Movie review: Quiet gay living in 'Bwakaw'

The movie “Bwakaw” by Jun Lana has everything you’d want in a film, if for Cinemalaya 2012 you were looking for something that would bring you to tears and make you laugh, where the grand crisis isn’t about the usual things that are teenage love and desire, undoing and drama.

 

Here is the story of a man and his dog, both at the tail end of lives lived long enough, both looking tired but surviving as a matter of course. Rene (Eddie Garcia) lives in an old house filled with boxes, all labeled with names. His room is kitchen and bedroom, also altar, if only because on his bed lies a statue of the Santo Entierro, one he inherited from his mother, one that purportedly performs miracles. Rene doesn’t care much for it, in the same way that he doesn’t seem to care much for a wound on his leg, or the routine of reporting to the provincial post office every day. 

 

What matters to him is this visit to an old friend in an old people’s home. She doesn’t remember him but he talks to her anyway, apologizes every time he visits, because he wasn’t the man he needed to be when they were together. What matters to him is that no friend sends him young boys in the middle of the night; what matters to him is that the world—his neighbors, his friends—leave him be. 

 

He is fine, he is close to death. And what matters is that the parish priest hears his confession over and over again, which is really about having this same priest accept his last will and testament of sorts, with a list of people who will get what he leaves behind. A list that he constantly revises depending on who exactly helped him out, or pissed him off, or who died, on any given day. 

 

What matters to Rene ultimately, is that Bwakaw is with him, even when naming the dog such is telling of what the owner thinks of stray dog turned pet: Bwakaw will eat everything in sight, he will not complain. Rene treats the dog more like equal than pet, leaves the dog to his own wants and needs. Things change when Bwakaw becomes sick, and Rene transforms into pet owner and—lo and behold!—a caring old man, the transformation not so much surprising as it is a measure of humanity. Yes, here was a man ready to die, but he always thought it would happen ahead of everybody else, including dog. There was no need to be kinder than he felt like being. 

 

But then a colleague at the post office dies after being thrown a surprise party Rene himself initiated; the woman he was visiting at the old people’s home goes missing, too. Rene was doing nothing but revising his list, over and over again. 

 

Bwakaw being close to dying made him forget about that list altogether though, for reasons larger than impending death. There is the fact of Sol (Rez Cortez), becoming not just the tricycle driver who would agree to bring Bwakaw as swiftly as possible to the nearest hospital, but who would also become friend who speaks to Rene as a person, and not as someone who’s old and grouchy, not someone whose fatalism is too pessimistic for comfort. The friendship happens given the task of caring for Bwakaw, and slowly Rene’s house begins to look like a home, the sala is used for drinks and conversation, there was desire where there was none before. But Rene is turned down, and he isn’t given enough time to recover: Bwakaw is dying, and even the miraculous Santo Entierro could not do anything.

 

Rene finds his friends again, as he buries Bwakaw beneath his house. The motley crew of the nosy neighbor (Beverly Salviejo), and the old friend who owns the local parlor (Soxy Topacio), as well as the young screaming fag (Joey Paras) Rene couldn’t stand. The constant presence of these three, despite fighting with temperamental Rene, makes sense if only because in a small provincial town where people don’t stay out of each others’ lives, there can be no enemies, really.

 

And this is also what allows for this kind of story to work, where the unraveling is interestingly slow, because it is slow in this space, it is as old and aged as our characters. But too there is the fact of silence, the one that surrounds Rene’s character, not just because he is sad and ready to die, but also because he is gay and alone and lonely. That it is the latter that evolves in the film, even as it is also shown to be secondary to everything else that was unfolding here, is a measure of Lana’s storytelling which is succinct even when the story is larger than life, believable because it is grounded in what’s here. “Bwakaw” is sensitive and funny, where Lana is able to manipulate the expected into being laughable, and absurdity becomes acceptable truth. 

 

Case in point, that scene where Rene tries the coffin he had to take home with him for size. You almost know it would happen, yes? But given Rene, it makes sense that it would happen to him, this situation where he had taken so long to use his life insurance the funeral parlor was now closing down. It makes sense too, because this tiny provincial space is undeveloped, and business would close down as a matter of course. There is too the homosexuality that is beyond stereotypical portrayals, and certainly beyond the usual images we see. Here, it is clear that while it is important, it is also secondary to what we might have in common with the sad and lonely man that is Rene.

 

Which is really Eddie Garcia on overdrive, and unhinged, untouched, without the glamorous drawl of the man we’ve grown up loving as living legend, probably the only one who could ever be called a sexy man in Philippine cinema, full stop. In “Bwakaw” Garcia is no surprise, if only because we’ve known of his brilliance as actor. What hits you with this portrayal though is your own visceral reaction as spectator, seeing Garcia playing an old man. And I mean an old man, living in some small provincial barangay, living in a decrepit old house, and living as he waits to die. This is something that hits you in the first 20 minutes of the film, where Rene and Garcia seem one; and then you watch the rest of this film and you forget it is Garcia. 

 

You watch the rest of this and you realize that without the usual role that hinges on manliness and sex appeal (one remembers “Fuchsia” by Joel Lamangan), Garcia is at his most resplendent.   

And yes, I say that even as he played this grouchy old man, because this role is also about a man who knows of a sadness that most of us will ever know. Here, the pessimism about life is perfectly caustic, and the moment Garcia as Rene is allowed the emotion of love, in those instances that brought him to tears, you cannot but be carried by its intensity, that is vehement and painful at the same time. 

 

Because “Bwakaw” is about these men, Rene and Garcia, showing us all that life ain’t over until it’s over. And that there’s always the pretty—and gay—to see us through: display it in your homes people, and bask in it. Sometimes, it’s all we’ve got. –KG, GMA News Katrina Stuart Santiago writes the essay in its various permutations, from pop culture criticism to art reviews, scholarly papers to creative non-fiction, all always and necessarily bound by Third World Philippines, its tragedies and successes, even more so its silences. She blogs at http://www.radikalchick.com. The views expressed in this article are solely her own.