Lament for a Lost World: A review of 'Ang Larawan'

An excellent filmic experience Loy Arcenas’s "Ang Larawan" most certainly is. It can confidently hold its own when compared to the original play (both as text and as theater), as well as the CCP-staged musical from the late 1990s.

One of the first things to say is that Arcenas’s decision to insert flashbacks of Candida and Paula's charmed and benevolent girlhood proves most appropriate, given Nick Joaquin's central theme — a personal one, in view especially of his magisterial nonfiction essay and part-memoir, "Sa Loob ng Maynila", that conjures the beloved city's spatiotemporality through the eyes of intimate remembrance – of “nostos,” a return to childhood and the historical imaginary from which Joaquin again and again drew material for his mythopoetic projects.

Home is of course literally a house in this play, the domiciliary being a central trope that resonates between the domestically enshrined portrait (with its image of the Aeneid’s burning home-city of Troy) and the ill-fated Intramuros itself, on one hand, and between this text and the Filipino nation it metonymically evokes on the other, whose past simply needs to be remembered and sung into presence, lest it forget who and what it is.

And yet the central family drama that Joaquin chose for this figurative project does prove problematic, for the dichotomy it establishes between structure and agency — between acceding to the pressures of practical existence, and committing oneself to the pursuit of humanistic ideals like beauty and truth, between determination and freedom — is being embodied in the character of paternally devoted sister solteras or spinsters, whose lives have most certainly been constrained by the very same genteel tradition championed by their classically artful, masterful, magnificent, but altogether patriarchal father.

Joaquin arguably understood this problem, which is why despite the wholeness of his “imaginary” enterprise, he complicated the dichotomy into the choice for personal happiness (for Paula and to a lesser extent, for Candida) on one hand, and filial piety on the other.

And yet the monetization of art that lies at the heart of this choice is not something that their father’s life has escaped, his own reputation having been built on the international-art-market-deemed value of his paintings that had doubtless helped him maintain his lifestyle in the past.

And so, it seems that the understanding that the sisters have of the decision that lies before them is a willfully limited one, and even the fact that their father had tried to hurt himself after they rightfully chided him for enslaving them to his way of life (arguably, also to his hubris) didn’t strike them as being yet another devious attempt to “infantilize” them and keep them even more emotionally dependent.

But perhaps this is itself a limited if unkind reading, for Joaquin’s play is obviously, despite the mimetism promised by its title—”portrait”—far from simply representational or realistic: originally written in what would never have been realistically spoken by its characters (in straight and standard English), it isn’t as theatrical as it could have been, replete as its text audibly is with extended and often polemical dialogues that luxuriously and unrepentantly tell rather than show. As with his fiction, whatever realism may be said to exist in this play may therefore best be denominated as allegorical, whose referential content is meant to be subsumed into or made to serve the text’s larger and more important symbolic project. 

It’s a project that this filmization captures very clearly indeed, its evocation of the lost city—the lost world— of Joaquin’s childhood exceeding the original play’s depiction, despite the Baroque richness of its scenographic notes. The production design is more than competent, especially with the “authentic” recreation of the walled city’s last La Naval Procession, that hews closely to the play’s letter and spirit as well as pays respectful tribute to the lifelong Marian devotee that was Joaquin.

This, and the choice to insert surviving Commonwealth-era footage as well as shoot scenes outside the Marasigan house—even if necessarily only close rather than wide views of serviceable corners of a much transformed present-day Intramuros—world the drama effectively indeed. Joaquin’s play is a lament for the historically inevitable demise of this world (as we know, whatever might been salvaged by grim and determined ilustrado families like the Marasigans, the merciless shelling and carpet-bombing of the Great War simply and definitively blasted away to oblivion), which as in his other works he equates with the loss of the country’s continental and Classically acquainted soul.

Contemporary audiences may no longer be familiar with the significance of such a concept, their experience of artistry no longer being as world-contrarian and “revolutionary” as Joaquin saw it—that is to say, no longer as cloven between the classical or “high” and the popular or “low,” as Joaquin in this text so starkly limns them. To him, of course, the former is Hispanized and ceremoniously Catholic-religious, while the latter is Americanized, vulgarly commercialized, and secular.

We need to mention that this is a binary that the works of other contemporaneous anglophone writers, like NVM Gonzalez, raised and educated outside the national capital, routinely confounded if not downright contradicted. For instance, Gonzalez’s famous initiation story, “Bread of Salt,” attests to the socially “levelling” power of humanistic American public education, even as his text’s narrative unmasks this power to be mostly a mystique, its promise of equality painfully undone by the new colonial dispensation’s maintenance of the traditional socioeconomic—in the Romblon or Mindoro of Gonzalez’s childhood, still identifiably Hispanized—hierarchy.

This may be why Paula’s dilemma may not totally resonate with present-day viewers: Tony’s own self-deprecating awareness that he is not Classically trained at least includes the earnestly confessed desire to be, and so why should Paula or even Candida not sympathize or identify with that? After all, their own experience of art is not exactly intimate or first-hand: it would appear that they mostly haven’t created it (if at all), but rather merely listen to it, behold it, and appreciate and are transformed by it.

How could they not see that Tony’s nightly improvisatory and courageous piano-playing (to a mostly unappreciative audience) not in fact ennoble him comparably, giving him glimpses, snatches, or intimations, of the same transfiguring experience? Was their apprenticeship in the lofty ideals of the beautiful world of their childhood so abstract that it did not induce the empathy that any sustained and deep encounter with literature and the visual arts must bequeath?

Indeed, it almost seems cruel to deprive Tony his chance at improving and acquitting himself, as Paula decides to do when she destroys the valuable painting, whereupon she proceeds to sing “Malaya na Ako,” a song about her having unshackled herself from the demon that she has been sleeping with, who now thankfully sleeps with somebody else. By the way, other than the aria “Kay Sarap ng Buhay N’ung Araw,” about the Keatsian dualism, kagandahan and katotohanan—sung superlatively by the excellent Joanna Ampil—this is probably the best lyric passage in the entire libretto (read: translator Tinio at his brilliant best).

In any case, there’s something false-sounding or unrealistic (yet again) about this decision, but it is an artifice that the Joaquinesque project not only permits but actually demands, and that surprisingly the musical form—couched in a highly mannered artifice enabled by its own additional suspension of disbelief—itself betokens and requires.  We do need to say that, fortunately, art is not life, and if the abundant orality — something that the highly literate Marasigan family, clearly a social exception even in their own time and place, feels itself resolutely arrayed against, even as they’re most certainly enmeshed in it — surrounding Joaquin is accurate, he was entirely generous in bestowing his artistic tutelage, largesse, and affection to familiars, companion spirits, and beloveds, across his prodigious career as the country’s foremost fabulist and literary historian and chronicler. (It’s a career that did indeed, later on, see Joaquin considering more kindly and seriously the enduring Filipino value of the oral and folk, as his second novel, Cave and Shadows, memorably narrativizes).

We also need to say that despite its virtues this film (or the musical on which it is based) is not as interesting as the “queered” production of this play, staged in 2002, that Joaquin himself found uniquely revelatory.

After seeing the roles of his play’s famous spinster sisters being translated into the repressed and pathetic characters of the solteros Candido and Paulo (played earnestly and powerfully by Behn Cervantes and Anton Juan), he is said to have remarked that, indeed, this is how he had envisioned this story to be most deeply about.

Nonetheless, it’s the very act of translating the highly discursive dramatic text into a Filipino cinematic musical that assuredly commends Ang Larawan the most, for it both represents and self-reflexively gestures toward the original’s own translational nature—unabashedly anglophone, mimetically complex, symbolic, “artificial,” ponderous, and yes polemical in parts—at the same time that it appropriates and transfigures it (which is how ekphrasis, the highest form of artistic tribute, is supposed to, in essence, work).

The greatness of Joaquin’s opus, which this filmization entirely succeeds in emphasizing and presenting to a new generation of Filipino audiences, is in its having found an entirely memorable and dramatic occasion in which to raise important but inconvenient questions, as well as meditate upon, and debate, the controversial notion of “Filipinoness” (which this play’s spatiotemporal investments urge the audience to see as being not so much a matter of “what” as of “where” and  “when.”)

Superbly acted — by the certified singer-leads, most audibly, but also by the musically awkward but affecting Paulo Avelino, who makes up with his engaged and spot-on acting what his vocality spectacularly lacks — Loy Arcenas’ "Ang Larawan" is the cinematic popularization of Joaquin’s high-minded and Romantic defense of artistic non-utility, in which lies art’s truest value and worth.

It’s an irony that Joaquin wouldn’t have minded: that his story about a family of thoroughly Hispanized, custom-bound, and tsismis-hating literati from early in the past century has now been newly “instrumentalized” and has entered the lives of contemporary Filipinos in the “secondary orality” of cinema. It’s an inevitable and finally welcome development, even if it isn’t something that these characters would’ve completely appreciated or understood: after more than half-a-century, “low” or “pop” culture has now become this domiciliary text’s newest and possibly most enduring artistic home.

On the downside, since I was able to see the three-hour-long CCP musical from 1997, it’s clear to me that the decision to edit down (or out) many of the original production’s songs, given the cinematic exigency of keeping the film to well within two hours, has resulted in a somewhat sonically dissonant experience. The original leitmotifs — both melodic and “lyrical,” or in terms of actual words—feel like they have been drastically attenuated if not altogether lost...

Unlike in the previous encounter, it’s all but impossible to emerge from the movie house singing or even just humming a passage from this undeniably lovely musical, whose riches are most certainly scattered all over—but sadly, with not enough of the felicitous refrains and sonic repetitions that would’ve endeared it more indelibly to the grateful heart’s ear. — LA, GMA News