It’s a man’s world in ‘Apocalypse Child’

Mario Cornejo’s Apocalypse Child  has become a critical darling since it was first screened at last year's QCinema, where it won best picture. On Tuesday, it picked up another award: Best Feature Film at the Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival.

It is still showing in select cinemas in Metro Manila (go here for an updated schedule).

It's a man's world

Apocalypse Child opens with a voiceover that belongs to Fiona, a biracial teenager who has come to Baler to be with her maternal grandmother, a well-loved townswoman who is on her deathbed.

She talks about the myths surrounding Baler: the legend of how an eighteenth-century tsunami killed all but seven families (who managed to escape to the mountains using a mysterious underground tunnel); the famed final bastion of the Spanish colonial forces, who were able to hold out for a year inside a church because their girlfriends smuggled them food and other provisions; and the unlikely “origin story” of its contemporary surfing culture.

Central to this last myth is the figure of Ford, the well-known lothario and local surfing champion who, (im)pertinent native lore has it, is the love-child of free-spirited local girl Chona and the famous director of the legendary 1970s Hollywood film that was shot there.

As an outsider, Fiona is not necessarily the central consciousness in this film—whose focalization is not as clear or sharp as it could have been—but since she is also the final “presence” in it, we are indeed encouraged to see its illumination from her point of view.

This is a useful clue, as the script deliberately forswears the gravitas of its national symbolism (as betokened by its rather serious-sounding title) by wielding a lightly allegorical or even just loosely “organically unified” hand. Indeed, in various places, this film’s palpable openness tends toward the rambling, its interest easily oscillating between the dramatic and the touristic, its narrative energy spreading itself thin across the emotional centers of its central characters, whose lives don’t necessarily cohere in any thematic sense.

Wide-eyed and young Fiona has fallen in love with the outwardly beautiful place, and with its representative spirit, Ford, who is appreciably older, more damaged, and as she learns soon enough, infinitely more selfish than her. Ford has a strange relationship with his footloose and patently unmaternal mother, whom he can call a “whore” to her drunken face, a compliment that she gamely returns (by calling him “idiot”).

Into this eccentric household Fiona unceremoniously finds herself being inserted—until she is supplanted by a new girl: Serena, the fiancée of Rich, the new congressman and childhood friend to Ford, who was treated as an adopted son by Rich’s sadistic governor-father. It’s on account of this horrible patriarch’s death that the estranged politician-son has decided to return to his hometown—to come to some sort of personal self-reckoning, and to make peace with his traumatic past.

It’s actually the past that constitutively haunts this film, as the driving force for the personal and collective mythologies that its characters compulsively tell themselves and unthinkingly live by, if only to make sense of their chaotic and present-day realities.

Fiona realizes this harrowingly enough, when she observes with horror that the man to whom she has given her heart is indeed an utter stranger and somewhat monstrous, especially when she discovers his past transgressions, the most important of which involves his strained relationship with Rich.

It’s interesting to note that despite her rejection of the myths that she sees the locals delusionally keeping, Fiona herself becomes the hero of her own mythic journey. What she takes away from this powerful experience is the idea that paradisal though it may appear, this is really a male homosocial world, in which women are commodities while men exercise important material agency: they become governors, congressmen, fathers, and lovers (willed or otherwise).

Once again we come to realize that underpinning male heterosexual desire to sexually possess is a prior and more powerful “homosocial” desire for identification; and concomitantly, that patriarchy is nothing if not a system of relations of exchange between groups of men, in which women do not participate inasmuch as they are precisely part of the “objects” changing hands.

Like other similarly themed films—just now Alfonso Cuaron’s Y Tu Mama Tambien comes to mind—Apocalypse Child argues that an unbroken continuity of male homosocial bonds is the engine that powers patriarchy’s many oppressive machines. The extremes of this homosocial continuum are what have come to be designated in modern social nomenclature as homosexuality (male-male bonding as genitally expressed) and heterosexuality (male-male bonding as anything but genitally expressed). But certainly, the middle stretch of largely unexamined and presumably equally intimate bondings is what mostly obtains among many men.

The film excels on many fronts, despite the problem of focalization—something a simple preproduction workshop of the script would’ve easily fixed. Cornejo’s direction is at once supple and crisp, and many shots and passages are both visually arresting and evocative (especially during crucial dramatic scenes, in which the frames skip ahead in time, only to interfold lyrically back into the present).

Expectedly, it’s in the acting department that this film distinguishes itself best. In a manner of speaking we can say that a more seasoned but ever-intense Sid Lucero reprises the moodily “aquamarine” role of his earliest foray into indie cinema—via Adolf Alix’s beautifully mournful Donsol—even as here he is visibly more cynical (and antiheroic). Ana Abad Santos is impressive (as always), enfleshing the laminous character of Chona most affectingly, while R. K. Bagatsing and Gwen Zamora turn in nuanced and lovely performances.

It’s Annicka Dolonius who is truly exceptional in this film, however. Her Fiona is a study in contrasts—by turns participant and observer, who richly exhibits the vulnerability and the moral ascendancy that the difficult and emotionally complicated role requires… It’s most heartbreaking to see her, after losing her grandmother, stand outside the—literally and figuratively—bastard Ford’s house, begging him for the hug that he in all his assholery can’t bring himself to give.

This story’s “apocalypse”—the self-annihilation, from which a new and transformative consciousness must emerge—is Fiona’s, after all. Devastated yet graciously victorious, Dolonius fully and quietly owns it, in the end. — BM, GMA News