Modernizing desires: A review of CineFilipino Best Film winner ‘Ned’s Project’

This review contains spoilers.

Adjudged Best Feature Film in the ongoing CineFilipino Film Festival is Lemuel Lorca’s Ned’s Project, starring the multi-awarded Angeli Bayani, who plays the role of a tibo and resident tattoo artist of her hometown, Sampaloc, Quezon.

It’s hard not to sit back and take serious notice of Lorca’s latest film, since even in the new wave (indie) movement the “lesbian” topic has not been treated all that often—nor all that earnestly. The last exceptional movie that comes to mind in this regard is Brillante Mendoza’s 2006 film, Kaleldo, starring Cherry Pie Picache.

Like Bayani, Picache self-identifies as a heterosexual woman, and so therein lies the rub: even as more rounded LGBT representations are a welcome development in our local cinema, the fact that the actors who portray these newly realistic and substantial roles persist to be “straight” does need to be acknowledged and perhaps, finally, lamented. We must admit that, among the many indicators that LGBT cinema has finally come into its own in our country, the most compelling one would have to be the abundance not only of LGBT parts but also of LGBT actors who can competently perform them.

But all that’s for the proximate future—hopefully. Recurring to our appraisal of Lorca’s film we need to say that Ned is the pet name of Henedina, and her project in this story is, interestingly enough, a baby-making one: after being dumped by her “straight” and faithless girlfriend and after witnessing the slow decrepitude, illness, and death of her friend and tibo mentor, Max, she decides she doesn’t want to suffer the solitary and lonely fate that her conservative older sister (the ever-efficient Ana Abad Santos) keeps warning her about, and so sets out on an all-too-awkward quest to promptly get herself pregnant. This leads her to consider going against her own nature and having sex with the more “likable” members of her mostly male and liquor-guzzling barkada: a tricyle driver in one instance, and a flamingly sissy and ribald beautician in another (she succeeds with neither—initially, at least).

And so, yes, it’s that kind of movie, and it’s that kind of world that Ned moves around in: rural, lower-class, not especially educated, and regularly inebriated. Of course, cinematically, this is bound to be familiar and interesting territory and indeed, convincingly and memorably recreating it is one of Lorca’s clearest accomplishments in this charming and altogether memorable film. Nonetheless, we need to disabuse ourselves at this point and remark that these foregoing sentences do not quite “capture” an essential feature of this world, whose language (Tagalog), like all the other mother tongues in our country, is not pronominally gendered.

While seemingly inconsequential to the anglophone discourses in which discussions and debates about Filipino culture are typically institutionally couched, the fact that neither Ned nor the other characters in this world address themselves as “she” or “he” is far from unimportant, but is already, especially in this kind of film, the weighty crux of the matter.

The simple truth is that translating these characters’ gendered identities and lives—from the Tagalog “source” to the English “target”—is and can only be a provisional and imprecise activity, to the degree that what the latter takes to be fundamentally binary is to the former, to all intents and purposes, unitary. Needless to say, especially where in-depth depictions of the gendered sort are concerned, an immense slippage takes place—and so much is irreparably lost—when one translates “siya” to either “he” or “she.”

This is why calling Ned “lesbian,” while easy and ordinary enough in urbane and academic discussions, must remain problematic, as this film poignantly shows. As illustrated by many similarly themed popular culture texts, the “homosexualization” of our country’s bakla and tomboy identities remains incomplete, inasmuch as in such mundane and uncritical accounts they alone bear the onus of this label, and their partners and/or objects of affection do not understand themselves as sharing—are, in fact, culturally understood as being incapable of sharing—this orientation.

By contrast, the very idea of sexual orientation presupposes a kind of “erotic self-sufficiency” within the homo and hetero divides—something not true of the bakla and the tomboy (mistakenly cast as “homosexual” in this unconsciously translational model), who are generally understood as being slavishly fascinated with the lalake and the babae, into whose hands they are popularly depicted as being all too willing to commend all their dignity (if not their ready cash).

This is not to say that just because bakla and tomboy are not so much about sexuality as about gender, then these local identities no longer suffer from the inflictions of heteronormativity. To the contrary, and as a matter of fact, they are entirely defined by it, as Ned’s finally acceding to the reproductive imperative so tragicomically exemplifies (although what we can easily add here is that this plot point isn’t entirely earned or realized: her fears of growing old and alone aside, the urgent “maternality” of Ned’s interior life is simply not present enough in this film).

Nonetheless, we need to remark that, all over the world, there may not be one but many heteronormativities, and what perhaps distinguishes the local one is that, unlike modernity’s discursively rationalized and bio-medically defined “heterosexual matrix,” to a certain extent it permits of “non-alignment” between genital sex and gender identity, precisely because its male/female dualism remains oral and customary rather than textually (and therefore, categorically) absolute. In contrast to the West, in our country a man can be “woman-hearted,” and a woman can be “man-hearted,” and as such—going by this form of pre-modern and, in many ways, eminently “negotiable” heteronormativity—their objects of desire must only be the lalake and the babae, respectively.

Of course, the “cultural simultaneity” of our everyday reality bids us to remember that a variety of cultural modes—as well as technologies and knowledge systems—can and do coexist, in pretty much the same way that in so many of our cities the shanties of the poor can coexist, often practically side by side, with the mansions of the rich. Obviously, there are any number of exceptions to such hard and fast rules, and  “misalliances” do conceivably happen, as this film’s uncharacteristic and fairy-tale turn toward the melodramatic affectingly enacts.

Just as the baby-dreaming Ned decides to enter “Tibo Tibo Tiba Tiba”—a fictitious regional talent contest for butch tomboys, obviously inspired by a recent spate of similarly-themed shows on national television—into her world enters the Manila-raised, urbane, well-off, and obviously troubled Ashley, a mestiza dance instructor (played to the wonderful hilt by Maxine Eigenmann) whose multiple tattoos mark her out as a rebel and misfit, and whose friendship and romance with our mannish heroine introduces a critical and translocal difference into this resolutely local world.

By film’s end Ashley confesses to Ned that she has finally made the decision to accept herself (quite likely, as a lesbian), and to come out to her aghast and easily offended upper-middle-class family. While the film ends just at this moment—with Ned looking capaciously pregnant, thanks to a night of binge drinking with her tricycle-driver friends—we are encouraged to believe that their relationship will now move away from the traditional tibo-babae model toward the homosexual and mutually consenting one, between (at long last) adult, gynephilic, and genitally female equals.

We can say that this is simply the tomboy equivalent of the many bakla films we’ve seen of late, that basically tell the same culturally transitional and “modernizing” story—of full and complete homosexualization, as manifested in the dramatic movement away from the customary romantic (and hierarchical) model to the modern and egalitarian one, between two mutually loving individuals, whose desires are now at last symmetrical and comparable with one another.

What’s different here, however, is that Ned the tibo remains mannish—and in this sense, “gender-transitive”—while in many recent indie “gay” films the bakla’s newly achieved erotic self-sufficiency necessitates a masculine self-identification  and -presentation. Going by this contemporary vision, the modern bakla can now love other “gay” men, precisely because they are now all similarly (often, hyperbolically) “male.” Obviously, despite the seeming progression, a symbolically “hetero”—because masculinist—norm holds sway in either case, still and all.

What’s additionally interesting about Ned’s Project is, however, the insight it seems to proffer about the crucial role that literacy plays in this particular cinematic tibo’s journey.

As we know, the religious stigmatization that afflicts the Filipino tomboy and bakla is, at bottom, a scriptural one. In a painful conversation with her older and pious sister, we hear Ned imploring that what she needs from her is compassionate succor, not the self-righteous “sermonizings” of an evangelist. With this bit of dialogue we are reminded of the role that homophobically interpreted textuality plays—typically heard in hysterical volleys of literalist Biblical abomination—in the socially sanctioned persecution of both the tomboy and the bakla.

In this film, however, another form of inscription is being offered as the tibo’s specific counternarrative: the corporeal textuality that tattooing performs, literally, on the personhoods of its agents. It’s a subcultural mode of bodily inscription that cuts across classes and predates Christianization in our islands, and it’s interesting that the film bids us, if only subtextually (and poetically), to hark back to it.

We can say that a continuum of “fleshly textuality” exists between Ned and Max—who are shown inking each other, by turns—and this makes us consider the truth (and the persistence) of the sexual abject’s agency, despite or precisely because of the homophobic inflictions of religious (in particular, evangelical) scripturality. Ned’s experience of this self-ecriture is palimpsestic: after the “straight” and inconstant Gladys abandons her for a “real man” (a tall and beefy jeepney driver), Ned decides to let Max revise and re-encode the tattoo of her name into the ironic declarative, “I am glad.”

On the other hand, Max’s final request is for Ned to finish inking on her arm a drawing of her younger—more girlish, more innocent—face, as a gesture toward the spiritual wholeness that she’d like to believe endures inside herself, despite the difficult (and we can only imagine, cruel) passages she has gone through. In both cases, as against the oppressive experience that writing—as religious scripture—has wrought on the tibo’s difficult life, another kind of inscription opens up the possibility for inversion—an integumentary “reverse discourse” of sorts, that arguably fights fire with fire, instating a different writerly performance of a life-script that’s no longer socially ascribed, but rather personally (and wholeheartedly) expressed.

Bayani is, as expected, simply exceptional in her dignified portrayal of this nuanced and emotionally complex character. On the other hand, Lorca has moved from strength to strength as a cinematic artist. Going by this award-winning and immensely gratifying filmic project, even greater things can be expected of this handsome young director, who has done so much to present and transfigure his beloved home province in his increasingly excellent works.

Bravo. — BM, GMA News

Due to its Best Feature Film win at the CineFilipino Film Festival,"Ned's Project" will be shown in select theaters on Tuesday. Go here for the schedule.