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Pauwi Na
English Translation: On the Way Home
English Title: Pedicab
Year of Release: 2016 / Color with B&W
Director: Paolo Villaluna
Screenwriters: Paolo Villaluna & Ellen Ramos
“Inspired by a news feature article which appeared in the Philippine Daily Inquirer on September 7, 2003,” per opening credit title
Producer: Universal Harvester
Cast: Bembol Roco, Cherry Pie Picache, Meryll Soriano, Jerald Napoles, Jess Mendoza, Chai Fonacier, Bimbo Bautista, Jack the Dog, Shamaine Buencamino, Melinda Tan de Guzman, John Paul Dragin, Emmanuel Dela Cruz, Marichu Belarmino-Cariño, Bombi Plata, Raul Morit, Jam Nhaze Canciller
Suffering from a cough that he knows will never get better because of his smoking habit, Pepe convinces his family to ride all the way back to their rural hometown by using rickshaws. His opportunity arrives when he’s able to swipe a packet of money from one of his regular customers. His wife Remedios objects initially but agrees that their hand-to-mouth existence is no way to live. Their eldest son JP earns ocasionally from pickpocketing and stealing, nicking a smaller motorized rickshaw to complement his father’s pedal-driven pedicab. JP’s wife Isabel is blind, heavy with child, and regarded as screwy for occasionally conversing with someone she addresses as Jesus. Their younger daughter Pina is a street vendor who plans to hook an AFAM (originally “a foreigner assigned in Manila,” currently any white American male) in the red-light district; she goes along, bringing their dog Kikay, although she easily complains when she gets hungry or wants to bathe. They encounter difficulties with traffic rules on the expressway leading southward and endure bouts of hunger. When they find a hand-pumped well at the side of a street, they take the opportunity to wash and fill up their containers. A woman comes up and demands that they pay for the water, and a priest intervenes to pacify the lady and offer the family a place to rest.
Nearly a decade since its emergence, Pauwi Na has lost none of its ability to masterfully delineate a national condition thrown into stark relief by the attempt of members of a typical Philippine family, trapped in desperate straits, to better their condition. A major factor toward accomplishing this tour de force is the assemblage of what must be the most impressive ensemble of performers in the present millennium, each of them resolute in depicting the multilayered suffering of the most neglected citizens around, while ensuring that their character’s basic humanity remains perceptible. Unsurprisingly, the query that one of these players raises toward the end, whether their story will ever have a happy ending, has already been answered by the mere fact that it has to be asked in the first place. (Felicitously, the narrative’s source material appears to have a less downbeat resolution—but then the family traveled even farther, to another island in fact, becoming a national sensation as a result, so one should not begrudge them such a closure.) The means by which PN morphs into a road movie worth the trip is the standard decent-artist approach of leavening heartbreaking tragedy with irony and humor, but it distinguishes itself by refusing the sanctification which is commonly bestowed on these subjects. Fantasy passages that interrupt the plot suggest how the family members, in a better world, might have handled the challenges they confront; but in acknowledging how old-fashioned and conventional these notions are, the film executes these excerpts in early-cinema style—black and white, slow-motion, actors facing the audience, accompanied by achingly evocative native love songs. In the film’s actual world, the men of the family are not above two-timing friends and strangers alike, much as the barely mature daughter casually contemplates sex work, and the mother opts for an inhumane option in order to assuage everyone’s hunger. An even more daring move is literalizing the Jesus that the family’s blind daughter-in-law keeps addressing (no spoilers, since he shows up from the beginning): he dresses up like a well-groomed slum resident save for the crown of thorns on his head and spouts contemporary lingo. When his real-life counterpart shows up, he tells his collocutor that things will take a turn for the worse, a warning that surprises her as much as it places the audience on alert, inasmuch as the parish priest the family meets initially behaves exactly as anyone would expect. A final symbolic touch, the small plastic chamber pot from which emergency funds are drawn to save the family’s grandchild, should be no surprise since we already know from early on what it looks like; what’s remarkable is how it transforms from a light semihumorous prop into an arbiter of survival, when its contents, though impressing the character who witnesses it, will suffice in covering only one life. How long before this item, alongside even the film itself, becomes a relic of a better-forgotten past, doesn’t seem to be a possibility for both characters and viewers, which is the far less laughable tragedy.
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