Movie review: No distance from Lilia Cuntapay

What you are dealt with is a familiar story, what you will be surprised by is the way in which this familiarity is thrown out the window in the course of watching this film slash documentary slash mockumentary. You will sit there and laugh, and tear up, but also you will wonder how it will end, and you will sit there waiting, because often our local films fail at their endings. 

 

“Six Degrees of Separation from Lilia Cuntapay” doesn’t fail at all. Not in any way, not with its ending or beginning, and nowhere in the rest of its storytelling. This is no mean feat, given the fact that it also decides to deal with what is a simple story with a level of complexity: let’s not do a docu, let’s not do total fiction, let’s work with both. So that what one is treated to is a film that dares stand on that line drawn between the fictional and the real, film and documentary. 

 

In the process what “Six Degrees of Separation from Lilia Cuntapay” proves is that there is a way of dealing with the more painful truths in this country, without romanticizing the suffering or forcing on us a hero.

 

That is, we might deal with the fact of poverty for example, by highlighting its ironies and contradictions, the things that it silences and forgets, with the use of fiction. As such Lilia Cuntapay, professional extra all her life, a familiar but nameless face in Philippine film, is paralleled against Kevin Bacon and the idea that we are six degrees away from knowing him, whoever we are, anywhere we are in the world. Here we are told, that the absurd is true: all of us might be six degrees separated from Lilia Cuntapay. 

 

Because she’s been in most every horror film that we remember, as she has starred in international films shot in Manila. Because her body of work means she has engaged with as many celebrities and actors and actresses and directors. And yet we would in fact, not know her. That, in itself is the sad life of a movie and TV extra, especially in a country where the biggest of stars will fall from grace by virtue of age, rumors and scandals, truth and lies, and everything in between. 

 

Imagine what it’s like for someone like Lilia Cuntapay. 

 

No wait, this movie has imagined it for us, and more. It has taken this woman’s life and fictionalized it, not to give us a happy ending, but to point out how much worse it can be. The absurdity in fact is in the telling of this protagonist’s life, premised on her real conditions of living, layered with the fiction that she might win an award. What is absurd here is that all of this could be real, at the same time that it is nothing but fiction. 

 

The latter is painful fact, but one that this movie deftly works into the narrative of Lilia Cuntapay’s everyday existence. Interweaving two distinct narratives, the story is able to engage the audience in this story that begins with a nomination for best actress, one she has a slim chance of winning, but which her whole town celebrates. It is the town after all that she helps, with trophies for the basketball liga, drinks and tong-its at the sari-sari store; as it is the one that helps her out, from an outfit for the awards to writing her thank you speech, from a neighbor who takes phone calls for her to having the whole community support her on her TV debut: an interview in the evening news.

 

What is of course interesting is how these smaller narratives, this community she lives in, points to the fact of her poverty, the sense that she is being neglected. Because there is family elsewhere who might care for her, because she lives in the saddest of homes, because there is an obvious disregard for what she does. But of course in this narrative too, there is Lilia’s bloated sense of fame, carrying T-shirts and pictures with her wherever she goes, speaking of arriving to movie sets early, if not on time, as a matter of professionalism. The latter of course doesn’t matter because she’s but extra, which in the course of the film is revealed to mean that she is dispensable, replaceable by the next ready and willing old lady extra. Particularly the one who hasn’t been typecast in horror films. 

 

Yet this protagonist, real and fictionalized, rolls with the punches, and you believe her to be true because she is acting herself after all. And yet this film is able to make her into actress too, as they give her the possibility of an acting award, and allow her to act on that. That is, the one brilliant thread that tied this story together—and consistently—is that of her trying out different acceptance speeches for comfort. From English to Filipino, from being surprised to being thankful, from thanking her whole barangay to not forgetting to thank God, here is Cuntapay’s shining moments really, where the absurdity of having her win any award at all in this country is pushed as far as it will go, and the audience is left in that space between laughing and crying at the impossibility of it ever happening. 

 

Of course the ultimate irony is that given “Six Degrees of Separation from Lilia Cuntapay,” given a movie that gives her the central role, she just might get the recognition she deserves, finally. Because that final moment when she is given the award in a way that doesn’t happen in this country at all; when that award is in her hands and you as audience participates in the hero’s success, and wonder which of the speeches she practiced would be articulated on that stage; it’s there that you realize that this Lilia Cuntapay, the one who’s extra but is finally lead actress, the one who’s real and fictionalized, she will take your heart. 

 

If she doesn’t get at least a nomination for this film, then we would again prove how the celebrity system and double-standard prevails in our culture industry. It is something of course that we’ve always known about; it is also this film’s great intervention in filmmaking and the star structure. To ignore this film, to ignore this woman at the center of it, will be nothing but our own particular failure at seeing brilliance even when it’s in our faces.

 

The only distance there is between you and me and Lilia Cuntapay is that one that we refuse to acknowledge, that one that is about disallowing her from being recognized. Yeh hear that film industry? (I hope so.) –KG, GMA News

 

"Six Degrees of Separation from Lilia Cuntapay" was written and directed by Antoinette Jadaone, and was an entry in Cinema One Originals 2011. It recently had a run in commercial theaters. 

 

Katrina Stuart Santiago writes the essay in its various permutations, from pop culture criticism to art reviews, scholarly papers to creative non-fiction, all always and necessarily bound by Third World Philippines, its tragedies and successes, even more so its silences. She blogs at http://www.radikalchick.com. The views expressed in this article are solely her own.