(Re)conceiving the bayot: ‘Miss Bulalacao’

This review contains spoilers.

If “Miss Bulalacao” had been a short story it would be perfectly at home in the “speculative fiction” subgenre that is currently very popular among many young Manila-based fictionists.

But for its decidedly rural locale, this film almost has a “slipstream” quality to it. To wit: into the otherwise perfectly mundane life of a Cebuano seaside village comes a most extraordinary visitation: after being crowned “Miss Bulalacao” in their community’s fiesta bayot pageant, teenaged Dodong flees into the mango grove to escape yet another one of his drunken father’s beatings; there he encounters robed creatures of light and falls into a deep slumber. He awakes all muddied and disheveled the following morning, and ambles back to his unhappy home, where only his stepmother gives him any succor. A few weeks later he is discovered to be pregnant, and this sets off a series of small-town and rumor-fueled events that predictably gets chronically infirm and desperate neighbors and the town’s parish priest involved, as well as a bevy of superstitious and religiously inclined matrons whose wild imaginings cover the entire gamut of possible explanations for the decidedly strange occurrence—diabolical possession on one hand, and “immaculate conception” on the other.

Dodong’s adversity bonds her even more closely to her stepmother, whose plight as devoted and long-suffering wife to a womanizing man the film takes pains to relate to the oppression of being  “woman-hearted” or bayot in this piously heteronormative community. The film’s resolution reveals the pregnancy as extraordinarily authentic. In particular, as against the “pre-rational” speculations of the townspeople, it turns out to be the calculated outcome of an alien abduction, as confirmed by the resulting extraterrestrial-looking infant (whom the deceitful priest secretly kidnaps, for reasons that only a sequel can satisfyingly reveal).

While this ending may come as a big letdown to some, I for one think it works, precisely because it presents itself as entirely incongruous in relation to this film’s painstakingly particularized and wonderfully “worlded” world, whose rhythms are as lugubriously slow and tropical as the tidal movements that suffuse the waking hours and even the singsong speech of its residents. In other words, with this ending one gets the feeling—nowadays increasingly familiar—of a deliberate cross-pollination or “mash-up” of genres: I’m thinking, specifically, of the neorealist provincial idyll on one hand, and science fiction on the other.

In my opinion something quaint and entirely charming emerges out of this willful cinematic “syncretism,” which despite its being speculative and ultimately nonmimetic actually manages to tell something offhand, complex, and possibly “true” about this little-seen corner of the Philippine reality. I’m particularly impressed by the way the film manages to lend rondure even to the character of the macho father, whose being uneducated and poor renders him, every now and then, strangely compassionate and without judgment, despite himself.  The dialogues are also mostly spot on in their ribald humor and folksy “authenticity,” and all told they shore up the generally competent “ensemble” performance of the cast.

On the other hand, on a different “conceptual” level, one cannot help but see a pointedly political project at work in this film: while this is a country where women have been known to give birth to fish (and where a man, sometime in the 1990s, did become rumored in national media as being pregnant), linking up the vilified identity of the bayot with anything remotely Mariological is most certainly a stretch, by any measure. This intentional “perversion” of a firmly established national piety is similar to the Mariological reading that Sari Dalena makes in her filmic tribute to the late great gay litterateur Nick Joaquin (who was a well-known devotee of La Naval de Manila, after all). What distinguishes “Miss Bulalacao” is, however, the interesting gender analysis that it proffers, linking up the oppression of the bayot with that of comparably downtrodden women in our country’s rural poor communities.

That this “linkage” can be imagined at all reveals, to my mind, the likely fact that despite the last century’s implanted homo/hetero discourse (of sexual orientation), especially among less educated (and therefore less Westernized) Filipinos, the “presexological” and traditionally hierarchical concepts of gender, on the level of personal relations, enjoy primacy, still and all. — BM, GMA News

“Miss Bulalacao” was part of the recently concluded C1 Originals Festival.