CINEMALAYA 2014: "Dagitab" film review | Intersections

Dagitab is a word that translates to "sparks" in English; but the film runs and ends on its other giant half of a theme: intersections.

The story reveals a series of intersections where characters are ever crossing, never meeting. The lives of husband Jimmy and wife Issey, both UP professors, seem ordinary enough until the end of the first twenty minutes of the film and Issey is already drunk, on her way home from a small house party, squirming in her car seat, and asking her husband to slow his driving down. She is melancholic, and they converse but fail to communicate. After all they are together but theirs is no marriage-their lives are mere intersections, and there is no home they return to. Every time Issey is home she is either drunk or annoyed, slapping away insects around the house. Her husband cares little that she has some trauma about fast cars. She cares little about his surprises for her and his aversion to her smoking and go so far as to do her morning routine while he has his breakfast. Her husband fares no better. Held hostage by an ideal from long past, he is rarely home, chasing pieces of his dreams in mountains, along with revolutionaries. At one point during the film he goes home after finally seeing to the end of his search, and in his exhaustion he takes a cake from the refrigerator and devours it using his bare hands—a showing of his gnawing unfamiliarity with the domesticity of his married life. He has placed so much of his fate on ideas that have haunted his life that his grasp of reality has gradually loosened. He finds his sword after decades of searching for it, but he loses his wife, finally, inevitably.

One of the more important intersections of the movie happens during the Makiling workshop where Issey’s godson Gab, just graduated from high school, was invited. Gab is too obviously attracted to his godmother but Issey expected it. During one particularly beautiful moment in the film where they are by the beach he tells her she is beautiful and kisses her, but she responds in the most unnerving way possible, ("hindi ka naman nakikinig sa akin e") suggesting that his kiss meant nothing. She goes on rambling about a void, people coming and going, and he looks puzzled, unsure of himself. This is one of the biggest turning points of the story because we later discover that he writes about his encounter with her, but it is not narrated fully and the last half of the essay is not revealed to the audience until towards the end of the film. We realize what it is much later when Jimmy reads Gab's award winning essay aloud to him. Jimmy, who repeatedly says that he has stopped smoking, begins smoking during their conversation and all indications seem to point to the fact that despite all appearances the husband is unnerved by suggestion of a relationship between Gab and his own wife. The essay is reminiscent of Neruda’s themes of longing and vulnerability, most of all love’s own insecurities; and everybody had quickly assumed, along with the audience, that the two had had illicit sexual relations. It was a taboo among taboos: he was a teenager just about to enter college and she was turning 46. She was his godmother, and teacher of sorts. Yet no one bothers to correct the notion; not Gab, not Issey. It is ironic that in their tight little intellectual bubble, populated by no less than UP professors, people around them could not separate fiction from reality: Gab had written about his innermost longing. The two had shared a kiss, nothing more. For some reason neither of them corrects the misunderstanding, and it is almost as if Issey turns their feelings of scorn to her advantage, her way of severing ties and finally being alone. Issey appears cold and collected but she later falters and lectures to the wrong class. Later she tells Gab something that she could have easily told her husband as well, after telling the boy she loved him but could not care less: “You are a void, soon you’ll become irrelevant.”

The film would have succeeded as a character study of Issey and the breakdown of her marriage, but its attempt is hampered by pointless, ineffectual scenes and subplots that add nothing to the story: the extended sex scene between Lorena and Jimmy, Angelo’s relationship with Gab, one of Jimmy’s jogging scenes where a group of skaters frame him, the first scene of the movie where Jimmy is in the mountains, the scenes showing the activists with their hackneyed dialogues, and the prolonged dance between the Jimmy and Issey to name a few. The tokenistic, oversimplified approach to activism and literary workshops did little to support the film’s premise and the attempt betrayed a lack of knowledge at the way academic discussions are at the College of Arts and Letters and literary workshops. The supposedly intellectual discussions were too elementary, and the activists seemed closer to caricatures than characters on film (i.e. Angelo and the activists). They fail to convince. It would have been enough to end the film with the scene where Issey laughs almost manically at the camera when pictures are taken of her; it is her catharsis, her release, and ultimately a fitting finish to her narrative. That is her spark after all—Issey’s studied nonchalance, her philosophy about people around her being void, mere intersections. And ironically it is 16-year old Gab who understood it all. Gab who was flustered when she started talking about voids but kissed her nonetheless. Gab who can’t seem to carry on decent conversations with her but can hold her knee and keep her from trembling in moving vehicles. He understood it all, and he put that one intersection into writing.

Ninja Scroll: Jubei and Kagero

The story of the 1993 Ninja Scroll is simple enough, and predictable at the most significant moments, but it pulls you in with well-developed characters-- formidable enough to make you root for them until the very end.

The main characters are studies in contrast, but they are similar in that they are individuals not searching for their place in the ninja world, but seek to find purpose, knowing they do not belong to it. Belonging to neither the government or any ninja clan, Kibagami Jubei is a hero of sorts, his services paid for by people who cannot afford the services of ninja clans. This is apparent from the very beginning of his tale, when a bandit he just defeated questions his way of living. He lives only within his means, even if his strength and skills can afford him so much more. With Jubei there are no wasted movements, no unnecessary words, no unncessary actions, no unnecessary deaths. He takes life only when necessary, and, as he himself declared, hates those who throw away their life so easily.

Kagero is Koga clan's poison-taster, a position dangerous for anyone but Kagero. This position is important, because it is indelibly tied to her suicidal character, in stark contrast with Jubei's. Kagero is a kunoichi who, as Dakuan accurately describes, "is made perfectly for this hellish world." She is beautiful, a fact remarked upon not only once or twice by different male characters in the movie and she has a unique power: any man who makes love to her, or even kisses her lips, will be killed instantly. Her entire body is seeped with poison. This is her tragedy, one of her clansmen claims. Such statement is interesting, not in the least because the tragedy lies not in her power, but in the fact that no one sees her apart from her sexual value, or lack of it. And they, her clansmen no less, think it tragic that she can never enjoy a man's penis.

Still, Kagero works with the clan, and even despite them. She shows her steel will at her very first appearance, where she cuts off her topknot to show her resolve to be one with her clan in such a dangerous mission, the only woman to do so. Her womanhood itself, it seems, is her ammunition, but she does not content herself with that. She is a well-rounded kunoichi, skilled in the art of shuriken, or swords, and can hold her ow n against enemy ninjas. In an attack by the Devils of Kimon, she survives, the only one to do so. Having nothing else, no clan, no identity, she bravely carries on the will of the clan's lord though it is apparent he cares little for the clan's welfare. She makes it her mission, though it may end in death, to find information about the dark shogun. As the story progresses one would think she has resigned herself to her death, and it is the way everybody else sees her fate. Dakuan later verbalizes Kagero's predicament, albeit harshly:"It's just a ninja woman lost, who cares?" After all she is beseeched by several problems, and all at once: she is Without a clan, without a real master, and she can never marry because of her body. In fact this is the way even Kagero sees herself, who often does acts either brave or suicidal. The only one who does not seem to think so, is Jubei.

Jubei and Kagero meet under the direst of circumstances: Kagero is rendered unconscious, and is raped, when Jubei saves her. His personality is immediately appealing: he wittly quips, "your body can't be hard as rock everywhere", incapacitates Tessai, and runs off with Kagero. Their first conversation occurs later in the marshes, when they were sure they were no longer being pursued. This scene is significant, not only because of its romantic signifiers (fireflies), but because of the way Jubei treats her: not as a damsel in distress, not as a kunoichi, but as a comrade and a woman. He inquires about the rapist, as though they were teammates. He acknowledges her and calls her by her name, something no other outsider would do, not even Dakuan, not the lord Kagero serves. Jubei later asks her politely, after their introductions, "are you alright?" but Kagero merely thanks him, then goes the opposite direction. He leaves it at that. When she was sure he was no longer within earshot, she breaks down. Reality finally bears down on Kagero, and her facade crumbles in the shadows.

The two meet again when Kagero saves Jubei, but it is clear at this point that she is interested in his character. They save each other several times more, despite Kagero asking Jubei once, while hanging at the edge of a cliff, to let her die. She shows unease when he hands her food to eat, as she wakes up. They become the most unlikely of friends, something Kagero is surprised at, and something Jubei declares easily when he saves her at one point. He articulates what is obvious from the start: "You are my comrade, my precious friend." She later offers herself to him, when she learns that the antidote to Jubei's poisoned body is another poison, Kagero's. He refuses, and does it out of love, the emotions clear on his face. He would not make love to her just to use her, even if it meant healing himself. Jubei responds to Kagero's needs this way, and it is not sexual, nor is it cliched. After all the hero is far from perfect: he hesitates before refusing her offer. When she taunted him once, telling him to sleep with her to find out if he will die from the act, he pulls her to him, as if in retaliation. In the same scene, when she declares no man can touch her, he responds, not merely to her statement, but to a fate she unwittingly resigned herself to: "is your heart steeped in poison as well?" This prompts her to self-examination, and by the end of her life, she finds her answer.

It is problematic that the fact that Jubei refuses to cheapen sex and use Kagero makes him something of a hero, and this highlights the overall misogynistic undercurrents in the movie. This, and the fact that he barely defeats some of the Eight Devils of Kimon (and with sheer luck) subverts the whole hero theory about Jubei. Jubei's flaws in fact do not make him a great hero or a great human being, but they complete him as a character. Likewise Kagero is imperfect, but her growth in just an entire day with Jubei is tremendous, and she finds where she belongs. Their parallels to each other are revealed in the poignant scene where she offers herself to him. Kagero loathed being used as commodity, and not being acknowledged as an independent kunoichi in her own right and a comrade, but she was willing to stoop low enough for Jubei, asking him to use her and take her to heal himself. Jubei declared once that he hated meaningless death, but he was unwillling to cure himself by using Kagero's poison, just to prove a point. And his point is clear: he would rather die than treat her like comodity. To him, a man who once was loyal to no one, she is worth dying for.