Ian Harvey A. Claros
As a phrase on its own, Kun Maupay Man It Panahon, translated to English as “whether the weather is fine,” opens up a moment of indecision, conditionality, and perhaps precarity premised on both time and weather. In the case of Carlo Francisco Manatad’s debut film, it commences with Miguel (Daniel Padilla) waking up to a mountain of rubble and ruin with its vestigial walls barely standing to suggest that it was once a home. Around him were tossed furniture, a huge business signage, dying fishes out of the water, other survivors walking by, and corpses in various stages of decomposition. All of these are conjured in one frame to offer a sight of death yet almost always embedded in an interplay of anguish and dark humor as if to propose a sense of vitality and a march of time. However, as Miguel surveys the place of unending wreckage, he is met with an announcement that another typhoon is about to come. It is, undoubtedly, the power of Kun Maupay Man It Panahon: to render a genus of apocalyptic time within cinema where storms haplessly come and go leaving little to no space for the rituals of mourning and rehabilitation to proceed. It is an apocalypse made more terrifying with the idea that no one ever fully distinguishes whether the sunlight signals survival or an anticipation of another storm.
Set as an aftermath of the super-typhoon Haiyan, the film centers on Miguel alongside his mother Norma (Charo Santos-Concio) and friend Andrea (Rans Rifol) who, upon knowing the news of an upcoming storm, decides to evacuate to Manila, presumably a site of refuge. Marred with insurgencies, feudalism, and uneven development, Kun Maupay Man It Panahon intensifies the provincial anxiety by including climate emergencies as triggers to abandon a historically inhospitable rural life. While Miguel’s choice to flee Tacloban is clear, both Andrea and Norma do not share the same passion for it as the former is only enticed by a Manila cabaret as a chance to be a performer, and the latter is only bent on finding his estranged husband Luis. These differing motivations further complicate the already circuitous exodus outside of their city.
Moreover, Manatad constructs a storm-wrecked Tacloban as a frantic dog-eat-dog world where violence can be a weapon, a consequence, or an inescapable fate. In the early stages of the film, we see a tug-of-war between a father and a child, and Miguel and Andrea to loot for live chicken. Both characters would also be able to steal additional food and a bike yet would then be forcibly stolen from them by a gang of kids. Thus, Andrea’s acapella interjection of Kantin Dudg’s Gi Fingers never falls short in disclosing a total shortage of needs.
The entire film is built on a formidable production design that is able to map out a city in disarray and exteriorize the trauma of the typhoon’s survivors. With the lack of proper burial, for instance, it efficiently simulates the disintegration of basic categories between life and death, internal and external, and public and private – paving the way of a new apocalyptic world order. Miguel himself calls his own hometown infernal as they pass through its dark, mud-soaked, and debris-laden labyrinths. As the three of them walked by a bay, one can notice numerous refrigerators floating adrift in the shore like coffins – simultaneously juxtaposed with the joy and nonchalance of the children playing as if it were a usual summer time. What is further laudable is that the constellation of debris and cadavers mobilizes a rehearsal of the abject that draws the audience both distant and close to the ground zero of Typhoon Haiyan without romanticizing the brutality of such a natural disaster.
Crucial in the filmic aura of Kun Maupay Man It Panahon is the Waray language which is not only deployed as a passing tokenism but as an integral aspect of both screenplay and performance. For the case of Daniel Padilla, his lines were spoken as a native of Tacloban as he also enunciates the language based on his proximity and affection for his hometown. On the other hand, Charo Santos, as a Tagalog, speaks Waray empathically internalizing the untranslatability of the region’s collective suffering. Manatad’s linguistic choice does not only champion the protracted desires and struggles for the representation of various mother tongues in national cinema but more ostensibly lays bare before its global audience a particular tonality of trauma as a visceral repository of Leyte’s catastrophic history. Thus, it is a cinema that implicates itself in the working-through of trauma by talking to the victims first before the world.
In the climax of the film, Norma asks his son Miguel to intentionally beat her as the Astrodome only accepts wounded survivors. Certainly, this is in the hopes of finding her husband in perhaps the only place where they have never been to in the entire city. At the first instance, Miguel disagrees to this bizarre proposal yet provoked by a peculiar sense of mercy and retarded instincts, he gives in to injure his own mother with a stone. Crippling and in immense pain, Norma finds her way inside the Astrodome only to realize that Luis is not there. At this moment, Miguel is left alone to fend for himself and proceed with the exodus to Manila since Andrea was already deified by a Christian cult who took notice of her miraculous powers when she brought back an ailing puppy to life. This uncanny scene would not even be confronted by the slightest resistance from Andrea or Miguel; only with an almost catatonic surrender.
The film is replete with these eerie encounters that reveal how auteurial choices at large have obviously embraced the surreal and absurd in rehearsing the aftermath of Haiyan. Without question, this attests to Manatad’s métier in cinema as a medium of narrating difficult histories and also a concerted effort and self-reflexivity not to fall prey into the trap of melodrama only to romanticize resilience. The limit, however, of this technique is that there is a slim chance of originality since there has almost always been a propensity to conscript postmodernity and fragmentation as a convenient handling of trauma. In fact, familiar styles of filmic exploration on the surreal can be seen in Khavn de la Cruz’s Balangiga: Howling Wilderness (2017) where Manatad has worked extensively as editor. In effect, the film’s ecological commitment and historicity are also distracted if not impeded with its belabored myth-making of the Typhoon Haiyan’s aftermath. At any rate, the missing piece here is the very materiality and the broad networks of power that render Miguel’s home inhabitable leaving him with the only recourse to journey to Manila with no assurance that his choice is not another catastrophe.