A Film a Week - Sisa

 previously published on Asian Movie Pulse

For a movie, to defy the expectations is not always easy. Sometimes the reason for that lays in our own inability to disregard them in order to approach the film in an honest, fair and square way. Reviewers bear some power and responsibility that comes with it, but we’re all humans after all. In that regard, marketing and PR come as powerful, but ultimately a dangerous tool – if used in a wrong way, it backfires and does the damage.

Case in point: Jun Robles Lana’s newest film “Sisa” that has just premiered at the official competition of Black Nights Film Festival in Tallinn, Estonia. Sold as a war movie and a revenge thriller set just after the American takeover of the Philippines from the Spanish, it turns out to be something else entirely, and not in a good way.

That should be clear from the get-go, since the filmmaker opens the film with a series of info-cards that give us a politicized historical lesson on a pretense of providing some context. The theme is the American occupation of the archipelago in 1899 following the war with the Spanish who ruled the islands for the previous three centuries. Americans have established a reign of terror, executing hundreds of thousands of men and putting women and children in concentration camps. While there were still some fighters trying to resist to the new colonial oppressor from the jungle, the fear of revenge was great and the rest of the population suffered. (At this place, one can’t help asking a question whether the previous Spanish or the subsequent Japanese occupation were any better or milder from the Filipino point of view, but let’s not go down that alley.)

Anyhow, a nameless and seemingly aimless traumatized woman (Hilda Koronel) walks into the fenced village going straight to the guard tower without saying a word. The American soldiers are about to shoot her, but the women from the village beg them to spare her life. The woman does not remember her own name, but gets a new one, Sisa, after a crazed character from a popular book. Simmering with anger that could explode to rage and fury, Sisa observes the proceedings in the village: the openly racist attitude from the camp military commander and the condescending one from the teacher (Isabel Lamers), the pedophilia from the soldiers, the different survival tactics adopted by the different women in the village, from open defiance to accepting the role of the concubines in order to make something for themselves, which almost always results in rivalry and conflict among them.

Given that the men coming to the village to trade goods or to pass the message are no less opportunistic and abusive, one might wonder not if, but when will the titular character lead the rebellion against the cruelty world. Alas, that does not happen, so, instead of a genre movie that we are promised, we get two hours of thinly veiled historical historical lesson from a raging anti-colonial and pretend-feminist perspective garnished with a dose of torture porn to make a point. Basically, a pamphlet.

The acting is underwhelming throughout, given that the cast members usually deliver some rigidly written lines in an amateurish way with more or less theatrics, with the noble exceptions from Hilda Koronel whose character rarely speaks, so the actress has to use her facial expressions and posture as tool more often, which she does quite well, and Isabel Lamers who has enough experience and instinct to make something out of her character. The choice of the actors to play the American soldiers is quite questionable, as it seems that it consists of amateurs that never acted for camera before, but it might be a deliberate statement.

From such a modestly budgeted movie, no one could expect some high production values, but the production design is basic rather than minimalist and the costumes seem lifted directly from a local theater troupe. Some saving grace might be found in Carlo Mendoza’s cinematography, but not for the reason of the cinematography itself, but simply coming from the outdoor locations that could pose as the scenery from a western, adventure or a war movie.

“Sisa” is a highly underwhelming experience, but what frustrates the most is that there was the way for it not to be the case, and that way was pretty obvious. Even on a shoestring budget, adopting a genre approach of a war action movie or a period-set revenge thriller flick would result in a better movie and in a vehicle that could deliver the message in a way that is both more elegant and more loud. It had the character, it had the setting, but its filmmaker might have lacked both courage and skill to do so.