A Moment in Time (2013)

A Moment in Time (Emmanuel Palo, 2013)

Emmanuel Palo’s A Moment in Time is an exercise in barefaced mediocrity. There is absolutely nothing in the film that exhibits any effort from the filmmakers to be anything other than fodder. Like an overgrown child who is unable to free himself of his parents’ smothering care, the film desperately sticks to formula, inexplicably afraid of exploring new ground. Sadly, the formula has been used and reused to the point of tedium. The characters are nothing but predictable reincarnations of the countless perfect men and women whose convoluted backgrounds have temporarily separated them from their fated loves and in turn, bored their audiences to tears. While the trend nowadays is to reinvent the wheel, to tweak the formula to at least feel a bit fresh, Palo stubbornly insists on yawn-worthy safety.

Perhaps, he thinks he can fool his audience with for cosmetics. He does situate a good part of the humdrum love story in Amsterdam where its lovers can chase each other around in bicycles against vistas littered with tulip fields and windmills. Unfortunately, the foreign city is nothing but a stage. Its gorgeous vistas, famous spots and cultural details are nothing more but empty props, hardly different from the nauseating gloss, the vapid sentimental score, and the hammy acting that identify the film as just another one of those romances that are pretty in the outside but are drab in the inside.

The story is miserably flat. It concerns the eventual relationship of Patrick (Coco Martin), a struggling artist, and Jillian (Julia Montes), the musically-inclined daughter of a very wealthy couple. They meet in a commuter train, where Jillian stalks her crush from school, and Patrick chances upon her and instantly falls for her, prompting him to paint portraits of her all over the walls of Manila. After a handful of coincidental meetings, they finally fall in love with each other, but not without the challenges brought about by Jillian’s worrying parents and the looming revelation regarding the accident of Patrick’s mother which eventually killed her.

Martin, whose expressive face used to be Brillante Mendoza’s canvass for his various portrayals of tortured morality, succumbs to being voluntarily cheapened by blatant commercialism. Given a character that is too two-dimensional to be explored, his interpretation of being romantic has been duly limited to either being an embarrassing creep or a reprehensible sadist. Burdened by an unimaginative script that overdoes the fantasy-driven tone of escapist cinema, Martin comes off as morbidly dishonest, not exactly the proper character one roots for in romantic movies. While he manages to make his teary-eyed stares into nothingness evoke a certain pain and longing, he mouths his lines with the earnestness of an obvious swindler, making Montes’ earnest efforts to reciprocate the attention absolutely confounding.

As with all commercial romances, A Moment in Time dwells too much in the convolutions of a relationship that is really not worth telling. The conflicts have the sheen of depth and gravity, but are ultimately betrayed by a resolution that is all too easy and convenient. In the end, the emotion one feels is not akin to love or any of its other manifestations. It is bewilderment and confusion. It is frustration. After all the effort of filmmakers, some of whom share credits in this film, to raise the bar in filmmaking and film watching, films like A Moment in Time are still produced, and worse, released to further dumb down the mainstream audience.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Sta. Niña (2012)

The Price of Redemption in Emmanuel Palo's Sta. Niña 

by Francis Joseph A. Cruz

Set in the bleak plains of Pampanga, Emmanuel Palo’s Sta. Niña tells the story of Paulino (Coco Martin) who suddenly unearths the coffin of his daughter ten years after her death. Despite the length of time the coffin has been buried, her daughter remains uncorrupted, seemingly miraculously unchanged. Rumors of the marvel start to spread, causing several townspeople, including the province’s sickly governor, to flock Paulino’s house to be cured of their afflictions. More than that, the return of Paulino’s daughter again unravels his sins from the past and his unfinished efforts for redemption.

Palo’s crafting is exquisite. The film is beautifully photographed. The greys of the lahar-covered landscape evoke the very emptiness that confounds the people that manage to make a living despite the sudden desolation brought about by Mt. Pinatubo’s eruption. When the film finally adopts colors, they are quiet and muted, very telling of the despair and the secrets that are supressed by circumstance.

The music is aptly spare and haunting. The film’s pace is unhurried, allowing stretched moments of silence that allow for a clearer communication of many of the film’s more nuanced emotions. The performances of the actors, more specifically Martin, Anita Linda as Paulino’s dementia-afflicted grandmother, and Irma Adlawan as the unforgiving mother of Paulino’s former lover, are especially fine.

However, the biggest triumph of the film is how it clearly portrayed a land and a people wanting of salvation despite the abundance of religion. Palo paints the Pampanga of his film as ridden with fake prophets and empty symbols, where statues and icons are peddled to the ignorantly faithful and every instance of the supernatural would be considered an act of God. He portrays his characters as especially burdened by the weight of religious zeal, more than willing to ride the wave of popular faith to be salvaged from the gravity of errors of the past.

There is actually more to the film than to pinpoint the blatant hypocrisies of the self-proclaimed religious. There is more to it than the overused dynamics of act and practice as displayed in various other films that criticize traditional Catholic rituals because they do not reflect the real religiosity of the people practicing them. The film is made from a perspective that does not hold judgment towards these beliefs and practices. It finds humanity in the very reason why these beliefs and practices exist and persist. Instead, it connects the outward and perhaps sham religiosity of these people with their inward insecurities because of their very own acknowledgment of their own sinful ways.

Sta. Niña depicts sinners suffering so much in such a judgmental world that the sudden appearance of the titular incorruptible saint becomes the only viable escape, and the price they would have to pay for a much-ambitioned redemption. Nothing is more human than survival in a society that is quick to pass guilt and slow to forgive and forget.

(Cross-published in Twitch and ABS-CBNnews.)