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Tuesday, November 23, 2004
Obenieta: How often is sometime?
By Myke U. Obenieta
Sound of Mosaic
In a Sunday crowd, guess who can hold a candle to blind beggars. Sad-eyed churchgoers without companions, that’s who. Does God, lending a tickled ear to each one asking or wishing devoutly for a lover, ever blush in the face of their prayers?
With your indulgence— and here I digress— I confess: To the tune of “Amazing Grace” did I wish to meet my bride for our altar date. To me, its lyrics licked me clean of my defenses (“I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see…”). Just in sync, I thought, with the grace of getting married to someone who makes me wink out of my myopic way of looking at things, tinged as it was in a lot of jaundiced light. “Romantic sa imong mata,” glared one of my wife’s friends-cum-wedding-planners. Didn’t I know that song is a favorite for funerals? Uh-oh. But, truth be told, wasn’t I as smug as a mummy before the missus came along?
Last week, my wife and I went to the preview of “Minsan Pa.”
If I were blind, the lessons of this film— the irony of finding love at last only by letting go after losing it, among others— would have been for naught. Between you and me, what if we ended up with our ex-lovers and realized later, as one song lamented, that “it’s sad to belong to someone else when the right one comes along”?
Here’s a film zooming in unflinching on how the heart’s mystery works— hardly nifty unlike love songs on the DJ’s play list and less predictable than fairy tales. Amazing how you can still feel as light as a deep-sea diver even though Jomari Yllana (as a Cebuano tour guide) and Ara Mina (as a wistful visitor), both playing characters in search of a place under the lover’s sun, didn’t end up gazing at the sea and the sunset together.
Written by Armando Lao and directed by Jeffrey Jeturian (the duo responsible for such cinematic gems as “Sana Pag-ibig Na,” “Pila Balde,” and “Tuhog”) this film produced by a Cebuana lawyer (Joji Alonso) and entirely shot in Cebu may make you kind of sad if you’re a sucker for the Jomari and Ara love team. If you’re a thoroughbred Bisdak, you might be fighting the urge to grab Jomari by the throat and let him gargle a mouthful of gravel or have his tongue cast in cement so he’d get his Cebuano accent down pat, thick and true.
But this one’s for you if your heart goes for subtlety in storytelling and characterization— chockfull of nuances with its seamless revelation of the woofs and warps in the tangle of any relationship, be it romantic or filial.
Like a Greek chorus, the blind singer at the airport and her guitarists performing “Usahay” rendered it clear as portent of heartbreaks to come. Clever, too, is the use of the camera and the character of the tour-guide as metaphors for the film’s variations on the themes of looking, searching, finding one’s self, and journeying on. Minsan Pa, sweet despite the grit of its sadness and graceful with its silences, is tough-hearted in its insistence to shut us off the fallacies of many feel-good films.
While wallowing in a bar to souse himself out of his sorrow, Jomari’s character asks the people around him no less distraught as he was with their respective relationships: What if your beloved becomes blind?
And what if, because you either failed to see this film or chose to be cold-eyed with cynicism, you’d end up groping and lost from its lovely virtues?
(e-mail: yomyko@yahoo.com)
(November 23, 2004 issue)
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