provides refuge for the “rebels.” Marilou meets up with the mayor’s wife who confides to her all her pains.
Up there on the cliff, Marilou witnesses the full descent of a woman into hell, a turning point for the barber to tell her own barber’s tales.
As the only barber—perhaps the only female barber in the area—vanishes, varied stories are told about her whereabouts. Rashomonesque only up to a point, the disappearance of the barber is soon explained in a tour-de-force scene at the end where religion, society, violence, and politics are almost textbook titles of what a small community has become. A procession is held and the military is on alert to look for a long-haired woman. But the woman are also on full alert to save other women. They all change their hair! The barber, his tale and his craft, becomes a sumptuous polysemic symbol of what women can do when they band together and refuse to be seen in the graven images made after men.
Barber’s Tales is a woman’s film only insofar as the wise moves made by the women in this film. This brings us to the actresses who play the lead characters in the film. Shamaine Buencamino is Tess, the aunt who placed all her trust and future in her nephew. Acerbic and territorial, Buencamino bristles with an indignation that is soon realized into knowledge. Once more, Gladys Reyes is proving herself to be the next promising indie actress, if we may have that category. Nearly stealing the scene from Allen Dizon in Magkakabaung, Reyes here is all at once intense and simple as a battered wife.
Economy of means and gesture is the discipline of Domingo as the barber who makes the final cut. She is terrific in her restraint. The theatricality in those pauses and glances is justified by the air emitted by the scenes in sepia and nostalgia: Marilou is memory and Memorare, a prayer and a political move, in the body, hands and eyes of Domingo.
The film is directed by Jun Robles Lana. The screenplay is attributed to Lana, Peter Ong Lim, Elmer Gatchalian and Benedict Mique. The carnivalesque and claustrophobia of the film are through the keen cinematography by Carlo Mendoza and the astute production design by Chito Sumera. The film is released through APT Entertainment.