‘Anino sa Likod ng Buwan’: Between shadow and light

This review contains spoilers.

Jun Robles Lana’s Anino sa Likod ng Buwan, like Kwentong Barbero that preceded it, seeks to illuminate as well as arrive at a cinematic understanding of one of the darker periods of contemporary Philippine history. It recently had back-to-back one-day screenings at the newly renovated Cine Adarna, formerly the University of the Philippines Film Center.

In particular, in this riveting two-hour-long and three-character psychodrama, Lana trains his filmic attention on the remaindered lives of “internal refugees,” rural peasants who were caught in the crossfire between the Communist insurgents and the Philippine military, in the “No Man’s Land” of Marag Valley sometime in the early 1990s.

Technically and cinematographically remarkable, this digital film is infused entirely in sepia-hued half light and composed of a seamlessly spliced series of long or continuous shots. An expanded and reworked filmization of Lana’s original and privately commissioned one-act play, Anino traffics in the "shadowplay" of emotional duplicity, painting an intense intimate portrait of an ill-fated erotic triangle, whose participants risk their own vulnerabilities while carefully keeping secrets from one another (as well as themselves).

Set in and around a ramshackle hut at the edge of a forest, Anino’s characters are the refugees, Emma and Nardo, husband and wife and friends to the army soldier Joel, who visits with them at the opening of the film, ostensibly to bring them some food (a can of sardines), and to bond with them, as he apparently has regularly done ever since he met (and helped) them in this relocation site the previous year. Soon enough, tensions become apparent, when talk of rebels hiding and living among the refugees and soldiers getting killed by an unknown assassin is broached. Knowing glances are exchanged between Joel and Emma, and between Emma and Nardo, and soon enough the two men engage in a literal pissing contest, which proves to be as portentous as the game of cards with which the film unceremoniously begins.

Theatrical at its point of inception, what Anino has going for itself is the crisp and powerful dialogue, which in the absence of scenic movement and visual variability gets to bear, almost entirely, the onus of the plot. This, of course, is par for the course for the kind of drama that this film sets itself up to unfold: the unmasking of pretenses and the laying bare of motives, which must culminate in the end of all disguises and the arrival of a luminous and game-changing epiphany. What makes this “illumination” interesting, however, is that it is personal and political, all at once.

Which is to say, in keeping with the well-known tenet, the politics here is as much feminist as it is recognizably ideological: the woman, Emma—the beloved of both proprietary men—enacts her own painful self-realization, even as it leads her to imperil her own heart as well as her own cherished and hard-won conviction as the daughter of the captured and incarcerated Communist rebel leader, Ka Samuel, whose rescue it has all along been her and Nardo’s secret mission to carry out. This mission has necessitated their creation and performance of an elaborate conjugal fiction, which includes the story of their being unhappy and childless, and his being mostly clueless about and/or unmindful of her regular romantic liaisons with the dashing soldier, whom she believes she has entirely erotically ensnared.

Of course, as the plot unspools toward its denouement, this belief is rudely disabused, the elaborate contrivance becoming violently unpacked by the clever and unremittingly cruel soldier, who it turns out has had his own inner (and militaristic) motives and been playing his part all along. It is the film’s singular achievement that while this conclusion is far from unforeseeable, nonetheless it arrives dramatically and unexpectedly enough, largely because of the competent performances of the actors (especially LJ Reyes), as well as the acuity and tautness of this film’s technical and directorial vision.

There are “excesses” that could’ve been tempered or excised, however. In the densely eventful final act, for example, it almost feels like the dialogue-borne revelations are tumbling out with the inevitability of a sneeze, and some of them indeed are not exactly needed (such as when Emma’s childhood friend and comrade suddenly confesses that it’s no longer just make-believe for him—he really does romantically love her already!)

Also, the cosmic image of the lunar eclipse and the mention of mythological creatures (like the kapre): they seem merely ornamental and “atmospheric” here, when they could’ve been rendered more symbolic and woven more organically into the story, particularly since an opening is made possible for this by Emma’s short “soliloquy” about the inevitability—if not the necessity—of spiritual faith (in an unseen and transcendent reality), in the face of a world of unrelenting suffering and war.

On the other hand, because Emma’s ambivalence is so central to this film’s “truth,” more dramatic development—even if only in dialogue form—should’ve been devoted to the quality of her relationship with the soldier, who has supposedly caused her to lose her singular focus (on her all-important goal), that leads to the death of Nardo and nearly proves fatal to herself.

As it is, what we are shown—rather graphically—is nothing if not the fleshly and richly libidinal nature of this relationship. Without a more relatably interpersonal and “extra-sexual” qualification, we are left tragically thinking she is somewhat vacuous and unredeemable as a character, for her conviction is shallow and insubstantial enough to be eroded—and extirpated—by a noisily good lay (incidentally, Luis Alandy, who plays Joel, acts his part well enough, although he looks a mite too fair, gym-built, and “hale” to be a barracks-bound foot soldier, come to think of it). — BM, GMA News

Anino sa Likod ng Buwan, which was part of the QCinema Film Festival's 2015 lineup, was screened again at QCinema Reloaded at the University of the Philippines' Film Institute in Diliman. The screenings will be held until January 29.