Of period movies & the making of a nation

MANILA, Philippines - A balmy morning visit early this year to the Quezon Heritage House, newly relocated at the Quezon City Memorial Circle, was an auspicious way to start 2014 with hope, in the same way that a December weekend respite at the Las Casas Filipinas de Acuzar, coinciding with the celebration of the martyrdom of Jose Rizal, was an opportune time to finish 2013 with gratefulness. Both jaunts reminded of how our country needs more historical movies so the next generation of Filipinos will have a keener sense of national events and greater accountability to who we are as a people.

The MLQ Gilmore House, the last which belonged to the family of the late president of the Philippine Commonwealth, Manuel L. Quezon, was bequeathed as a legacy house recently, in time for the 75th foundation year of Quezon’s dream city, through the conservation efforts of former actor, Mayor Herbert Bautista and Vice Mayor Josefina Belmonte, aided by Prof. Eric Zerrudo and his team from the University of Sto. Tomas (UST) Center for Conservation of Cultural Property and Environment in the Tropics (CCCPET).

Vice Mayor Belmonte even donated a platera which belonged to her grandmother and my companion for this trip, UST’s Interdisciplinary Studies chair, Prof. Lino Baron, also donated a big framed sepia picture circa 1939 of Quezon with his grandfather who was the latter’s personal physician, as the museum house is still being refurbished. If MLQ’s humble ancestral house from Baler will be recreated in the same space, movie producers can easily make a biopic on the life of the Quezon-Aragon tandem, underscoring their service in government and the Red Cross, respectively. Real-life couple, Christopher de Leon and Sandy Andolong, will be perfect for this project.    

Two productions had made use of the Acuzar heritage resort in recent years: Zorro for a GMA teleserye in 2009 and Scenema Concept International’s biopic El Presidente for the 2012 Metro Manila Film Festival (MMFF). One movie, made before the living museum was started in 1999, used the Casa Candaba house of the Reyes Family (an antillan mansion dating 1789 which was reconstructed in the beach resort in 2005) in the 1961 film Noli Me Tangere megged by Gerry de Leon.

This marvel along the Umagol river, in Barangay Pag-asa, Bagac, Bataan (Northern Luzon, Philippines), was the perfect venue for nourishing the patriotic intellect and the nationalist spirit, as my husband wished for his birthday — the reticence of the resort’s manager notwithstanding. Her concierge at the Casa Mexico office (built from salvaged materials from junkshops) managed by Asian Grand Legacy Hotels Corp. gladly lent us a DVD copy of the film which we did not watch in the apocalyptic year prophesied by the Roland Emmerich disaster film 2012, because we could not decide which movie to see, and of course, ended up not seeing anything. 

The 400-hectare heritage park provided a golden chance to appreciate the movie written and directed by Mark Meily, which romped off with the most awards at the 2012 MMFF, winning the plums for Second Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor (for Cesar Montano), Youth Choice Award, Best Float, Best Sound, Best Musical Score and Best Make-up. Fortunately, the experience obliterated the lackluster period film with the Spanish dialogues badly in need of coaching from Instituto Cervantes (the only one we saw for the 2013 MMFF) from our mind.

UST’s Department of History chair, Dr. Augusto de Viana takes studious note that since El Presidente was based on Aguinaldo’s memoirs, to which Laguna Gov. ER Ejercito had access, the movie omitted his defeats in the political arena, especially in the 1935 elections for the presidency of the Philippine Commonwealth.

He adds: “I think it is also helpful to say that the movie was shown after Supremo (produced by Alternative Vision Cinema and Strawdogs Studio Productions, directed by Richard Somes) as a reaction to the Bonifacio film.” 

The Acuzar repository of Philippine customs and traditions recreating a community typical of the 18th to early 20th-century Philippines is a goldmine for filmmakers with a commitment to history. There is the fascinating Novicio House, also called Casa Luna, which was owned by the family of Laureana (the mother of the Luna brothers) and built circa 1850 in Namacpacan (renamed Luna in honor of Juan, Antonio and Jose), shielded by volada on the entire length of the façade. It was a venue of important gatherings during the liberation period and the latter part of the Japanese occupation in 1942.

Together with the reconstructed bahay na bato in Badoc, where the older Luna brothers were born and which is now a museum, these aristocratic ancestral mansions will be magnificent locations for a sociological movie on the dramatic turns of the lives of these patriots, including the lesser-known Jose, who rivaled Rizal during their medical studies at UST. Real-life brothers in showbiz like the Santiagos, the Sottos and the Padillas and their showbiz wives maybe good choices to play the Lunas and their paramours, including Isidra Cojuangco of Tarlac, allegedly one of the sweethearts of the fiery Antonio.

Casa Biñan or the Alberto House, reputed to have been originally built in the 16th century in front of the Biñan Plaza in Laguna, belonged to Rizal’s maternal grandfather, Don Lorenzo Alberto, and inherited by Doña Teodora, who expanded it in the 18th century. A family dispute forced Rizal’s mother into exile by walking from Biñan to Calamba while her father was imprisoned. The house became a movie theater, a bank and before it deteriorated further, architect Jerry Acuzar of San Jose Builders came to its rescue. The Alonzo twin structure with a courtyard, replicated with great attention to detail, now houses the La Bella Teodora Italian Restaurant and provides the temporary chapel (until the bigger church, floating in the man-made lagoon with sea water channeled from the West Philippine Sea, is finished) in the bodega/cochera space in its ground floor for Sunday Mass celebrations of the resorts’ guests.  

This two-centuries-old house will definitely inspire a revisiting of the Rizal story, with focus on his strong-willed mother (with Boots Anson-Roa as one of the casting choices), whom Rizal loved so much that he took up medicine to cure her failing eyesight — a welcome contribution to feminist films in the country. With the Casa de Segunda Solis Katigbak  (home of Rizal’s first crush, built in 1880) still standing in Lipa City, a lesser-told love story can be a counterpoint in this film. The search for the young Pepe and Gunding can be launched nationwide by any of the noontime variety shows, a relief from the perya-like song-and-dance contests they dish out for ratings.

The Casa Hidalgo or Enriquez Mansion constructed in 1867 in Calle San Sebastian (now R. Hidalgo St.), Quiapo, Manila and reconstructed by Acuzar in 2006, housed the first campus of the UP School of Fine Arts where Luna, Felix Resurreccion Hidalgo, Fernando Amorsolo, Guillermo Tolentino, Emilio Alvero, Carlos “Botong” Francisco and Tomas Mapua studied. Envisioned to be a museum for the arts, this edifice with ionic columns and colonnaded sidewalks can very well breathe life into a psychological film on the agony and ecstasy of these painters as they created their obra maestra. These are the dream roles to be reserved for our veteran actors, just like Surviving Picasso was given by Warner Brothers to the great Anthony Hopkins in 1996.

The harvest of recent notable epics to mark the milestone centenary of our country’s glorious but bloody claim to independence in 1898: Viva Film’s Baler (1997), also by Meily; Tirad Pass (1997) by Carlo J. Caparas; movies on the national hero — Rizal sa Dapitan (1997) by Tikoy Aguiluz and Jose Rizal (1998) by the late Marilou Diaz-Abaya — are heroic efforts by our filmmakers to retell history with outstanding mise-en-scene, generating a sense of time and space, recreating a mood from the vicissitudes of war and fortune, and introspecting on our heroes’ psyche despite financial constraints by the producers. 

With the production design and location not eating up the budget because the Acuzar paseos and plazas like the one in the Quezon Memorial Circle will provide these requirements excellently, historical films may still save the movie industry from the flash-in-the pan genres solely churned for shallow entertainment and box-office killings. “Pride in the past, hope for the future,” the theme of the vintage architectural showcase of ciudad Acuzar, or “A testament to a bygone era so inextricably entwined with the birth of an independent nation,” the tagline of the MLQ Heritage House, may well be borrowed by the Philippine movie industry if it is to recoup its golden age.