Faith and box-office appeal

The two 2024 Metro Manila Film Festival entries written by National Artist for Film and Broadcast Arts Ricardo “Ricky” Lee seem to have contrasting box office appeal.

Green Bones, with its lead cast of prominent actors Dennis Trillo, Ruru Madrid, Michael de Mesa, Wendell Ramos, Iza Calzado, and Alessandra de Rossi, will likely do well at the box office.

The musical Isang Himala, with its cast of actors (led by Aicelle Santos and David Ezra) who are more popular to habitual viewers of straight plays and musicals in theaters, may not do well at the tills — even as Isang Himala is an adaptation of a film top-billed by “superstar” Nora Aunor in 1982 at the height of her popularity. The film has since been adapted into a straight play and a musical.

This year’s festival entry was directed by Pepe Diokno (whose real first name is Jose Lorenzo, as per his credits in the film) and it was shot like a stage play. Since an actual stage is not shown, those who will watch Isang Himala, but have never watched a stage play, may not sense that right from the film’s opening shot, the characters’ blocking (formation) in front of makeshift nondescript wooden houses is a theater convention (formula?) to indicate what a big cast it has and what sorts of characters activate the narrative. It’s a justified opening shot for Isang Himala since the film’s narrative is set in an impoverished town in the boondocks known as Cupang. (It’s a quaint name, though, in a country whose towns and cities are named after saints and other personalities with Hispanic monikers.)

The narrative, of course, is about a young unmarried religious woman who reveals first to her adoptive mother that the Mahal na Birhen (Blessed Virgin) has appeared to her on top of a hill in that town suffering from prolonged drought. The young woman, Elsa (Santos), is soon found to be capable of healing the sick — even as the parish priest doesn’t buy her yarn about seeing the Blessed Virgin.

Life changes in Cupang. The sick and their caretakers came in hordes and swarms. Tourists turn up, though mostly domestic ones. (We did not espy foreign tourists in Diokno’s film). A lone media photographer (Ezra) turned up and hanged around indefinitely for his exclusive coverage, which will eventually include a violent scene that seems to disprove that Elsa is under the aegis of the Blessed Virgin. The scene also involves Chayong (Neomi Gonzales), Elsa’s bosom friend who prays with her on the hill at the wee hours of the day.

Isang Himala is a good film despite being stagey. People ought to watch it and possibly learn from it what faith is about and what it is not. Isang Himala is not religious at all, though it may imply something about faith. Everyone sings and acts fairly well, though Santos is (almost unarguably) the best of them all. The 2024 Elsa is not exactly the same as the Elsa of 1982. This year’s Elsa is ambitious, relishing media exposure, somewhat a schemer thwarted by life’s harshness.

Lee seems to have created in this outwardly about miracles movie a narrative that disproves transpiration of such events (even as some people in the story seem to have healed thru Elsa’s ministrations). And yet, in Green Bones, Lee implies faith in good deeds (including heroic ones) and benevolent twists as potential life changers for the better.

Cupang is a land for free but impoverished people while San Fabian Penitentiary, the main setting of Green Bones, is the turf of persons deprived of liberty (PDL), the male kind. One of the persons jailed is a criminal named Dom Zamora who is supposedly a hardened one for having killed his sister and the sister’s daughter. That’s what the publicity yarn declares. And those details are held to be true in the first half of the film.

In the second-half, it will be revealed that Dom, indeed, has criminal records — but not including killing his sister and daughter. Dom knows who killed his sister and what he really happened to the sister’s daughter. To prevent himself from telling the truth, Dom stopped talking and pretended to be incapable of speech. For some reason, though, months before landing in jail, he had to learn sign language to be able to communicate someone he seems to have been fated to meet and live for. (Sorry, it will be a spoiler for us to reveal now who that character is).

Dom managed to behave well in that prison and eventually slated for parole. But, then, he discovers a plot to get rid of him before his scheduled parole. He must have thought it’s the new assistant jail warden Xavier Gonzaga (Madrid) that’s behind it. This Gonzaga has chip on his shoulders against hardened criminals due to the death of his sister (who is not the same as Dom’s sister).

Fate (and faith, or lack of it) animates Green Bones as a narrative. Watch the movie till its last frame, so you’ll know what “green bones” are and their significance in the film.

Isang Himala and Green Bones are specimens of Ricky Lee’s imagination, literary craftmanship, and human(e) concern for Philippine society over the years that merited him the stature of a National Artist.

Both films deserve awards in several categories. Personally, we wouldn’t object if Santos, Kakki Teodoro (as slutty Nimia in Isang Himala), and Trillo would win acting trophies at the 2024 MMFF awards night. Both films could win in other categories.