The elusive charm of ‘A Catholic Schoolgirl’

By John Anthony S. Estolloso

What is so charmingly elusive about an 18-minute short film? Perhaps it is the manner with which Myra Angeline Soriaso’s ‘A Catholic Schoolgirl’ shocks the audience to confront the veiled side of religious life. In offering a cinematic short story through the innocent eyes of a girl caught in the innocent yearning of a teenager, the film explores the separations and subversions that keep characters together. We attempt to grasp the internal turmoil that the dramatis personae have to deal with in the plot; at the end, we are tantalizingly left with more discourse on societal taboos.

For this writer, the elusiveness is two-fold. Released in 2023 as an entry for the QCinema International Film Festival, Soriaso’s film has made several rounds of screenings in the city in months past. Truly yours missed all of them—not until the evening of August 30’s curation of local short films as part of Places, Pieces, a programme of films about locations and memories, prepared by the Film Development Council of the Philippines in partnership with Japan Foundation.

The film’s unapologetic subtleties made itself all the more palpable with the way it approaches the forbidden. The plot is as strangely demure as its characters. High school student Kaya— played by a timid and taciturn Ora Palencia—weaves through academic life as a dorm scholar among nuns. Intermeshed with the sanctified atmosphere of convent life, she encounters the hidden side of cloistered living, where creatures of habit and prayer indulge as well in secular recreations, that nuns too can laugh heartily or take languid dips at the swimming pool. One Sister Agnes (Sharon Idone in habit and veil) particularly makes an impression on Kaya, to the point that she develops a repressed albeit intense attraction to her.

In attempting to establish this personal connection with a religious, Kaya breaks social conventions and expectations, and while we do not see her sanctioned for it, one can surmise the consequences of her actions; if not as penance from a prescribed moral code, then from the guilt and possible remorse that follows. We can sense the tension of her conflicted feelings climaxing to the deed: it bursts out as a collective gasp from the audience when their lips make contact and when the nun slaps the erring girl on the face.

Nothing much follows after that. The audience can clutch its pearls in scandalized shock or awe, but they have to come to terms that Kaya’s situation is not an improbability nor an isolated incident of fiction. Hidden behind the walls of the cloister are human beings with human emotions, human desires, and human frailties—and these too demand to be felt and seen.

The film’s details adorn and build up this emotional storm in charming metaphors and cinematography. In one scene, Kaya intones Hildegard of Bingen’s ‘O quam mirabilis est’, the antiphon of marvel and joy at the beauty of the human face and form, even as the human she claims as hers hovers around her. Close-up shots of ripe and fleshy mangoes pulped into gooey jam evoke both connotations of sacrifice and carnal passion: crushed, sliced, and pressed, there is both pain and sweetness in the concoction. The stripping of close-clad personas mirror the nakedness of repressed emotions, the stages of undress turns enticing to the female gaze even as it could be uncomfortable to an audience unused to the idea of clergy in this state.

Furthermore, nuances from the region permeate the short. We see West Visayas State University’s iconic Quezon Hall lending its facade to the film to portray a sprawling convent, the usual babble and volume of young voices lacing its halls subdued for once. The Hiligaynon vernacular spoken in the dialogues infuses the characters with a homegrown familiarity: these could be people you know and would talk to. A fleeting cameo of a local visual artist is caught in the panning of the camera. All in all, the minutiae speak volumes in establishing the film’s identity.

* * * * *

In his Les Misérables, Victor Hugo described the convent as a place ‘filled with the black radiance of death’. Like Kaya, his Cosette was one confined to cloistered walls where all talk of pleasure and sensuality is anathema, where one’s humanity is willingly abased to a bare minimum. But Kaya breaks through metaphorical constraints, though only to arrive to a disappointing end: Sister Agnes remains a nun, keeping all her vows promised to the Divine.

As such, we can commend or condemn the film to our tastes, but that does little to diminish Soriaso’s brave aesthetics in her essay into the sacred and hidden intramural of the convent. At its best, ’A Catholic Schoolgirl’ rattles our comfortable religiousness: that is its elusive charm.

Then again, should not good art disturb the prayerful comfortability of its viewers?

[The writer is a humanities teacher in one of the private schools in the city. The poster is from QCinema’s website.]