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.”
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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.
