Canvas, Celluloid, Curtain — ‘Isang Himala’ for a country without miracles

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By John Anthony S. Estolloso

The recent Metro Manila Film Festival featured the film adaptation of Vincent de Jesus and Ricky Lee’s 2018 musical retelling of the 1982 classic Himala. In one of those occasional quirks that meld theater with the cinema, the work was essentially a film-from-musical-from-film affair. Just how many transmutations can an artwork go through and survive with its meanings intact?

Then again, that is the point of contemporaneity in art, regardless of form. Meanings in art change with the passing of time: of what use is a narrative which is no longer resonant with its audience? As such, Isang Himala is both hommage to and a reconfiguration of the 1982 film.

What it aims to recall and reconfigure was monumental, in its own right. The 1982 classic was a cinematic masterpiece created by the talents of National Artists Ishmael Bernal, Ricky Lee, and Nora Aunor. It had no qualms taking on issues that would have made the ordinary storyteller or filmmaker shudder at that time. With a nation slowly testing the waters at the wake of the Martial Law, it was the perfect backdrop for an outbreak of dubious Marian apparitions, to lure the devote, the curious, the gullible, and the desperately hopeful.

On that note, not much has changed in Isang Himala. There was Elsa, delusional in her sanctity as ever and pitifully played by Aicelle Santos. Chayong (played by Neomi Gonzales) and Nimia, the prude and the prostitute, as character foils left the audience to grimace at the sordid circumstances that surrounded them – and Kakki Teodoro as the latter made sure of that. Orly (played by David Ezra), with his trusty camera, clung on to the varied hats of the journalist: storyteller, commentator, observer, and chronicler.

Despite the more emotive pull of the combination of music and lyrics, the same themes from the highly charged narrative of the 1982 film surfaced. Religion is reduced to showbusiness and a willing mistress to politics. Thrown into a morass of inescapable poverty and religious credulity, everyone becomes a willing participant to the delusion of a ‘miracle’. Band-aid solutions, quick fixes, cheap entertainment, and empty promises are magnified in the echo-chamber of an alleged divine intervention. No one questions; a few perhaps but they are quickly reduced as voices in the wilderness. As in the original film, the ordinary Filipino appears to prefer being enamored with illusions rather than face the harsh realities that enslave his reason, even if it costs lives or one’s self-dignity.

In a recent talk at the University of the Philippines – Visayas, screenwriter Ricky Lee shared the ambivalent feeling of how contemporary audiences reacted to a retrospect of his films: while it was heartwarming to see young people resonating with his films, it was likewise depressing to find that the same issues that were relevant during his times are the same ones that continue to plague the country – and the young folk has noticed it.

Isang Himala served to underline that. Here was the cinematographic triumph transmuted to a cinematographic rendition of theatre – and the adulation nor the chilling relevance has not abated. We connect because these problems stayed, and worse, they festered, and not all the music and poetry of the musical can whitewash these.

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National Artist for Literature Cirilo F. Bautista opens his poem Third World Geography with the line about ‘a country without miracles’ sitting heavy on the iniquity of its past, something from which it cannot move on. Revisiting Himala as a musical, we come to terms with this stagnated dreamlessness that permeate our institutions and worldviews. Like the final lines from Elsa’s monologue – the one that shatters the illusion and shutters the seer – there are no miracles; there are only fictions that are made to look bigger than our realities. No one mourns the wicked: people would deify the dead seer who fed their delusions than a breathing rationality of empirical albeit unpleasant facts.

Altogether, Isang Himala was no cinematic miracle at all nor does it aspire to be one: it was the work of human hands consecrated as musical theater on film. It was the stage insisting on its right to the screen and pulling it off with panache and good taste. In all appearances, Pepe Diokno understood the assignment – and we applaud him for that.

[The writer is the subject area coordinator for Social Studies in one of the private schools of the city. The photos are from CinemaBravo.]