Tito Quiling, Jr.
One slow afternoon, Leonor (played by Sheila Francisco) sees a newspaper advertisement for screenplay submissions after replacing an old light bulb inside her bedroom. Downstairs, her son Rudy (Bong Cabrera) argues with a mailman about their electricity bill. While an action movie plays on the television, the former genre director takes out an unfinished screenplay from her trunk, titled Ang Pagbabalik ng Kwago. This scene sets off the narrative which reveals her family’s strained relationships, her losses, and intention to finish a film-related project in her twilight years.
Martika Ramirez Escobar’s first directorial feature, Leonor Will Never Die (2022), follows a charming retiree named Leonor, in her pursuit of finishing a screenplay for an action film, featuring a benevolent construction worker, Ronwaldo (Rocky Salumbides) who seeks justice for the undue murders of his older brother Conrado (Raion Sandoval) and mother Lolita (Rosario Elena Perez). In action films, the main elements include: a spectacular physical action, a narrative emphasis on fights, chases, explosions, and a combination of state-of-the-art special effects and stunt-work. In Filipino action films, special effects may not be found consistently. Works in this genre are filled with car chases, stunt-work, physical brawls, and firearm fights within urban neighborhoods and oftentimes, inside warehouses. Moreover, action films regularly feature male leads with a younger female love interest, as the hero navigates the villain’s strategic responses. But the film goes beyond the archetypal male hero that stereotypically constitutes the action genre. With Leonor, Escobar features a grandmother as the main character caught between two filmic worlds.
An inciting incident shows Leonor working on her script, when a neighbor throws an analog television out the window during an argument. The set falls on Leonor and renders her in a comatose. As she is rushed to the hospital, a dream sequence follows, showing the grandmother falling into a colorful abyss, and onto a mattress. As Leonor wakes up in her screenplay’s reality, she goes through the slums and encounters Ronwaldo during a brawl at the beerhouse with Ricardo (Ryan Eigenmann), one of the villains, who forces Ronwaldo’s eventual love interest Isabella (Rea Molina) to come with him, ignoring her protests. An enthusiastic Leonor becomes entangled in Ronwaldo’s world. At first, her omniscient statements are perceived as bizarre by Ronwaldo and Isabella. Eventually, he returns his maternal affection and Isabella develops a similar view.
The cinematography by Carlos Mauricio and Eero Yves Francisco’s production design mutually render the film-within-a-film approach successfully. Wide overhead shots of the urban locations set the tone for the subsequent chase and fight scenes between Ronwaldo and the thugs, while intimate dialogues between characters use medium and close-up shots, all their personal items visible in the background. Zoom-ins are also scattered in the sequences as a staple camerawork. The steady intercuts between Leonor’s world and Ronwaldo’s are marked by the changes from widescreen (16:9) to classic television (4:3) aspect ratios. While this is a classic cinephile touch, the shifts match how the Philippine action genre thrived during the 1970s and 1980s—from the slim cinema screens to the bulky television sets inside homes.
As writer and director, Escobar’s eccentric organization of sequences that present fictional characters producing their own imagined world and personalities, can be read as a mise-en-abyme, where the plot presents a film-within-a-film. In this structure, the film being produced within the film, refers to the real film being organized. Apart from focusing on Leonor as the primary figure drawing up a fictional character her action film (perhaps as a swan song), Escobar refers to her own film being a production in itself, as opposed to crafting a work to suspend the audience’s disbelief.
Additionally, many sequences show the Escobar’s actors interacting in between takes, reading their lines, gaffers fixing their equipment on-location, including an editing timeline. Escobar’s work has a meta-filmic approach, where the film informs the audience that they are viewing a work of fiction. In the film, Leonor constantly breaks the viewers’ suspension of disbelief, as she writes the scenes and narrates the exchanges between her characters during key sequences and when she participates in them. While some audiences may find this technique perplexing, this method of storytelling generates a stimulating take to cultivate awareness on the characters’ development, and how the primary figure ties in with the director’s intent to showcase an unconventional lead character in an action genre.
The film continues to follow Leonor’s adventures and interactions with her characters, mostly with Ronwaldo. While working at the site, Ronwaldo is visited by Ricardo’s minions who threaten him as they keep looking for Isabella. In their clash, when Ronwaldo’s co-worker gets shot, His rage gets him to overpower both goons. He ties them up and pours concrete on them with no remorse. This guiltless act indicates Ronwaldo’s aim to unapologetically seek retribution, which is exacerbated when Ricardo comes to their home, and shoots Lolita who is hiding in her bedroom. In a fit of rage, Ronwaldo drives a nail into Ricardo’s left eye, and leaves him dead. However, he gets captured by another set of goons. Leonor sees him being taken away, who is concealed in an outhouse. As with most action films, the high point happens in a warehouse, where Ronwaldo and Isabella are held captive by a vengeful Mayor (Dido dela Paz), the father of Ricardo.
The film switches between Leonor and her family’s world, and Leonor’s imagined reality in Kwago with her characters. Leonor minimally responds to the characters from her world as they keep monitoring her condition. Dra. Valdez (Tami Monsod) mentions to Rudy that his mother is in a state of “conscious sleep.” Leonor does not respond to her son’s questions. However, at the peak of her screenplay’s world (referring to the fight scenes and her characters’ musings), she moves her hands, as if encoding the dialogue and scene descriptions madly on a typewriter.
In Leonor’s world, her estranged husband Valentin (Allan Bautista), a former action film star, is detached and constantly preoccupied with his image as a barangay captain. Her son, Rudy is frustrated with Leonor as her primary caregiver. While it seems that Leonor overlooking the electricity bill and declining to move out of their house indicates her stubbornness due to age, her refusal to leave, stems from her grief of losing her other son, Ronwaldo (Anthony Falcon). Leonor wants to hold on to the memories contained in their house, which relates to her deceased son, who appears in the film as a translucent figure occasionally responding to his family’s monologues.
Leonor goes after the group in hopes of rescuing both Isabella and Ronwaldo. Back in her world, she disappears, much to the surprise of Rudy, Valentin, and Dra. Valdez. However, Junior (John Paulo Rodriguez), a mute child who shares a love of action films with Leonor, comes to the hospital and alerts the crowd to direct their attention to the television in the lobby. The screen shows Leonor at the warehouse, which prompts Rudy to try and get her attention, but to no avail. Rudy bashes his head on the television to ‘enter’ Leonor’s filmic world and get her back. The climax shows Leonor stepping out of her hiding spot and reuniting with Rudy. She also encounters a now corporeal Dead Ronwaldo as one of the henchmen, who warns her to leave as the goons look for the intruder. The next sequence shows Ronwaldo, Rudy, Isabella, and Leonor beating the Mayor and his thugs, who were all slain. But amidst the fray, Leonor gets shot. A sentimental farewell follows, with Ronwaldo apologizing to Leonor, Isabella crying, and Rudy sharing affectionate words for his mother, perhaps for the last time. One of the most resounding statements in the film came from Leonor, who reminds them that they are the ones who ‘write’ the course of their lives.
In Leonor, Tagalog songs accompany the changes in mood and emotive planes. In Corinne De San Jose’s sound design, the sequences are complemented by melodramatic instrumentals, as seen in the sentimental moments between Leonor, Ronwaldo, Rudy, and Dead Ronwaldo. Heavy percussions serve as backgrounders in action sequences, while upbeat mixes are used in comedic scenes and the production members’ interactions in the film’s behind-the-scenes footage.
The music helmed by Alyana Cabral, Pan de Coco, and Joseph Salcedo, provides Leonor a distinct atmosphere that inject local images through the songs written by Cabral (“Ibon at Bala”), with Ghabby Gee, Joe Salcedo, and Juanito Encantado for “Walang Wala” and “Tanging Tunay.” Slum communities, construction sites, sari-sari stores, and roadside arm-wrestling matches form part of these local images. Penned by Edmund Fortuno and performed respectively by Pan de Coco and the Anakbayan Band, Ronwaldo’s emblematic song, “Pagbabalik ng Kwago”, further reinforces the classic narrative structure in action films. Clandestine activities turn into hostile scenes involving the hero’s loved ones as collateral damage, over the course of resolving the main conflict of power imbalance between heroes and villains, as one conquers the other.
Lawrence Ang’s firm editing sustains the thematic explorations in Leonor, as they experiment with the narrative structure and the denouement. While Leonor’s world has crisp hues and clear shots, in the world of Kwago, the colors are saturated and grainy frames evoke the mood of the 1970s and 1980s Filipino action films. Each of these encounters can independently heighten the tension towards the end of the film, but all scenes mesh well as part of the main plot. With two films at work—Escobar writing Leonor’s story and Leonor writing Ronwaldo’s narrative—who or what holds the reins in pushing the narrative forward? While the screenplay maps out the narrative, the editing stands as a primary mover. Ang’s work impacts both Escobar and Leonor’s films as he integrates two cinematic worlds, whose production runs alongside each other, at times re-working the sequences as they move on.
A personal touch is shown when Escobar uses her own voice in the film, as a director and writer contemplating over her choices of concluding Leonor’s story. If one can revise a story or edit the characters’ engagements as the work is produced, how can a film be efficiently closed? Escobar and Ang’s banter on the rooftop set against the evening skyline of Metro Manila, captures the film’s intent with their storytelling. Instead of allowing the story to be largely framed by the filmic worlds of Leonor and Kwago, the editor and the filmmaker consult one another about how the film can be edited for a proper ending, which interestingly, includes them in the narrative. Straying from the traditional resolution in commercial action films, where the characters find peace, the inclusion of the editing timeline and their exchanges signify how film language needs to emphasize the relationship between visual cues for an effective, stronger conclusion. This time, it is Escobar who narrates the events with Ang, as his smartphone rings, leading into the next scene.
In a strange turn, the characters perform a rather lengthy song and dance number in a construction site, coming from the last sequence, with bloodied temples and partially-ripped clothes. Leonor leads the group as she sings “Tanging Tunay”—perhaps as a nod to her experiences in her own world and in the screenplay, measuring the realities of these filmic worlds.
As Leonor physically rises above the rest of the characters from Ang Pagbabalik ng Kwago and her world, she closes the film on a brighter mood, her smile carrying a hopeful tone. While physical bodies vanish over time, memories of one’s encounters can strengthen what was left behind. In Leonor’s case, the work that she leaves can render her eternal. Her expression refers to an earlier remark from Escobar. While our lives cannot be reversed or edited, our stories can be re-structured in the midst of uncertainty and futility; where intra- and interpersonal relations create amusing episodes that can be projected and mirrored by the stories we watch onscreen.