Filipiñana

Certain places in this world repulse not for their dirtiness, but for their cleanliness. Pristine atmospheres with rigorous obedience to sanitation resemble the oppressiveness of fascism or monarchy as much as they are simply hygienic. This is what Robert Harbison relays in The Built, the Unbuilt, and the Unbuildable about the French gardening “style of fierce control of the vegetable world.” The dentist’s office can be one of these places with its bright white lights, lab coats, and abundance of disposable plastic. The labor necessary to maintain such a spotless facility certainly must reach draconian standards, right? The same goes for certain bourgeois restaurants, the kind that people who read the Boston Hassle are likely to avoid anyway. The golf course is another one of these spaces, and Filipino filmmaker Rafael Manuel leverages every ounce of this inherently class-charged symbolic oppressiveness in his scoldingly politically observant debut feature film Filipiñana.

A feature length adaptation of the director’s thesis short film, two women are at the crux of this unhurried social commentary, operating at what fellow Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz might call “Malay time,” Isabel (Jorrybell Agoto) is a seventeen-year-old tee-girl at a country club in Manila. She is a transplant to the city from Ilocano—the part of the incredibly ethnically and linguistically diverse country where the ruling Marcos regime hails from. Her job is virtually the only one more degrading than the already servantly caddying: she sets tees for wealthy patrons and foreign tourists too lazy to set their own balls. In an effort to return a lost club, she wanders the vast course in search of its master, Dr. Palanca (Teroy Guzman). The other woman, Clara (Carmen Castellanos), is a Filipina ex-patriate visiting her uncle from New York. He wants her to join the family golf equipment business, but something about home, and the way the meek are treated, keeps her at an arm’s remove.

Filipiñana is a very hot film. The heat blisters through the screen and the first golf club we see sparks like a silver sword. A golfer died of heat stroke last week, we learn at the outset, and invasive trees fall with the regularity of a ticking clock as the film progresses. Despite the heat of a summer in Manila and the lush green cinematography, Filipiñana is ironically also a cold film. The golf course trains callousness and apathy. Vertical dimensions favor the powerful as the rich stand tall; tee-girls flatten their knees into an almost prayerful position to serve. Even the most earnest of these characters, Isabel, finds her very warmth shaken to the point of violent rupture when dark secrets relating to her own past come back into picture.

Continue reading at the Boston Hassle.