Director: Rafael Manuel
Writer: Rafael Manuel
Stars: Jorrybell Agoto, Joanna Maria Banua, Angeli Bayeni
Synopsis: Teen Isabel’s attraction to Dr. Palanca at her country club job turns dark as she uncovers violence beneath the club’s facade and discovers their disturbing connection from the past.
There is a magical moment that every film critic or cinephile knows. When the credits roll, and the film opens up to the viewer, baring glimpses of its soul, revealing whatever the filmmaker decides to uncover from the beginning. It never gets old, and reminds us all of why we love cinema. When there’s a new mysterious film at hand, that plays this mind game on us to the bone, that’s when we sharpen our teeth and take a deep…bite into the material at hand.
Rafael Manuel’s Filipiñana is that kind of film. It uses golf as a metaphor for power disparity, the shameful uneven distribution of riches and money, and the morbid isolation of the elite from the working class, while picking a select few from them to diligently do what they -in the elite’s minds- are born for: serve those upstairs.
The feature is about 17-year-old Isabel (Jorybell Agoto) a tee-girl in a prestigious, private golf club. Her job is lining up golf balls for haughty golfers to drive into the manicured horizon. But Isabel’s curious nature and inquisitive personality leads her to places she shouldn’t be, discovering harrowing truths about the nature of the club, her country, and her own repressed memory.
Manuel perfectly captures the contrast between vast, luxurious spaces and tired, sweaty faces working in the underbelly through his use of the 4:3 aspect ratio; a very contradictory image to what the public perceives of a spacious golf course. His composition and sharp focus on skin tones and textures highlight the difference between the upper class, those who are served, and the servers, whom nobody asks if they are well-hydrated or not. He perfectly captures the presence of the “heat” as another protagonist, besides the ones already in the heart of the story, and it is evident through every sweat stain and sweaty forehead.
Manuel also alternates between long shots and close-ups, reserving each shot type for a particular purpose. Long shots are to enhance the beauty of the liminal spaces in which the servers exist on the periphery, even though technically they are the ones running it, and close-ups are for the voyeuristic faces, like Isabel’s as she silently watches the events unfolding around her, while lacking the power to shake things up.
Manuel’s use of sound is en pointe, heightening the sensations in a film that demands feeling before following a structured narrative. The director tries to put us in an eerily voyeuristic place of lurking and peeking at things we aren’t supposed to access or approach. The rustling leaves, the fine arcs of water from the sprinklers on the courses, golf clubs hitting the ball, people stepping on grass, or feet stomping in shallow ponds, pristine tablecloths being placed, or the synchronized, collective movements of the resort staff dancing as they greet the wealthy guests. The awkward angles make the conversations hard to follow and highly uncomfortable, almost as if the viewer is spying on something they shouldn’t see.
This feature provides not-so-subtle political statements in an apolitical world. It’s about the violence that shaped the luscious, glossy manicured landscapes, how the bored rich and powerful tread over grounds that have seen suffering and mass graves. The land is careless, and so are the ones who get to claim it, greedily sucking the marrow out of the real Filipino people. After tales of nature grifting and forest decay, knowing the history of some of those posh golf clubs, make this film harder to swallow, and more impactful.
Filipiñana provides a grim, stripped-bare portrait of another side of Manuel’s home country, the Philippines. It opens at Film Forum in New York on August 28th and at Laemmle Theatres in Los Angeles on September 4th before expanding to select theaters nationwide.
