Saturday, May 31, 2008

Blue Moon: Trawling Memory and Loss

Blue Moon: Trawling Memory and Loss

Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez

Quiet, unassuming films literally come once in a blue moon in this landscape teeming with shrill attempts at shabby humor and needlessly complicated drama. And so, given that, and Blue Moon's screenplay coming with a literary pedigree (2005 Palanca Awards Third Prize, Dulang Pampelikula), expectations were high this text would translate into at least above average filmic fare.

Allan Tijamo's story brings three parallel narratives of loss into play in a cross-generational telling of imperfect relations and equally flawed attempts at atonement. In what could easily be construed as a deathbed conversion, terminally-ill grandfather (Manuel Pineda played by Eddie Garcia) sets off to find one of two Corazons (allusion to split subjectivities obviously intended) he'd wooed in his youth. Son (Rod played by Christopher de Leon) and grandson (Kyle played by Dennis Trillo) come along for the ride through Baguio, Albay, Cebu only to end up back in Manila after Pineda's illness forces them to abandon chasing clues around the Philippines. These two initially hesitant but eventually gung-ho accomplices pack their own warped emotional baggage along for the compensatory journey—Rod's dimmed professional prospects and impending fall-out with his wife most definitely weighing down his sorry fatherly attempts at communicating with a son who has his fair share of commitment debacles.

At the onset, Blue Moon could easily be construed as a neatly laced-up saccharine bundle of a road movie (conflated with World War II reminisces) except that, despite its directorial lapses, it still manages to tug at major sympathetic chords—second chances, loves lost and rekindled, sins visiting several generations but forgiven nonetheless. Particularly so since it stands as one of the exceptional occasions when filmmakers (save for the upcoming I Wanna Be Happy) have considered the nuanced lives of elderly Filipinos worth the average two-hour film stretch, Blue Moon begs to be watched even as it is critiqued.

To begin with, since it is the long-suffering Corazon (played by Jennylyn Mercado who ages into Boots Anson Roa) and not the iconoclast Corazon (played by Pauleen Luna) who turns out to be the woman dying Manuel Pineda seeks, Blue Moon easily opens itself up to charges of further privileging and perpetuating the romantic myth of Filipina as martyr, ever demurring, and pliant to a fault. But then again this Corazon does her own journeying in this film, leaving as she does Pineda to tend to their son as she deals with her own personal grief compounded by post-partum depression and long drawn disappointment with a largely indifferent spouse.

YCC colleague Eli Guieb cites the film for “giving us a mature elaboration of the multi-layered and multi-scalar intricacies of what it means to nurture and recapture lost and fast-losing spaces of domestic accommodation under circumstances of emotional diaspora.” He adds: “Blue Moon delineates boundaries of domestic losses and probabilities of kin security without melodramatic pitfalls, albeit the film’s melodramatic genre. In it, family ties are given new dimensions and contemporary contexts of social ties are rendered as humane as the individual struggles of human links intricately tied to their search for wholeness. Travel served as an effective motif for the internal voyage of the film’s main characters.”

It is in response to this promised horizon of contending readings that the Young Critics Circle Film Desk, recognizes, for the first film quarter of 2006, Blue Moon’s screenplay, along with the performances of Eddie Garcia, Jennlyn Mercado and Dennis Trillo, noting how these thespians displayed restraint appropriate to the complexity and depth of characterization woven into this tale of emergence from past sins of self-indulgence (which at least in this particular filmic universe seemed to be the new be-all in the self-actualizing pyramid).

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