The general you deserve
One of the biggest guffaws I heard during a showing of Jerrold Tarog’s Heneral Luna in Power Plant Cinema was when a snooty foreigner in charge of the railway tries to converse with the high-blood Filipino general (John Arcilla) about appropriating a train to transport his troops. The foreigner, dripping with a British accent, tries switching from French to Spanish to English before the exasperated Luna bellows to his men in Tagalog: “Take him away and arrest him, I’m running out of English!”
There were appreciative whoops from the crowd, possibly from people similarly exasperated at us foreigners who fail to master Tagalog.
Going in, I was a little concerned the film would be anti-American propaganda. There was, after all, that spelling of “General” with an “H.” But the movie was nicely subtitled for us lazy Americans, which should also earn it extra pogi points on the festival circuit.
Not that it’s looking for any outside validation. Indeed, part of Heneral Luna’s appeal is that it speaks directly to a modern Filipino audience. It lays out a very 21st-century thesis for what ails the country against a backdrop of the Philippine-American War in 1898. It does so with a blunt reminder at the outset that fact and fiction have been blurred to tell the story (if Quentin Tarantino can do it with Inglourious Basterds, why not us, Tarog seems to say).
It also depicts a Philippines that is plagued by the same troubles that current-day critics gripe about, such as a lack of national unity or love of country. Those problems were there from the start, the script — originally written by E.A. Rocha and Henry Hunt Francia in 1998 but here, one imagines, taken liberties with — tells us again and again. People love their families first, then their neighbors… then somewhere down the line, their country.
It’s a problem Antonio Luna faces from the opening skirmish with US troops, as the Spanish have taken their $20 million and left the battlefield for the Americans to inherit. Luna has a hard time getting some of his men to go over the trenches. Some — like a field commander who would rather laze around in bed with a woman than marshal his troops to aid Luna — deserve to get their scrota squeezed, the tempestuous general decides.
Arcilla is one of the biggest pleasures of this movie, which is part history, part comedy, part gross-out Tarantino flick. As he did in Metro Manila, playing a security guard gone way off the reservation, he breathes fire into his character, going beyond caricature to something larger than life. (My wife says he reminds her of Toshiro Mifune, Kurosawa’s muse.) Whether he’s threatening to kill a presidential guard for wearing a ponytail or cursing up an anachronistic storm (“Putang ina!” he yells at one point, definitely not a common phrase in 1898), Arcilla’s every grimace and bellicose roar reminds us of his impatience with Filipinos, almost as though he’s racing against a clock that’s winding down.
Because his impatience is also the modern Filipino’s impatience: with lousy, lying leaders, who misuse taxpayer money and funds; with mounting traffic. It’s cathartic, perhaps, to see someone getting so pikon even back in 1898.
The Americans, meanwhile, under Gen. Arthur MacArthur (father to Douglas “I Shall Return” MacArthur, played by Romcel Musa), find in Luna a worthy adversary. “He’s the best damn general they have,” admires MacArthur in true John Wayne fashion. Strangely, the Americans are not depicted as the worst villains here; it’s Luna’s own contemporaries who damage the country the most.
It does seem the Philippines in Tarog’s movie could use a little more action and less conversation, especially with a gallery of leaders and elites who either collaborate with the Spanish or line up anew to collaborate with the Americans. Of course, the movie plays up the dramatic fireworks at the expense of all the facts — but at least the fireworks are very entertaining.
A running rivalry with fellow general Tomas Mascardo (Lorenz Martinez) leads to a classic pissing contest, sabers rattling, terse memos sent back and forth, with Mascardo saying he will follow Luna “only when I’m lying inside a wooden coffin.” Luna obliges by bringing a wooden coffin along to their meeting.
Did all this stuff really happen? Every great whopper probably has a kernel of truth, so we can forgive such embellishments as long as they serve the story — and as long as the movie is as watchable as Heneral Luna.
In the end, it’s Luna’s raging commitment to independence — his arrogance, you might say — that undoes him. (Parallels can be drawn with George C. Scott’s hubris in Patton.) As a modern audience, we’re already privy to the end result of this skirmish between the US and Philippines (50 years in Hollywood, forever in TMZ-land was the final result), so it’s no surprise to today’s audiences that the Philippine elites ultimately chose collaboration. What’s still a mystery is who ordered Luna to be killed — a gruesome death that is depicted with so many bullets and flailing bolos that even Tarantino might have dialed it back a bit. The death is supposed to represent a final repudiation of national unity, I suppose (the shot of a Philippine flag burning in the next scene echoes the message in case you happened to miss it): Luna’s death has to be as bloody and violent as that of Jesus Christ, though he’s no savior, exactly. Just a guy who’s really fed up with things not getting any better.
