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When Alice (Max Eigenmann), a forty-year-old, independent, and unmarried woman, learns she’s pregnant, she decides she needs an abortion. Anna Isabelle Matutina’s 12 Weeks is one of the few films in the country that touch on this topic, following its main protagonist through the circuitous emotional turns that unfold as she ponders on whether to push through with the procedure or not. Among the few, Lino Brocka’s Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kulang (1974) begins with a forced abortion that leads to Kuala (Lolita Rodriguez) losing her sanity. In Brocka’s work, abortion is a weapon utilized by Cesar (Eddie Garcia) to bestow violence upon Kuala’s own bodily agency, as well to indicate Cesar’s own moral degradation. Meanwhile, Marilou Diaz-Abaya’s Moral (1982) features Joey (Lorna Tolentino), a UP graduate who wants to abort an unwanted pregnancy. Joey, however, fails to convince her friend and mother to provide cash for the procedure. Eventually, she ends up having a miscarriage due to an undiscovered medical condition. 12 Weeks bears some similarities to Joey’s arc in Moral, as both include a complicated mother-daughter relationship that finds a turning point in a miscarriage. These women-centered stories unfold under the shadow of military rule that has either recently passed (as in the case of Moral) or is unfolding in a different location (which is the case for 12 Weeks).
Our initial meeting with Alice is staged like an interrogation. Seated across, she addresses the audience directly, answering questions from a disembodied voice. Her responses and the line of questioning imply that she is being assessed for an illicit procedure, for in the Philippines, abortion remains illegal without exemptions. Questions asked soon become probing and intimate and Alice finds herself answering some and evading others. Eigenmann portrays a character propped up by a quiet, subterranean fortitude. While seemingly undaunted in her responses, the performance is nuanced enough to allow minute moments of doubt to surface. Here then is protagonist shown in a moment of vulnerability, but also, of strength. At times wry and funny, 12 Weeks is a distinctive work that not only touches on a contested medical procedure and women’s rights issue, but also captures some of the experiences and travails of middle-class womanhood in our contemporary period. While not the first of its kind in Philippine cinema, its arrival still feels like a long time coming.
Prior to the medical evaluation, Alice has been attempting to break up with Ben (Vance Larena), her long-time, live-in partner. While capable of being gentle, Ben is also feckless and infantile, all histrionics and tantrums, and a foil to Alice’s no-nonsense, everyday exasperation. During their argument, he hurls insults about Alice’s age and questions her desirability before literally throwing things to get her attention. Alice pointedly ignores him with her phone as she would a child, scrolling instead for a red pair of stilettos online. They end up sleeping together. The following morning, having interpreted the night’s development as a sign of reconciliation, Ben has left a note, several beer bottles and some cigarette butts in the living room, which Alice cleans up with fury and frenzy. But she is also not feeling well and has rushed to the toilet to puke. Realizing the vomiting as morning sickness due to a possible pregnancy, she hyperventilates. In one interview, Matutina (2022) has described Alice as someone who has learned to rely on herself for most of her life, and thus feels the need to contain and control situations. But if her pregnancy marks a present and future disruption to this state of being, a potential loss of agency over her own body, it is also in her prior romantic and sexual relationship with Ben that she seemingly exhibits a glaring lack of foresight and a sense of letting go. Theirs is a relationship akin to a bad habit, something that you find yourself slipping into out of convenience. That Alice has an amicable friendship with Ben’s sister only further highlights the difficulties of extracting oneself from existing relations, a pregnancy notwithstanding. All throughout, Ben attempts to convince Alice to allow him to return in her life. He visits her house several times in the guise of picking up his personal belongings yet attempts to prolong the visit. Each time he is rebuffed, Ben resorts to childish gestures if not outright anger.
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But it isn’t only Ben that Alice has to deal with. There is also the hovering presence of her mother, Grace (Bing Pimentel). When we first meet Grace, she is looking down on a sleeping Alice. She wakes her up and admonishes her for not closing the front door again. All throughout dinner, Grace gives unsolicited comments about her adobo, the kitchen sponge, how dishes should be washed, and why one shouldn’t drink coffee at night. The younger woman answers back sulkily for the most part. It is an interesting and strained dynamic, one explained by the fact that Grace was an Overseas Filipino Worker (OFW) who wasn’t around when Alice was growing up. Later, we find out that Grace had known about the pregnancy through Ben. Mother and daughter argue when Grace intuits that Alice is considering an abortion, a decision Grace attempts to thwart by revealing that she had also considered aborting Alice in the past. The older woman insists on a prenatal checkup on the weekend. Alice, however, had already asked help from Lorna (Claudia Enriquez), a friend and co-employee at a non-governmental organization (NGO), to contact someone who provides abortion services for women. While serving as a confidant to Alice, Lorna herself is not without her own personal burdens. Dealing with the cancer diagnosis of her husband, Lorna is at times unable to empathize with Alice out of sheer exhaustion. Throughout the film, tensions often arise between the two, even as they continue to support each other as friends.
It takes time for Alice to hear back from Lorna’s contact regarding the abortion schedule. In the interim, she unhappily goes through a prenatal checkup with her mother who cannot contain her excitement about the pregnancy. So much so that Grace chooses to keep the sonogram, gleefully staring at the small image. The ease with which the checkup was booked, alongside the presumption of the doctor that Alice would want to keep the baby (she tells Alice to come back in two weeks, warns her of the dangers of the first trimester, and prescribes medication to help avoid miscarriage) contrasts greatly with the difficulties of getting a safe abortion in the country. When Alice is finally able to meet the contact person for the abortion, she is dismayed to find that she must go through a lengthy interview assessment and then return on a different day for the procedure itself.
In the midst of this personal crisis, the Marawi siege unfold in the background. In their office, employees watch as Martial Law in Mindanao is declared and Alice had to comfort a co-employee whose family is affected by the ongoing conflict. Their NGO decides to send people to assess the situation of the bakwit at Marawi City, while the rest are to check on the evacuees in Iligan. Alice is tasked as one of two to go to Marawi, but the departure date conflicts with her scheduled abortion procedure. She argues with a fellow employee, Gus (Nor Domingo), to be allowed to depart at a later time without telling him her reasons for delaying.
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Grace later visits Alice and gifts her with old infant clothes. Bought by Grace for a younger Alice during her working days in Hong Kong, they didn’t reach Alice until now. While deep in thought and folding the box of clothing, Alice eventually decides to skip her abortion schedule. She later tells Lorna that she’s considering the idea of herself as a mother. Alice’s change of mind is a particularly strong point of the film, showcasing the highly personal and idiosyncratic process of decision-making that women might go through. But in the aftermath of Alice’s decision to keep the child, Ben slowly attempts to ingratiate himself back to Alice’s life. He shuttles her to and from her office by car, and even accompanies Alice to the next prenatal checkup. Soon, he is back to staying nights at her house. However, it doesn’t take long before Ben is once again back to her old self, carelessly smoking while Alice is in the same room or leaving Alice to clean up after him around the house. Alice’s new decision also changes things at work. When Gus finds out about the pregnancy, he immediately denies her clearance to go to the field and refuses to discuss the matter further. Relegated to office work, Alice and her co-employees in Metro Manila receive updates and video interviews on the experiences of the bakwit. And seemingly relenting to the new limitations and conditions set by her pregnancy, Alice also decides to take her doctor’s suggestion to file a week-long leave.
In one particular scene of interest, Alice waits on the sidewalk for Ben to pick her up after work. Peering through the darkness, she spots a lone motorcycle coming down the street and immediately steps back in fear, partially hiding her body with the open metal gate behind her. In 12 Weeks there is a subtle but pervasive hint of violence, helped by the stark contrast in which scenes have been lighted. It is a violence linked to men. When we first meet Ben, he sits in the shadows, arguing with Alice. On the television, Alice watches the Defense Secretary justify the imposition of Martial Law. And in the period of the misogynist Duterte, a time of tokhang and political killings, a motorcycle rider in the dark is dangerous and suspect. The social violence hinted at this scene foreshadows the personal violence that is to come for Alice.
Ben picks up Alice from work and they drive to one of his late-night gigs. He tells Alice he’s excited to play a new song, perhaps one that was written to win Alice back. But he’s inebriated and driving a tad too fast. When Alice asks him to slow down, he dismisses her request, telling her to simply relax. They end up hitting a traffic barrier and Alice bruises her lips on the dashboard. They argue as a result and Alice insists on walking as Ben leaves in a fury. After a while, she realizes that she is bleeding between her legs. She walks towards the nearest hospital as a spot of blood pools on the backside of her dress.
For film theorist Laura Mulvey, the function of the woman in cinema unfolds in two ways. On one hand, she “stands in patriarchal culture as a signifier for the male other” (169), marginalized and castigated, but a threat to the status quo, nonetheless. And on the other, she bears a child which serves as her entry into the symbolic. That is, in having a child the woman gains significance. And yet after fulfilling her maternal role, “her meaning in the process is at an end” (168). Maternity makes sense only in the way in which it further replicates the patriarchal order. The first sense, the woman as threatening other, is made palpable through the cultural conditions under Rodrigo Duterte’s presidential term and his numerous attacks against women. This context frames the narrative that unfolds. But it is the second sense that is more fully explored in 12 Weeks.
Inclusion (or exclusion) in the symbolic is reflected in how different characters pertain to the unborn child. Initially for Alice, contemplating abortion, it is a fetus. Ben refers to it as their baby while Grace is understandably excited to have an apo. Through this naming, what is revealed are the roles that the potential child opens up. In other words, what it would allow the characters to inhabit in the symbolic realm, bringing them into the fold of the patriarchal and heteronormative order. For Ben, it is the respectability implied by fatherhood and family, of which he seems ill prepared for. His attempts at being better, i.e., shaving his beard, finding a more stable job, attempting to fix the faucet, points to the ways in which he wrests meaning and relevance, a co-optation of the unborn child as catalyst for his personal transformation. It centers the pregnancy towards his own subjective development. Meanwhile, for Grace, it’s a chance at redemption. If she was unable to be a mother to Alice, she can now be a visible and present grandmother. Alice herself warms up to the notion of being a mother, perhaps contemplating how she can raise a child differently and at times, seduced by the idea of having Ben as co-parent to the child. Having more financial stability – ironically, in part due to Grace’s years of working from afar as an OFW— she, at least, won’t need to work in a different country.
Near the end of the film, we find Alice lying in a hospital bed. She is conscious but sullen. When Grace arrives to talk about the D and C procedure, we know that Alice had a miscarriage. Her daughter mentions that perhaps she should’ve pushed through with the abortion, which leads Grace to ask why she changed her mind in the first place. Her daughter stares back, unresponding, and the two embrace, seemingly reconciled in their shared grief. Ultimately, the film ends with a flashback. It is 1977 in Cotabato City and Grace has just given birth to Alice. We hear gunfire in the background as another woman hands the infant Alice to her mother.
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Situating Grace’s pregnancy under the shadow of warfare, the film highlights the generational trauma that women in the country often have to contend with. It’s a trauma that comes full circle in the closing scene. Even while living outside areas of conflict, the lives of Grace and Alice have been indubitably changed by dire national and economic issues. The threats and effects of Martial Law link both mother and daughter. Alice has had to deal with it through her work in the NGO, while Grace’s work as an OFW was shaped by the labor export policy of Ferdinand Marcos Sr. But the film also surfaces the resistance of women, or mostly, the fortitude to bear and withstand the violence in their environment. In one scene, the television shows a woman activist railing against the imposition of Martial Law. In another, Alice wears a white shirt bearing the slogan “Never Again” as she opens a box of red stilettos. In the comfort room, sensing that Alice may be pregnant, a Muslim woman hands her candy to help with her nausea. 12 Weeks allows these glimmers of solidarity and courage within a story of women who are complex, flawed, difficult, but ultimately, human. Carrying on regardless, they act with an often quiet, but at times joyful, conviction to support each other amidst the burden of violence and the travails of everyday life.
References:
Matutina, Anne Isabelle. “AMP Interviews: Anna Isabelle Matutina.” Asian Movie Pulse, 29 Aug 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tzyDHgQ35s.
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, 1975, A Critical and Cultural Theory Reader, 2nd edition, Antony Easthope and Kate McGowan, Open University Press, 2004, pp. 168–176.