“Katips” lives up to its shortened term for “Katipunan” (the secret nationalist organization among Filipino patriots against the Spanish cruelty and subjugation), now a group of young and multi-sectoral representation of dissent against authoritarianism.
From stage musical to film, “Katips: The Movie” is a blend of the real and the allegorical.
In the flashback alone, after the opening scene in a museum, a mass movement is set in the terrains of a mountainside where the protesters gather from a cross-section of society—students, workers, religious – are flexing muscles who are mouthing freedom and democracy. It is a recreation of the tumultuous era of the early seventies, specifically the imposition of Martial Law.
Instead of situating the rally in the streets of the city of Manila, the film choses to adapt a rocky highland as milieu of the mass action.
The prologue says it all about a mountain and its peak as a symbol of power—discursively referred to as Malacañang where the subject of the demonstration is aimed at and its resident Apo (an allusion to the dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos).
Although in the press briefs, it is mentioned that the foothill is Mendiola, the semiotics of it all is worth the discourse: That the only way a despotic rule ends is a fall from the pinnacle of the mountain.
Even the setting of a repository of Philippine history is a sign and symbol of palpable meanings of the past.
Without necessarily consciously employing Brechtian technique of depersonalized drama--the use of song and dance--highlight the tension, however lengthy, that dominates the sequence.
The musical isn’t a distraction but a significant devise to alienate the discussion among the characters from the thinking and still, emotionalizing audience.
Oppositions too many within the realm of activism in the wilds—personal vs ideological, traditional vs modern, national vs regional etc.—the more gripping and horrifying is the abduction of a progressive UP prof by the state-sponsored military arm, Metropol (an allusion to Metrocom) led by Lt. Sales (Mon Confiado) in the middle of the march.
Shouldn’t the mountain be more convenient yet apt surroundings for the whole film?
What follows are vignettes and subplots of individual stories of the activists that constitute the main body of the narrative like sharing the exploits of revolutionary writer Panyong (Vince Tañada) with his ideals being interjected in campus journalism; meeting of a young idealist UP student Greg (Jerome Ponce) and a Fil-Am stage actress Lara (Nicole Laurel Asensio), a major character to provide another conflict of bourgeois and colonial sentiments against patriotism if not radicalism and her subsequent conversion to militancy when she discovers that her rebel dad teacher is killed by the dictator’s hatchet men; healing the wounded and feeding the hungry, an image ala Tandang Sora—Melchora Aquino during the Katipunan days—of Alet (Adelle Ibarrientos) as refuge and care to her comrades; neutralizing the overall anti-establishment tone of the entire tale by a Metro Aide head (Lou Veloso) etc.
Side-by-side with the musicality of the film, on a realistic sense, the horrors of Martial Law are graphically illustrated in haunting, terroristic and violent manner of the military torture like electrocution, nail-pulling, hot ironing, rape and other inhuman, barbaric, brutal and fascist ruthlessness on activists and fighters for human rights.
Although the root causes of corruption in and outside government, economic imperialism of superpowers like the US, lapdogs in national leadership etc. are presented and dropped by the characters in linear, like the rebuttal between Lara and the activists Greg, Panyong and Alet on issues on colonialism, bureaucrat-capitalism and feudalism, the impact of the exchange of ideas is intervening in the consciousness of the public leading to more personal, intimate and self-introspective moments of revelations (Lara’s learning the death of her dad and her turnaround from the individual to the collective, Alet’s longing for her eternal love, a former cadre who turned state witness against her).
Vince Tañada as actor and director might be substantial but there are times he overacts and overreacts as if to lend comic relief or to ride on the proclivities of typical notion of entertainment to an engrossingly emotional overloads which kind of discredits the gravity of his material.
“Katips” lives up to its shortened term for “Katipunan” (the secret nationalist organization among Filipino patriots against the Spanish cruelty and subjugation), now a group of young and multi-sectoral representation of dissent against authoritarianism.
Tags: #cinema, #filmreview, #musicals, #KatipsTheMovie, #MartialLaw