The few weeks or so that stretch between late August and early September are generally thought of as the doldrums of the movie release calendar. The summer blockbusters have come and mostly gone, and the fall Oscar contenders have yet to drop. Yet there are always new films worth seeking out, usually flying just under the radar.
You might not have heard of the terrific new movie Filipiñana, which premiered earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival. It's in theaters now, and it marks the arrival of a remarkable talent, a Filipino writer and director named Rafael Manuel.
In a way, Filipiñana is an ideal thing to watch in a nice, cool theater at the end of a brutally hot summer. It's been a while since a movie so powerfully captured the sweltering heat of the season, or established such a vivid sense of place from its opening moments. It begins on a tour bus making its way through the crowded streets of Manila, where a local guide tries to teach the bored-looking passengers a few words in Tagalog.
Manila is in the midst of a drought. Early on, Manuel shows us weary residents lining up for water rations — and then cuts to a shot of sprinklers irrigating an enormous golf course. That's a bluntly effective bit of commentary.
We have arrived, along with that bus full of tourists, at an upscale resort — a lush green oasis of luxury in one of the most densely populated cities in the world. For the rest of its 100 or so minutes, Filipiñana will never leave the resort; it's a realistic yet satirical portrait of life inside a hermetically sealed bubble.
Our guide is a 17-year-old girl named Isabel, played by the intensely watchful Jorrybell Agoto. Isabel has just started working at the driving range as a "tee girl," whose job is to tee up balls for golfers, one after another. It's a tedious, ridiculous task, one of many that keep the resort in operation. Some workers are forced to spend hours wading in the ponds, fishing out errant golf balls.
It's mostly through Isabel's sharp eyes that the movie's class critique comes into focus. We follow her as she wanders this carefully manufactured paradise, which is dotted with non-native trees that have been trucked in from afar and meticulously planted. Isabel has a rebellious streak, and she can't help breaking the rules and sampling the resort's amenities, whether she's dipping a finger in a guest's strawberry cake, taking a shower in a spa or simply basking in a few minutes of air-conditioned bliss.
Manuel also introduces us to another key character — a significantly more privileged young woman named Clara, played by Carmen Castellanos. Clara, who lives in New York, is visiting the resort with her uncle, who wants her to move back to the Philippines and help him run his golf equipment business.
Clara's uncle insists it's her duty to support her country, and fight what he calls "brain drain" — the flight of young Filipinos seeking better opportunities abroad. But Clara is reluctant, probably because, like Isabel, she can see that people are being exploited and marginalized in the name of development and progress.
Filipiñana has just a few spare dribbles of plot. From time to time, we hear ominous whispers of a young girl who's gone missing on the golf course. Isabel is given a seemingly simple task — to return a stray golf club to the president of the resort — that becomes a kind of quest, with a few disturbing and even devastating revelations along the way.
But what distinguishes Manuel's filmmaking is how much of the story he conveys visually — through texture and atmosphere, framing and blocking. He shows us the resort from a seemingly infinite number of angles, shooting in long takes and seldom moving the camera. But the filmmaking never feels static. Every shot of Filipiñana positively churns with life.
Early on, Manuel unleashes a playfully choreographed sequence worthy of the great French director Jacques Tati, in which the resort workers' perfectly synchronized movements — setting a table, stacking chairs and cleaning a pool — are brilliantly set to music. It's a rich dose of comic fantasy that serves to underscore the situation's grim reality. Filipiñana is an impeccable piece of world building that genuinely challenges us to imagine a better world.
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