Jaime Oscar M. Salazar
Kung Paano Hinihintay ang Dapithapon (2018), directed by Carlo Enciso Catu, revolves around Tere (Perla Bautista) and Celso (Menggie Cobarrubias), a couple who are both roughly in their seventies. Their partnership plays out as a riff off the truism that familiarity breeds contempt, being defined at least as much by peevish bickering and casual disparagement as by sincere respect and gentle concern. Their well-appointed home, where they spend most of their days, functions as the nerve center of their blended family—Tere has a son, Chito, and Celso a daughter, Marissa, from previous relationships.
On the same night that Tere and Celso celebrate their 27th year of togetherness over dinner with Chito, Marissa, and Marissa’s husband and children, Tere receives a telephone call, during which she learns that Bene (Dante Rivero), the husband from whom she has been long estranged, has been diagnosed with terminal cancer and would like to see her. Tere agrees, a decision that gradually leads her, Bene, and Celso to revisit their divergent pasts and contemplate their shared present within the circle of illumination cast by the looming face of death.
(Still photo from Kung Paano Hinihintay ang Dapithapon‘s cinemalaya.org page)
Although its screenplay, by John Carlo Pacala, is given to the occasional stilted exchange or contrived moment—as well as subjects Chito and, especially, Marissa, to treatment that winds up being somewhat adventitious—Dapithapon deals with the imminence of the end of life in a manner that is largely pruned of melodrama and mawkishness. It unreels at a deliberate pace, heightened in no small part by the tendency of cinematographer Neil Daza to dwell on faces, to linger on objects, evoking the gaze of one who, about to depart from home for an indefinite period, strives to bid farewell to each sight and impress everything in memory. Moreover, the characters of the film, even in moments of crisis—and for all their physical closeness and psychological entanglement—rarely yield to strong emotion, as if zealous of their dignity or obdurate in their docility before circumstance.
If its title is any indication, the film is possessed of a hortatory or didactic spirit—the official English translation is Waiting for Sunset, but it might be better rendered as How to Wait for Sunset. What it seems to seek to persuade viewers of are the ostensible virtues of practicing restraint, especially in one’s dotage. The act of waiting, in this sense, would appear to consist of adapting, as necessary, to the vagaries of life while asking as little of it as possible. The three main characters interact mostly with each other, their respective residences, particularly Bene’s ancestral house, serving as spaces where they all but cloister themselves. But a tension obtains here: Bene, Tere, and Celso are clearly animated by desires that, in view of the inevitability of death, are staggering in their immodesty: to be, to persist in being, and to do so in the company of familiar, if not necessarily beloved, others. How, then, to make sense of their apparent lack of avidity?
The austerity of passion that pervades the film finds its fullest expression in the person of Tere. In spite of her being suddenly abandoned by Bene after more than 20 years of marriage—Bene claims to have woken up one day to the discovery that he no longer loved her—Tere acquiesces, without rancor, only nervousness, to his request for a visit, after which, over his feeble protestations, she takes it upon herself to look after him; she later recruits Celso to provide assistance. Moreover, in an account of her own life that she narrates to Celso’s grandson, garbed, if clumsily, in the guise of a fairy tale about a Princess of Quails, Tere indicates that the choice that she and Celso made to enter into an unwed union was arrived at out of neither ardor nor materialism, but the need to assuage the commonplace dread of passing away alone, unwitnessed, unremarked upon.
What Tere and Celso share, then, is a species of intimacy that is not premised on, and indeed declines, the presumption of eternity on which the institution of marriage, not to mention notions of romance that are everywhere prevalent, is professedly founded and has frequently foundered—as in the case of Tere and Bene. It is, rather, an intimacy that is contingent on fear, casting out love in favor of comfort. Similarly, an undercurrent of fear drives Bene to contact Tere, Tere to care for Bene, and Celso to join Tere: a triangle of timor mortis.
(Still photo from Kung Paano Hinihintay ang Dapithapon‘s cinemalaya.org page)
Perhaps they are right to be afraid, for disaster strikes whenever they break out of the routines that they have established and seek out quotidian pleasures: seeing a movie, going to the beach. And yet one wonders what might be possible were these characters far less predisposed to “stop for death” than to cultivate a keen thirst for the world that they are soon to leave behind, holding each moment by the stem and up to the dwindling light before drinking it in. Waiting, in this wise, is neither passive nor resigned.