Written and directed by Ian Loreños
Cast: Jericho Rosales, Bugoy Cariño, Leo Martinez, Carmen Soo
The best parts of Alagwa are those that linger on the relationship between the father and his son, moments that stay with the viewer because they tiptoe around the drama and attack it at the most vulnerable time. They are compellingly executed but tempered enough not to stretch the movie’s early highlights. It also helps that Jericho Rosales and Bugoy Cariño are mainstream actors: they exhibit a kind of discipline that has a tendency to please: their performances are trimmed well and their ability to hold an emotion and sustain it for a certain period adds to the effect of the buildup towards the tragedy. Both are aware of their position at the center of the movie, sometimes changing places from left to right, so the fulcrum never weakens, or at least it gives the impression of steadiness. But director Ian Loreños knows that at some point he’ll enter a gray area where even the talent of his actors can’t pull him out. The predictability of the narrative does not hamper the film—the parallel cutting to several sequences in the future intensifies the conflict and changes its texture, despite being an unadventurous structural device—but its producers’ advocacy, which becomes controlling in the middle until the end, does. Listen, it’s a good cause: it presents the enormity of child trafficking and the numerous lives it ruins, the horror of seeing it happen and not being able to stop it. But an effective advocacy in film doesn’t show its hands; it sends strong air punches until the viewer writhes upon feeling them. The drama becomes stilted in the second half because it decides to put forward its intent with little regard for the sobriety of reason. Alagwa shares the madness of Secret Sunshine, the acclaimed 2007 movie by Lee Chang-dong, but whereas the latter latches on dragging the story of a grieving mother, Loreños’s film stays away from any form of inactivity, determined to keep the narrative afloat and moving all the time. Fortunately it’s all done in good taste, leaning more on eliciting compassion than logic, the Filipino spirit being the sentimental and hyperbolic kind. Proving this is the decision to end it at an almost improbable point, a crucial conclusion to a story whose emotional graph is dotted with red marks. But thank god Jericho Rosales can act: he nails that scene like gangbusters. Fucking waterworks. B+
Filed under: Asian Films, Cinema One, Noypi
