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Hintayan ng Langit
Additional Language: English
English Title: Heaven’s Waiting
Year of Release: 2018
Director: Dan Villegas
Screenwriter: Juan Miguel Silverio
Based on his one-act play
Producers: QCinema International Film Festival, Globe Studios, Quezon City Film Development Commission
Cast: Eddie Garcia, Gina Pareño, Kat Galang, Joel Saracho, Mary Joy Apostol, Jomari Angeles, Geraldine Villamil, Dolly de Leon, Francis Mata, Karl Medina, Che Ramos, Mel Kimura, Reynald Raissel Santos, Errine Danan, Neil Guillen, Martin Lazaro, Hadaneeah Cubico, Monina Fe Meraces, Jonel Pusing, Miguel Mascareñas, Nina Ybanez, Miko Yu, Angelica Tapia, Elizabeth dela Cerna
Upon his arrival, Manolo’s informed by the halfway place’s concierge that the room allotted to him has been damaged, so he’ll have to share sleeping quarters with someone he used to know. He finds out that it’s Lisang, who used to be his girlfriend before he married someone else several decades ago. After remembering how he died, he figures out that he’s in Purgatory, awaiting a final trip to a higher realm along with the other residents. What he wonders about is why Lisang keeps delaying her own ascent, even committing an infraction in his presence.
Hintayan ng Langit would literally translate as “heaven’s waiting room,” so the idea of Purgatory, problematic even to enlightened Catholics, serves as the closest possible equivalent of the concept of a way station in the afterlife where the recently deceased could resolve their personal issues before attaining a state of eternal peace and happiness. Those with enough historical awareness might also recall that colonial-era Spanish clergy earned for the local church incalculable wealth and property based on instilling the fear of purgatorial suffering on vulnerable wealthy natives, in order to claim their inheritance right before they expired. The challenge for the filmmakers therefore lay in selling the fantasy—which the narrative unexpectedly performs by fusing classical values with a covert modern sensibility. Traditionalists will have to be inordinately picky to find fault with HnL’s visual design as well as the first-time pairing of two studio-era old-timers known for both their consummate skills and their willingness to tackle daring roles: their extended exchanges and individual monologues are reserved for the film’s climactic section, and unsurprisingly they make it worth the trouble. The modern element, in terms of Hollywood samples, requires a recollection of which American film came closest to HnL’s example. In general, US productions could not resist resending their dead characters back to the real world, so even in these terms, HnL remains distinctive; but the first American film to focus on a woman’s post-life predicament was Gerard Damiano’s The Devil in Miss Jones (1973), arguably the first undisputed masterpiece of the Golden Age of Porn.[1] It shouldn’t be too surprising that what was so unusual for Americans that it could only be initially made on the fringes of their industry became standard fare for Pinas cinema in the late twentieth century, after the collapse of the country’s authoritarian adventure.
Note
[1] The title once appeared in the decadal Sight & Sound survey of 2002; I was the respondent who entered it, along with another X-rated title, The Opening of Misty Beethoven (Radley Metzger a.k.a. Henry Paris, 1976). See “Sight & Sound ’02,” Amauteurish (May 30, 2014), amauteurish.com/2014/05/30/sight-sound-2002/.
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