Movie review: Take one: Remton Zuasola’s ‘Swap’

There is a moment of unintentional lightness in Remton Zuasola’s "Swap," one of the films at this year's Sinag Maynila. A character needs water to be brought to him. A few minutes later, they give him a glass of instant orange juice. The theater erupted with laughter. Perhaps it was intentional, given that the scene before was full of action and tension. Or it may have been one of those things that, in spite of the film’s carefully laid-out structure, just stuck out.

A carefully laid-out structure is essential for a film done entirely in one take, and that is what this film attempts to do, mostly with success. Those familiar with Zuasola’s work would tell us that such a filmmaking technique is not new for him. The work that landed him on the critical success map, "Damgo ni Eleuteria," was shot in exactly the same way. His most recent feature, "Soap Opera," was done more conventionally but with the use of a soap opera as, in part, a Greek chorus of sorts running in parallel to the story.

For those new to Zuasola's style, a one-take feature may seem innovative, and challenging. The challenge is how to tell a fictionalized incident from the filmmaker’s past. (The fictionalization even comes with the thinly veiled name of the kidnapped baby: Tonton Zarasola. It also helps us pronounce Remton’s surname properly.) To do this would require writing techniques that fit more with straight theater, and scene transition techniques that entail careful coordination. This is what Zuasola does pretty well.

Even if we were to accept that Zuasola’s script does fit in more with a theatrical sensibility, I wondered how, for instance, he would have to avoid the perils of telling more than showing. This is a challenge I’ve seen theater writers have to confront. Sometimes I have seen that attempts to provide background through dialogue can slightly slow things down, whether on stage or on screen. Granted, it is necessary in this film. But it is challenging when one’s expectation of film, especially films from outside the “studio system”, is a stronger emphasis on the visual. Zuasola, however, gets it right in a story strand woven through the film that I will talk about in a bit.

What I found difficult too is how his two protagonists, played by Matt Daclan and Dionne Monsanto, expressed themselves in the film during the most stressful moments. It verged on the kind of melodrama that would be repulsive, or pathetic. Yet in some places, especially with Daclan’s character, we gain some sympathy, especially when we learn that he is working with the kind of people who see suspicious motives in everyone they encounter. Pathetic becomes sympathetic in those moments. We learn that they happen to be with the Philippine Constabulary and that police force, in 1985, enjoyed a far more unsavory reputation back then than at present.

This is where I found Zuasola’s work more interesting partly as a bit of historical remembering. A strand of the story involves a journalist and her cameraman visiting a protest and meeting hunger strikers and the ensuing and recurring appearance of desaparacidos on screen, even in a symbolic scene where Monsanto’s character is in church. The journalist is pursued by the desaparacidos into the film’s epilogue, where we discover that the constabulary’s concerns have little to do with kidnapped babies but rather with suppressing a raging storm of discontent. Here was the perfect balance of the visual, the symbolic, and the expository.

I have much more to say about Zuasola’s film, but for now, and on balance, I do think this is a compelling experiment in filmmaking, notwithstanding its difficulties. More importantly, "Swap" knows when to relieve tension, whether it means to or not. — BM, GMA News

Sinag Maynila screens at select SM Cinemas in Metro Manila until March 24.