What remains is love: a review of 'Lola Igna'

Winning top prizes at the recently concluded Pista ng Pelikulang Pilipino was Eduardo Roy Jr.’s "Lola Igna," a quiet dramatic feature about an extremely long-lived grandmother, played to the magnificent hilt by the legendary stage and movie thespian Angie Ferro, who was accorded the festival’s Best Actress trophy.

Undoubtedly, "Lola Igna" is the octogenarian Ferro’s masterful achievement, possibly her filmic swan song, a leading-role performance that has been a long time coming.

It’s a rare enough dramatic vehicle, of course—a film focused entirely on the workaday life of a 118-year-old woman living in a nondescript hut in the middle of a bird-infested rice field in a nonspecific Philippine province—but Ferro lifts the material to sublimely human heights, infusing the role with the kind of profoundly felt and thoughtful truth that has defined her extensive but mostly low-key career in theater and cinema.

As with other recent indie films, the ‘germ’ for Lola Igna’s story may have been sourced from the news, even as it dramatically builds upon it: here, the prospect of receiving international recognition for their resident centenarian’s exceptional longevity gets her hometown in a tizzy, spurring local tourism and prompting even the mayor to become personally involved.

The ‘fame’ occasions a series of events that ushers the hoary and world-weary protagonist into a new journey—one that she didn’t initially believe she would still find an interest, or the strength, in making.

This ‘newsy’ event is just the adventitious layer. The film’s core story is really about the affectionate restoration of Lola Igna’s family — in particular, the return of her prodigal great granddaughter, whose fate intersects with Lola Igna’s, in a way that the mortally aggrieved and sometimes-cantankerous old woman had not foreseen.

It's that kind of a film, then: a ‘domestic epic’ of sorts, that seeks to limn a portrait of cross-generational love, between and among women chiefly, but also involving husbands and sons (in this case, great-great grandsons).

Threading all these lives is the memory, abiding presence, and devotion of Lola Igna, who had also been a much-respected midwife, and thus had helped bring forth generations of people in her own hometown.

Understandably, this is the source of her unique disenchantment with life. She has arguably enjoyed it for far too long; she has had to be the one to bury and grieve the loss of so many of her contemporaries—relatives, friends, including the very children she had helped welcome into the world.

As she confides to her millennial (and aspiring vlogger) apo sa talampakan, over a shot-glass of her favorite palm liquor, she is tired of being the one who mourns; for a change, she’d like to be the one mourned.

And so, the story’s fully realized epiphany is simply, about an important change in consciousness: as against what she may have first believed, this wizened old mother isn’t finished with life yet, and vice-versa.

As she holds in her shaky but determined arms her great granddaughter’s newborn infant—her descendant several lifetimes removed, whom she had once again carefully marshaled into this world—it’s clear to her that there’s still more mothering, still more nurturing, still more loving that needs to be done.

What an ordinary, straightforward, and given the recent spate of miserablist and ‘poverty-porny’ films entirely refreshing vision of our people’s inner truth—indeed, of all of humanity’s inner and most resplendent truth: while everyone and everything passes, what will remain of us is love.

Kudos, hence, to Lola Igna’s producers, writers, cast, and crew, for such a touching and memorable film. Congratulations to Roy, who is moving from strength to strength as a director, and who is definitely one of our cinema’s bright new lights.

And of course, hats off and immense respect to the great Angie Ferro, whose dignified and poignantly human ‘enfleshment’ of Lola Igna will doubtless be a touchstone performance for other actors for many generations to come. — LA, GMA News