Filipiñana is a slow burn, a film that feels like it’s constructed of very beautiful still images, lacquered, lugubrious, and heavy. The figures in the images seem to feel it, too. Their movements and the pace of their speech are deliberate at times, tentative at others, as if they may not have intended to speak, or as if what they say may not matter to a listener, if anyone is even listening. Taking place on a single day, in a single location—at an extravagant golf course in Manila—stasis is the very medium of Filipiñana‘s world, a medium that deliciously engulfs the viewer as well.
Maybe more than sluggish or narcotic, one could say that Filipiñana is a film of pointed exaggerations, which is to say that, while it is almost inherently stylish (the opening and closing credit sequences seem to reference the typography of a fashion magazine), the film is not governed by style so much as mode. Its genre is metaphor and its central metaphor of deeply asymmetrical social power requires every aspect of its cinematography and performance.
Ostensibly, Filipiñana is the story of two parallel journeys by young women, Isabel, a Tee Girl (meaning her job is to tee up golf balls at the club’s driving range) and Clara, a young American whose Filipino uncle, a member of the club, is trying to convince her, over a languid 18 holes, to move to Manila and become an executive at his sporting goods company. The relationship between the US and the Philippines here is represented as a kind of rivalry of privileges, one Clara’s uncle clearly thinks he and his country are winning. As director Rafael Manuel told the audience after Filipiñana‘s premiere, golf came to the Philippines via American military bases, and the colonial legacy, a process that ends up elevating a local elite into positions of ultimate power, seems clear throughout the vast reaches of the fantastical club. Clara’s smarmy, self-satisfied uncle knowingly prods her about the regal nature of his home course compared to the best American courses she’s ever played, noting, too, that there are very few public courses in his country. The greens at this club are off limits to anybody but the golfers and their female caddies. And hammering home the clockwork, plantation-like structure of the place, all the workers’ actions are perfectly choreographed to live Filipino folk music, a dance taking place within perfectly balanced, symmetrical shots.
But the architectural and administrative equilibrium of the club is not entirely secure. Isabel, like other Tee Girls, wanders relatively freely onto the course to retrieve mangos. In the early morning, she happens to catch sight of the club’s president, Dr. Palanca, sleeping beside one of the caddies, apparently in the wake of a secret tryst. Isabel is fascinated by Dr. Palanaca, who, he informs her later, during a driving session, is from the same province as she is, Ilocos, in the country’s northeast, home, too, of the infamous Marcos family. After their first face-to-face encounter—photographed in a single shot with the girl framed by Dr. Palanca’s spread legs, his driving stance—Isabel, on the pretense of returning a wedge Dr. Palanca left behind on the course, sets out on a quest to discover the source of her attraction.
Her journey and Clara’s successively reveal layers of power and powerlessness among the female employees that keep the club running, as well as their own potentials to probe and challenge this structure. Clara is a vector of alternatives, informing her own requisite caddy that in America, amateur golfers typically carry their own clubs. Isabel, a country girl and poor like her colleagues, is so invisible culturally that she might infiltrate even the most occult spaces. It’s not just that the legacy power represented by the club is invincibly grand and entrenched; it’s also so self-assured that it’s calcified, half-blind, and careless. It’s sleepwalking. A zombie. Listless, but nevertheless dangerous.
Can these two agents of change make a difference? The culmination of Filipiñana, in the waning hours of daylight, is both subtle and poetic, harsh and dreamlike, tying up some loose threads that have been tickling us all along while leaving us with one last mystery. A delight for the eye and with enough absurdity to lighten its inherent darkness, Filipiñana will likely find its greatest appreciation among fans of social satire, such as Ruben Öslund’s Triangle of Sadness.
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