AT the end of Arnel Mardoquio’s film, Alienasyon, a voice trails off and laments how in the darkness we all find the alienation of our times. It is the voice of Spanky Manikan as Paulino Abenoja, a retired professor. It is a voice that is not timid to accept the regrets, the sadness, the failures and the tiny triumphs of a relatively long life.
The film is that—a story of a generation lost in its memories. It is the generation of those born before the war and immediately after the war. Peacetime and wartime. Those are years we never visited and never liked to visit. Indeed, those years are memorialized in political rites of remembrance but are really never remembered. The old professor knows that. He would make us know those years.
Epic, or almost epic, is how we could describe this latest film. Not the length of it but the breadth of the content which makes this film epic and epochal. The film begins with a candle in the dark. The retired professor is walking through corridors, at the end of which he sees a young boy who happens to be the professor in his childhood. The young boy goes near the professor and takes the latter’s hand. They walk. The boy disappears as a young man looks out from behind a wire fence. The young man is the professor when he fought in the war. The professor confronts the young man and both of them erupt in loud laughter.
In another director’s hand, that opening could’ve been the cheesiest of introductions to a cinema of memories. In Mardoquio’s imagination, however, the linked scenes are the eeriest and the loneliest of perorations, tender and at the same time touchy. These are memories that one can always question and the person remembering is left to defend himself. The problem is the old professor is left with no one to argue his position except…. I cannot go into details at this point except to say that, once more, Mardoquio shows us how theater and film can be put together. I’m not talking about the two arts in one space but how a theatrical presentation can advance the narrative of a film.
This is proven in one scene where the professor visits his old school and passes by his office. He watches the rehearsal of a play, which he wrote. The play itself is an extension of what the professor grieves for: the histories of a period, the ideals that his generation died for.
The play is moving but it is a theatrical piece. The years in the heart of the old professor are now a drama, and, however it compels us to think of those heroic years, we are a mere audience. It is only the professor who is living those years. He is the medium now that the film uses to exorcise the ghost out of the past that is possessing the present. The demons are all over the place but there are angels of remembrances as well, to help us make this travel to past and present and back into the past again.
The constant reference to the development of Diliman and the subsequent mention of Manuel L. Quezon as well as the discussion about the state university and its corrupt system can be jarring. These stories, in fact, stop the flow of the narrative. Remove these footnotes and we have a discourse on a generation that is forgotten. The relevance of a war and the people who fought the enemies stare at us from the fence of the years that do not matter anymore. Only the retired professor and his students are willing to make sense of the years. Only a very few can see the connection between the past and the present.
Metaphors become visual iterations in the film. These metaphors appear and reappear. The images of war seem to be collapsed in the landscape of the greenest of trees and tall grasses.
This is Mardoquio’s universe, explored once more and found wanting. If in Riddles of My Homecoming, the filmmaker returns to a Mindanao of cult, killings and lore, in Alienasyon, he goes back to a past and finds it rich with so many things except a place to come home to and a hope.
Mardoquio remains a master storyteller, and in Alienasyon his version of the flaws of history is told from a personal point of view. Instead of being limited however, this perspective takes on the power of a gaze that transfixes an event for a person to ponder on. As if images are held in abeyance that when one decides to get back at them, they are there at open fields, in the sounds of hills, along dark corridors and artefacts of a home and loved ones that are gone, of events that are relived only to be questioned.
What makes this personal retrospective possible is the cinematography of Arnel Barbarona—gritty and sharp but also with the lyricism that allows us to look up at the skies and the woodlands as if this is the last time we are seeing them. Barbarona’s camera is our eye to a funeral of dreams where the icons begin with the artefacts of a loved home and terminates in a voice extolling the ironies of liberation.
Art Acuña is the father whose words of wisdom we could hear over and over again. On the road to war, Acuña as a father stands in between his two sons and bids them with a farewell that is the only hopeful word in this film.
Acuña imbues these words with a strength that makes poignant one’s recollection of a good father. Shamaine Buencamino sketches the image of a mother whose grief at the return of a son sums up the sorrow of a nation fighting a war that was never our own.
She is a mother whose face we wish to cup in our hands forever. As the source of all this retention, Spanky Manikan has the face and beard of a wise man whose wisdom stops at the gate of guilt. But if we do feel his rage and remorse, it is because of this actor who plays him as a young man. Jess Mendoza is this fine actor and it is his portrayal of a man torn by ideals and facts that introduces the ruination of an individual. His journey back to his homestead will remain in our mind as the final return of a young soldier to peace that we know will usher at each cycle wars and strifes. Mendoza’s face has no more hurt to show because a war has dug a grave for him and his generation.