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Biyaheng Lupa
English Translation: Overland Journey
English Title: Soliloquy
Year of Release: 2009
Director & Screenwriter: Armando Lao
Producer: Quantum Films
Cast: Jaclyn Jose, Julio Diaz, Coco Martin, Angel Aquino, Eugene Domingo, Susan Africa, Shamaine Buencamino, Mercedes Cabral, Carl Guevara, Allan Paule, Andoy Ranay, Archie Adamos, Jess Evardone, Jose Almojuela, Isabella de Leon, Mely Soriano
The stories of various people come together via their thoughts in a bus ride from Manila to Legazpi City. Anabel, a young single woman, is pregnant and, wracked by guilt, worries that she might give birth to a monster. Alex, whose ambitions have fallen apart, desperately clings to the pyramid scheme that he believes will be his key to success. A mother, Irene, regrets leaving her son so she can work abroad. Fina, a game-show contestant who finally admits to herself her dissatisfaction with her husband, crumbles at the prospect of meeting him once more. Helen, a woman conducting an extramarital affair, is anxious to maintain her secret. Her reverie is interrupted when a gossipy spinster, Lilian, boards the bus; in turn Lilian sets her eyes on Pepe, the conductor, just as a gay passenger similarly eyes Obet, a dreamy, melancholy young man who turns out to be homophobic. Even Mickey, a deaf-mute, articulates his thoughts as he leaves his foster home to visit his biological mother’s grave. As more passengers hop on and off the bus, these and other stories either find, in their own ways, their own welcome (or unwelcome) resolutions.
A busload of working-class characters journey to a distant destination and see, not the scenery passing by, but their past follies, present predicaments, and uncertain futures. The movie first takes on the difficult challenge of pulling off a genuine multiple-character narrative, perhaps the most ambitious among local features, with 16—or possibly 17, counting the unseen bus driver—lead actors. It then complements this with the audacious technique of externalizing these personalities’ inner lives by allowing us to literally hear their thoughts. The end of the film, coinciding with the end of their trip, demonstrates not just how rare it is to encounter a fully developed aesthetic philosophy in a first film, but also how preferable this is to the skills display that most debuting directors feel obliged to demonstrate. Perhaps more significantly, in light of Lao’s extensive influence in local film-project conceptualizations, is in how Biyaheng Lupa departs from Lao’s utilization of real-time presentations, notably in his collaborations with filmmakers who first garnered global attention via the scripts he wrote for them. Lao described BL as reliant on poetic time, where cosmic principles impinge on the unfolding of the narrative, as opposed to the duration-dependent real time and his earlier deployment of character-based dramatic time. Such insights on transience, destiny, and the abiding power of memory are brought to bear in the film’s bravura climax, simple in conception, casual in execution, yet grand in the best possible way, where a series of rapturous textual ruptures build up to an incredible final shot that resolves the film narrative in a way that coalesces the literal with the symbolic in a manner that might still have the capacity to surprise avant-gardists wherever they may lurk.
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