Ian Harvey Claros
Batsoy (dir. Ronald Espinosa Batallones) opens with an aerial shot of San Dionisio, a coastal town in Ilo-ilo, whose littoral space is surrounded by Mt. Mahapnag and a lush vegetation of what can prematurely be called edenic. Then, the camera fixes its gaze on two siblings Toto (Sean Ethan Sotto) and Nonoy (Markko Cambas) who were busy collecting twigs and branches for firewood amid the midday heat of the sun. The screen’s texture and gradient, in its goal to assert a filmic period, seemingly tames this debilitating heat yet a banter between the two brothers reminds us that their bodies were persisting in a kind of labor that is far from idyllic. Rushed into the expectations of adulthood, Toto assures his younger brother, Nonoy, that after a day’s work they will have something to eat. Nonoy licks his lips and wishfully imagines what could possibly be that food. After which, the screen cuts to the endless thicket of trees that affords a child’s mind to meander beyond their sordid reality.
The film follows the journey of Toto and Nonoy, who were left with their injured father after their mother’s death. The presence of their father was intermittent, often coming out in passing conversations, some of which mentioned his youthful fame as a town boxing champion. Thus, the practical responsibilities of their home was left to their young hands. From the mountain, they proceed to an arduous walk toward the town center where they sell a two days’ worth of collected firewood. The long itinerary provides a consciousness of San Dionisio’s manners and milieu that confront the brute political economy of this archipelagic nation. At a young age, they become subject to an alienation, a violent irony, from a food whose culinary existence is made possible through their tireless toiling for firewood yet this foul system of exchanges banishes them far away from a bowl of hot batchoy.
For this reason, the famed soup of La Paz becomes their objet petit a, a merciless unattainable commodity from whose production they were inseparable yet from whose consumption they were dismissed. The idea of batchoy was far from Toto and Nonoy’s innocent aspiration. It was on a free trip in a carabao-drawn carriage where young girls of their age giddily talked about this sumptuous noodle soup which can be paired with bread or rice cake. Listening to them intently, Nonoy looks at the vast rice fields, the coast and Mt. Mahapnag—all in one frame—as if to yearn for such affordances. In the succeeding dream sequence, Nonoy finds himself before his mother who gently prepares their new found craving which he contently finishes. Toto even had to go as far as fighting in a street boxing match, with no training or preparation, just to afford a special batchoy for his brother—showing how much pain they are ready to trade for a fleeting culinary pleasure.
This swing between dreams and poverty was made more tangible by stereoscoping the narrative within San Dionisio. Its bare, Spartan, and malevolent world is a poignant contrast to Amorsolo’s tropical globe of provincial life in the Philippines where festive merriments were rare and hard labor was the rule. The film never missed the portrayal of rural idiosyncrasies and antics where the sole neighbor with a television and city-based working lady bringing a tin can of assorted Rebisco biscuits become the primus inter pares of the community. Batsoy also has the unmistakable propensity to turn toward the scenery of nature to diffuse tension, imagine possibilities, and assert a natural rootedness of the film.
Yet no matter how remote their lives may seem, the film naturally engulfs San Dionisio within the protocols of Martial Law. It is a strategic play with the period by choosing a setting many times removed from Manila, a center of power which has dominated the imaginaries and nostalgia of that contested period. The mysterious death of Julie Vega, the presence of nutriban and other Imelda Marcos initiated feeding programs, the collective reading of Zuma comics, help weave the effective markers of a period film. This gesture is, of course, a welcome recourse to the impasse of remembering the Marcos regime. At one point of their journey, Toto and Nonoy come across a group of wounded warriors of the insurgency. The elder brother signals Nonoy to hide behind the trees and keenly observe the limping and wounded comrades who retreat from a recent battle. Here, the brothers are inducted to a network of national realities that render San Dionisio indissociable to the plight of its kindred islands. Though in fear, before Toto and Nonoy are reminders that their distance between a bowl of batchoy is more complicated than what they know for it is a brute maze of unknowable contradictions.
While Batsoy succeeds in bringing on screen narratives outside Manila during the Marcos regime, its storytelling can be haphazard and sparse often hiding behind the ruse of fantasy and childish ruminations. Crucial characters such as the parents are left underdeveloped even when their fate has primarily forced their sons to child labor. Some of the acting lose the rawness of human encounters. The caring teacher who gave the sibling Nutribun lacks the tone and eyes to demonstrate affection. Her lines are stoic and cold forgetting that this was supposed to be an almost maternal encounter. Indeed, local languages and provincial imagery alone do not make a good cinema of the regions. In fact, an overreliance on local color can easily fall prey to becoming an exotic show.
Furthermore, the portrayal of insurgency was grossly problematic as it renders the warriors as recklessly violent. Their eyes and demeanor speak of shallow motivations that raise no cogent reason for the protracted war in the provinces. Violence for violence sake. To top it all off, there was also an eerie handling of the Martial Law period as an unproblematic and unperturbed flow of historical time where in truth the countryside has been the harshest site of ideological clashes. In the end, death befalls Nonoy who is a victim of this intricate web of local wars.
The final scene captures Toto running toward his father as if to collapse the divide between innocence and maturity in his painful coming of age. He has just lost his brother Nonoy whose meanderings and dreams intimate that somewhere in the green thicket and sustenance of this coastal town, a batchoy can be possible.