John Bengan
At the beginning of Historya ni Ha, Lav Diaz’s relatively compact articulation of the artist’s stake in a troubled society, we hear a voice addressing his paramour. Hernando Alamada (John Lloyd Cruz), a bodabil performer on his last tour aboard a cruise ship called Mayflower, writes a letter to his girlfriend Rosetta: he wants to return to their hometown, Tagsibol, and marry her. Soon to obtain a teacher’s license, he also plans to retire from show business. In spite of these prospects, Hernando broods over the end of his career, an indecision that will soon be compounded by devastating news.
As with Mula sa Kung Ano ang Noon and Panahon ng Halimaw, Lav Diaz retrofits the past to the present to create an origin story of sorts for the country’s slide, once again, into authoritarianism. The result is surprisingly lucid even in its absurdity. This time Diaz has chosen a critical period: it is 1957 and Ramon Magsaysay’s plane has gone missing. On the ship, Hernando meets Jack Agawin (Erwin Romulo). When Hernando refuses Agawin’s request for an interview, the journalist slyly refers to Hernando’s arrest over his ties with the Hukbalahap and asks whether the movement has disillusioned him. “Disillusioned ako sa immaturity ng mga tao (I am disillusioned with the people’s immaturity),” replies Hernando. Later they meet with Congressman Torres (Jun Sabayton), who, suspecting that Magsaysay is dead, begrudgingly eulogizes the president’s legacy. The late president, the congressman muses, ran over Philippine politics by capitalizing on charisma. The “ignorant” masses will now keep seeking a comparably magnetic leader. The congressman, belatedly admiring the efficacy of a tactic, sings one of Magsaysay’s catchy jingles, “Mambo, mambo, Magsaysay…Our democracy will die kung wala si Magsaysay.” Such mythmaking will surely happen again, the false prophets yet to come.
Upon arriving in Tagsibol, Hernando lives with his twin sister Hernanda and her family. From one of his suitcases, he retrieves Ha, which when brought to life with Hernando’s voice turns into a livelier, diminutive version of the ventriloquist himself. Barely about the size of his puppeter’s arm, Ha has a habit of rambling lyrical and making acerbic observations. Through him Hernando constructs cryptic parables about golden dolls, missing cats, and deceptively attractive cages, his political barbs ribbonned with rhymes. Later Hernando learns from his sister that Rosetta has been betrothed to a powerful man to whom her parents owe a debt. Shattered, Hernando leaves Tagsibol, giving his sister the earnings he’s supposedly set aside to start a new life. He instructs Hernanda to use the money for her children’s education so that they may escape Tagsibol someday. Using his brother-in-law’s carabao and cart, Hernando sets off again, destination unknown, and Ha packed in his luggage.
On the road they pass by a boy named Joselito (Jonathan O. Francisco), the same boy who catches up with Hernando at night and sleeps next to the cart. In the morning, Hernando and Ha observe Joselito asleep on the ground. In a quietly peculiar scene, Ha extends his wooden hand onto the boy, trying to wake him—a moment that will haunt after the boy, bringer of the nation’s hopes, becomes collateral in an unfolding chaos. With Hernando refusing to talk directly to others, Ha serves as his conduit, conveying a weariness of the spirit that can only be mitigated by performance. The boy is on his way to Isla Diwata where a “gold rush” has been attracting people to the island. He tells Hernando that the cheapest boat going to Diwata is in a barrio called Daang Tapak. Before they part ways, He says to the boy: “Hindi lang ginto ang kasagutan sa lahat ng problema (Gold is not the only answer to everything)”
Hernando and Ha cross paths with two other travelers headed for Isla Diwata: Sister Lorenza (Mae Paner), a nun doing missionary work; and Dahlia (Dolly De Leon), a woman who wants to put up a “business” on what they believe to be a bustling island. Eventually Joselito catches up with them. They ask Hernando to take them to Daang Tapak, and while reluctant at first, Hernando agrees. However, Ha is wary of their companions. In a grassy clearing, Hernando talks to Ha in private. Ha chides Hernando for being too kind and suggests that they also go to Isla Diwata. “Naroon ang eksena (The events are there.),” says Ha, expressing the artist’s yearning for adulation. “Hindi ka ba napapagod? (Aren’t you tired?),” Hernando asks. Persistent, Ha suggests that they return to Mayflower. When Hernando objects, Ha callously calls him a “loser” for letting Rosetta’s betrayal get to him.
Unlike Diaz’s less successful works in which earnestness slips into tedium, Historya ni Ha has a pulse. Small but keenly observed moments afford the measured pacing the effect of a crescendo. When Ha keeps teasing him for being a “loser,” Hernando hugs his dummy in a gesture of tender resignation. Upon seeing Ha for the first time—Hernando using Ha to buy crackers and Coke at a sari-sari store—Sister Lorenza makes the sign of the cross. After a brief performance, Dahlia reaches out to shake Ha’s little hand. While having lunch on a banana leaf, they ask Hernando why Ha isn’t eating with them. Diaz’s penchant for grand allusions, while clumsy and mechanical in the past, rings vital now, mainly because of Ha, whose uncanny presence upends Diaz’s high seriousness. In a scene in which Ha notices Sister Lorenza reading the Bible, the nun says about the book of Genesis: “Kung paano nagsimula ang lahat (How everything began).” Ha asks, “Mayroon bang kung paano nagwakas ang lahat? (Is there a chapter on how everything ended?)” When Sister Lorenza says no, Ha surmises that the book isn’t complete after all. Dahlia interjects and insists that the Bible is complete because of “the father, the son, and the holy spirit.” Ha quickly punctuates, “Amen.”
Many of Diaz’s characters function more like vessels for his ideas than recognizable, dimensional personas, their garrulousness flowing unmistakably from Diaz himself, the master puppeteer who cares not whether the strings he’s pulling are a little too taut and, often, too visible. But in telling the story of a desolate ventriloquist and former revolutionary lugging around a wooden doll that resembles him, Diaz found a strange but appropriately shaped container for his reflections on our current epidemic of falseness, and in the process, manages an oblique treatise on his methods. A ventriloquist, after all, performs alongside the doll, and the human voice is thrown, seemingly splintered, to emerge as though from somewhere else. The notoriously long takes of characters walking through the jungle don’t induce listlessness; the film, instead, hums with propulsion: Will they ever reach Isla Diwata? What will people there make of Ha and Hernando?
In Daang Tapak, the travelers find a village controlled by Among Kuyang (Teroy Guzman in a disarming turn) and his quick-tempered sister Matilde (Hazel Orencio). In a few beats, the scenes in Daang Taak condense the madness of the present. Men carrying long firearms patrol the dirt roads, even though there are no other combatants in sight. When Sister Lorenza explains why a thirteen-year-old traveler could not produce a cedula, the retort of one of the armed men sounds as though it had been lifted straight out of a comments thread on Facebook: “Masyado po kayong magaling, Sister. Ang bobo namin. (You are too smart, Sister. We are so dumb.)” Meanwhile, a proxy for unhinged disciples, Matilde throws raging tantrums whenever she fails to hold people back from seeking an audience with her brother. At one point she childishly stabs a tree trunk with a bolo, and in another, she comically drives away a man who is only asking for a glass of water. When the women find out about the expensive fare to Diwata, Sister Lorenza and Dahlia approach Matilde, and later Among Kuyang, but fail to persuade either of them to defray the cost. They ask help from Hernando, who, in turn, uses his stature to negotiate with a tyrant. In a terrifically comic and tense sequence, bodyguards cautiously lift their rifles as Hernando reaches for an object from inside his suitcase, and lower the weapons when they see it’s only a doll. Upon meeting Ha, Among Kuyang excitedly agrees to a staging of a bodabil show, which will render him vulnerable. A drifter (Earl Ignacio) who calls himself Ernesto Gueverra arrives. It turns out Ernesto is a disgruntled Huk who reveals that Among Kuyang posed as a guerilla before fashioning himself into a warlord.
While Hernando stands in for Diaz’s romantic idealist, Ha is pragmatic, mischievous, and enterprising. Cruz doesn’t turn the performance into a demonstration of ventriloquism, but rather a balancing act of emotional tones and vocal textures. His looseness in maneuvering the dummy and the subtle contrast between their personalities and registers imbue the performance with a subjunctive force. Does Ha present Hernado’s truest being? Or does Hernando vanish unknowably behind the artifice? In a conversation with Ha set in front of a mirror, Hernando questions the integrity of their trade, having just made an agreement with Among Kuyang, the show they must put up to distract the devil. Considering the performer whose career is built mostly on matinee idol roles, the scene takes on another dimension. Does John Lloyd Cruz ever think of Popoy Gonzales’s impact on the lives of ordinary people? Maybe not. Nonetheless, the nod to bodabil recalls the theatrical form’s decline in the wake of cinema and, at the same time, its resurgence, albeit transformed, in succeeding formats. (Eat Bulaga’s “kalyeserye,” which birthed a now infamous following that once shattered world records, is a reminder of bodabil’s indelible influence in Philippine entertainment.) It is as though Diaz is also questioning the position of popular entertainment in the edification or the suppression of citizens.
The final two images in Historya ni Ha assert what sounds simple but even more true in a numbingly self-destructive nation. Hernando, newly settled in another village, repeats again and again with hypnotic patience the Abakada to young and adult students. Finally he writes to Rosetta, a more sanguine voice laid over the sight of Hernando and two men working in the forest to build a latrine for a villager. They will be constructing a school, Hernando says in the letter, or digging a grave for one of the locals who died from another illness that could have been prevented. Yet the film ends with a promise: even if history itself is the enemy, Hernando swears he won’t allow it to destroy him. The voice doesn’t match the moving figures on screen, but Diaz’s execution has never been so perfectly timed.