Page-turner set in turn of century Manila

MANILA, Philippines — Walking through Megamall on a Tuesday afternoon with an elder sibling, shortly after a death in the family, would take us to the basement nook Book Sale and a novel by British writer William Boyd going for little more than a hundred pesos.

Likely pre-loved and now on its 30th anniversary since first published, The Blue Afternoon is a rabble-rousing romance set in turn of century Manila, around the height of the Fil-American war, a certified potboiler from the author who had recast Ian Fleming’s James Bond in another novel.

Why Blue Afternoon has never been made into a film surely is cinema’s loss, and literature’s best kept secret, for here we get to see the Philippines through a mestizo’s eyes. Forget the inexhaustible casting options of the lead characters – there’s enough of those during the studio balls – or the writer’s misspellings of things familiar enough to the common Manileño – narra becomes nassa, Legarda becomes Lagarda – we are thrust into a period piece chockful of landmarks in the old city, Intramuros, Sta Cruz, Sampaloc rising out of the haze of this literally found fiction.

Protagonist is a surgeon going by the name of Carriscant, half-Filipino and half-Scot, let’s say in the mold of either Piolo Pascual or Alex Medina, who falls head over heels for the married American woman Delphine, maybe Bela Padilla or Carla Humphries, after meeting accidentally at an archery range and the doctor after a night misadventure in town gets grazed by an arrow from the beauteous American’s bow, who could be cupid in the midst of manifest destiny.

Thus starts their own version of amorous misadventures and palpitating episodes in a tragicomedy of manners, complete with guardia civil and taxi dancers and subplots galore including an anesthetist named Quiroga obsessed with his flying machine invention, admittedly a supporting role but a show stopper if played by the likes of John Lloyd Cruz, who could do his Lt. Papauran character one better.

The screenplay would need a lot of work, entail loads of research particularly in nuances of dialogue and conversation heard in Manila in the early 1900s, before the advent of marites and related jolographies. It’s something a national artist or even a national bookstore writer can’t handle given enough incentive and inspiration, not necessarily in that order, but a chance to view the noble and ever loyal city through the eyes of the other seems too good to pass up, give cinema and its more than a century of history their due.

It will be a major production, as all period pieces are, with elaborate design down to meticulous details, no job for a slouch either for the one holding camera whose lens must filter needless nostalgia from the proceedings, here is a tale of cuckoldry and redemption at a time of long skirts and fans and tracing a long lost love through the decades and across continents with the help of a misbegotten child now a grown woman maybe to be played by Jillian Ward, who is to help her aging surgeon father perhaps Ronaldo Valdez look for Delphine of the shaking hands (Gloria Romero?) in Portugal after sleuthing her whereabouts with the aid of a faded newspaper clipping. Spoiler alert says their planned rendezvous of more than 30 years ago fell through, and the years in between were harsh and persevering and suffused with the light of a blue afternoon.

“He could not hold back for long and when the moment came the absolute stillness of their posture, the lack of bodily contact, of any heaving or straining, made it seem dreamlike, otherworldly, as if this extraordinary experience were happening while he lay buoyant in some tepid stream or was held in the windshifted topmost branches of some mighty tree.” (Boyd, Penguin Books 1993.)

Yet why am I telling you all this and does film need another failed and dizzying romance when the price of a movie ticket alone is enough to buy a hearty meal? Maybe we need something to preoccupy ourselves and distract us from grumbling stomachs much less vertigo, apart from the prospect of having one of the Eigenmanns either Sid or Ryan play the cuckold. Maybe we’re doing it for Delphine, Carla or Bela, who could be playing the piano as another century turns, Claire de Lune coming on as Megamall fades in the distance.