'Edward': The real and the bleak

A film about the public health situation in our country is long overdue, and a feature like "Edward" is just waiting to be made.

And made well enough. To anybody who’s ever been to any of our government’s general hospitals, the organized chaos and despair of the world of Thop Nazareno’s "Edward" is horrifically recognizable.

Understaffed, overworked, filthy, cramped, wretched, teeming with sadness and the ever-present specter of death: these are the words that readily come to mind, as one envisions the sorry state of the typical public health facility in our country.

Foremost among this film’s virtues is its production design: an unremittingly gritty and veritable tour into a composite “general hospital” in any of our country’s cities and provinces, whose despondence needs to be experienced to be believed. That Edward’s setting wasn’t ready to hand, and had to be reproduced almost from scratch, makes the feat even more impressive.

What "Edward" adds to this familiar litany is the word perversion, which does lamentably push it into the miserablist — read: “poverty-porn”— end of the neorealist spectrum.

As the screenplay by Nazareno and John Paul Bedia would have it, not only is this public hospital in a state of general turmoil and misery. Among its harassed, glib, and colorful staff, is a cadaverous-looking morgue handler who, if not himself necrophiliac, happens to be blissfully pimping newly deceased female bodies to necrophiliac clients, ostensibly to make an extra buck.

And so, yes, there’s the all-too-familiar “neorealist” rub: as the exotica-fascinated and sadistic cinema gods would have it, what we must see is not only a film about grinding poverty and death—but rather, also an unrelieved embarrassment of cinematic miseries and depravities.

Thinking about the film, one readily suspects that the dark detour into necrophiliac territory constitutes nothing if not an excessive gesture. Indeed, in the interest of the film’s central story it would have been enough if the boy-hero’s first love should die so dreadfully and her body remain unclaimed.

Edward’s unexpected “heroic” decision to take matters into his own hands—and kidnap his girlfriend’s body, in order to bury it in a place that she had loved —would’ve still made dramatic sense, and would’ve rounded his “growth” as a character.

The epiphany, the initiation, the change in consciousness is supposed to be Edward’s, after all: when he experiences the death of his girlfriend, and is faced with the impending death of his father, he is no longer the same thoughtless teenaged lout and “douche” who, together with another loutish boy, is callously making bets on which among the injured or infirm strangers arriving in the always-toxic Emergency Room would live or die.

So, yes: this is a realization that he could well have made even without the adventitious and cringe-inducing excursion down into the depths of such a singularly abhorrent paraphilia.

The acting department is, to be fair, amply staffed. While the role of Edward's father was arguably miscast, the ensemble is competent all around.

Both leads turn in credible and memorable performances: newcomer Louise Abuel proves his mettle in this first acting project, bearing out in appreciable measure the promise of his thespian pedigree; equally, Ella Cruz is a revelation, and entirely deserves the festival accolade she has received.

Obviously, this film is not unique in its attempt to present a closely observed portrait of poverty, and how it robs the poor of their personal dignity.

That such privation must exist not only while the impoverished body is afflicted and wounded and desperately convalescing inside a ramshackle government hospital but also even after it has breathed its last is a message that does, admittedly, bear repeating. After all, as is the experience of so many urban poor families, the final rituals of funeral and burial are just as prohibitive as the rites of everyday subsistence.

One only wishes our filmmakers could reign in the neorealist harness in between whiles, and opt for illuminative visions that while entirely (and spiritually) committed to the real, do not have to be so hopelessly—and exotically—bleak. — LA, GMA News