Organizer: Sulo: The Philippine Studies Initiative at NYU
Type/Location: In person / New York City
A literature professor meets up with his student, and rumored lover, Lancelot, months after the suicide of Eric’s longtime partner, Marcus, a Filipino writer celebrated for his novels in English. As their conversation becomes more complex, secrets and lies emerge, driving them to wrestle with the truth.
Jun Lana burst upon Philippine cinema with a rich and sprawling screenplay about the emotional and mythical lives of the inhabitants of a small island for Marilou Diaz-Abaya’s 1988 Sa Pusod ng Dagat/In the Navel of the Sea. Two years earlier, Diaz-Abaya was a judge at the Palanca Awards, the Philippines’ equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize, when she read Lana’s screenplay submission and immediately optioned it. Lana had been throwing plays, teleplays and screenplays at the Palanca Awards, and eventually garnered enough writing prizes (eleven) to get inducted into its Hall of Fame.
For some ten years after Sa Pusod ng Dagat, he continued writing scripts for some of the most noted directors of Philippine cinema, including Diaz-Abaya herself, before he tried his hand at going auteur and directing his own screenplay with Roxxxanne about a closeted gay student. Since then, he has directed his own screenplays for some two dozen films, along with numerous teleseries installments for a major TV network.
It is the world of writing that Lana focuses on in About Us But Not About Us. At the tail end of the covid pandemic when people are starting to venture out of the safety and isolation of their cocoons, University of the Philippines literature professor Eric (Romnick Sarmenta) meets at a restaurant with student and aspiring novelist Lance (Elijah Canlas), who is rumored to be his lover. The two characters are haunted by thoughts of Marcus, an acclaimed novelist and Eric’s longtime partner, who has committed suicide. As the conversation progresses, secrets and lies come out in surprising and unexpected ways. The conversation evokes a literary world in its manifold aspects, from the aspirational to the cynical, the droll to the tragic, the brutal to the tender, in a way that anyone anywhere who has had dreams of being a published fictionist can relate to.
What is more specifically Philippine is how Marcus, the novelist celebrated for his novels in English, had been working on a Tagalog novel that he longed to be his greatest legacy. There’s much code-switching between Tagalog and English in Eric and Lance’s conversation that reflects the Philippine literary and cultural world. The imposition of English by the American colonial powers is still seen as a tragedy in the country, in the way that it devastated and set back indigenous language and culture, and introduced further stratification of society. It is however appreciated by others in having prepared Filipinos to plug into the world wide web where English reigns as the lingua franca. While there is a rich history of both English and Tagalog novel writing in the Philippines (but hardly any with the other indigenous languages), the novelist that is often cited as the greatest and most incisively nationalist is Nick Joaquin, who paradoxically published only in English. There’s the New York-based novelist Gina Apostol in our day, whose writings in English that revolve around the Philippines have been compared by the New York Times to those of Nabokov and Borges. In many Filipino fictionists writing in English, like the film’s Marcus, there lurks the desire to publish that great Tagalog novel. Less known outside the country are Tagalog novelists like Edgardo Reyes whose powerful work Sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag/In the Claws of Light was the basis of Lino Brocka’s eponymous film, often cited as the greatest Filipino film ever made.
Lana, who is openly gay and flew to NYC to get married in Central Park when the US legalized gay marriage, darts back with this film, from dramas and comedies involving straight characters, into his ongoing explorations of gay lives. From his earlier films where recognizing one’s identity and coming out lay at the heart of the story, to Bwakaw which deals with the loneliness of an aging gay man, there is an evolution in About Us, in its scrutiny of the boundaries and responsibilities of gay persons towards each other and society, reflected in the issues arising from the relationships among the three characters. As in many of the best films by Lana, the darkly comic absurdity of life in general is never far from the surface.
Romnick Sarmenta and Elijah Canlas have been much praised both in the Philippines and internationally for the way they are able to transfix audiences in what would be a challenging setup for any actor. Except for brief arrival and departure scenes outside the restaurant, the entire film takes place at that one restaurant table while the two characters remain seated and chatting with each other, casual at first until it starts taking the most jaw-dropping turns.
Script reading took place just one day before the shooting which was completed in a head-turning five days that was slowed down by lockdown regulations. It surely helped that both Sarmenta and Canlas were experienced actors. Sarmenta started acting in film and television at 4 years old and, through the next 45 years, has appeared in some 60 films, playing the gamut as juvenile or macho romantic lead to action star and, unusually, to transgender woman in Miguel/Michelle, one of his most renowned performances. Twenty-three-year-old Canlas appeared in his first film role at 14, and in the course of some 20 films plus a number of teleseries, has become one of the most acclaimed of the Philippines’ young crop of actors. He is most familiar to international audiences as lead in the Netflix series Game Boys created by Lana.
About Us is a prime example of the modern-day Filipino indie filmmakers’ kick-ass gumption and resourcefulness. Like most filmmakers working in developing (and often corrupt) countries, they have to contend with an almost permanent state of inadequate funding for their dream projects. But even this cannot stop them from creating worlds and stories that end up resonating at major international film festivals, conspiratorially drawing audiences into intimacies of urgent familiarity that are also somehow strikingly specific, one that in this case can only happen at that unique and special restaurant table in Metro Manila waking up from pandemic isolation into nightmares and self-revelations.
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