Looking for the father: ‘I America’

The task I America sets out for itself is a daunting one: to tell the story of the Amerasian children left behind by the R-and-R-ing troops in Olongapo City, and to do so without subsuming these lives into the easy but powerful national allegory that’s par for the course for such a project, and that sadly depersonalizes and remainders these lives yet again.

This film’s auteur, Ivan Andrew Payawal, understood the reductive danger and the difficulty of such an undertaking, and in response decided to go for a rambunctious and meandering narrative whose specificities and details temper the metaphorical depth that would have otherwise easily swallowed it up. Instead of metaphor, his film’s guiding rhythm is loosely associative or metonymic—a rhythm that keeps things moving mainly “on the surface”—and as a storytelling strategy it proves to be surprisingly refreshing and generative indeed.

At the heart of this film is half-white aspiring model and actor Erica Berry, who it turns out is really Erica Perry, except that her estranged alcoholic mother (a former Subic bargirl who’s now a terminally ill mama san or brothel manager) either forgot or deliberately lied to her about it.  In any case, this tiny little “pun” in her surname proves to be entirely crucial to her story, and it gives us yet another instance of this film’s metonymic slant.

Erica (played earnestly by Bela Padilla) believes herself luckier than the other Amerasian kids in her neighborhood, because she actually found John Berry online, and he has come to Olongapo to meet her and bring her back to the U.S. with him. They indeed meet, and he proves to be as flawed as everybody else, and while soon enough she uncovers the truth about her identity, she decides to keep it a secret from him, enjoying his company and even helping him locate his other daughter (who turns out to be better adjusted and more independent-minded than her).

Erica didn’t grow up with her biological mother, but rather with a woman who had long ago put her bargirl days behind her and become a single parent to a daughter (with a Filipino boyfriend), adopting a couple of Amerasian girls along the way, the other being half-black. Erica is a fair-skinned mestiza, and this makes her more employable than her sisters or even her mostly half-black barkada of fellow Amerasians, whose only hope to land a career in local show business is through comedy or music (and even here they don’t quite make it, which understandably enough causes tensions).

It’s difficult to inventory all the plot movements in this story, which don’t necessarily conceptually cohere, and which include back-and-forth zipline trips over the Subic forest canopy, another teenage Amerasian pregnancy, an unseemly scene of teenaged girls jumping on and beating up a hairy and fully grown man in his hotel-room bed, and the foreshadowed although not-too-credible demise of the alcoholic and jaded mother, played impressively enough by Elizabeth Oropesa—who unfortunately (for the film) looks too hale and hearty to be a cirrhosis sufferer. Quite obviously, these rambling plot points were meant to be as random and as loosely impressionistic as its filmmaker could make them, in order to prevent the “heavy” and symbolically fraught story from falling into the predictable (and thematically neat) trap of allegory.

Of course there’s finally an “insight” in this film, and its charm is that while dripping with gravitas and arguably nationalistic (after all), it’s rendered just as metonymically as everything else. After embracing fully the reality of her givenness, like her other Amerasian friends our harried heroine decides to forego the American dream, and to abide instead in the mottled and lovably blighted country of her birth. By film’s end she’s still doggedly pursuing a career in modeling, and in her final VTR interview instead of saying she’s Erica Berry (or Perry, or whatever), she decides to simply and confidently declare, “I am Erica.”

The heroine’s external search for a father, for the “origin” that can fully account for her essence or “truth,” is unmasked as illusory. The journey has been inward all along, and the self is the shore that one departs and washes back on.

Like all or any of us, she is finally all she has. — BM, GMA News

The Cinemalaya Philippine Independent Film Festival runs until August 14, 2016. Go here for the screening schedule.