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Ang Nawawala
English Title: What Isn’t There
Language: English
Additional Language: Filipino
Year of Release: 2012
Director: Marie Jamora
Screenwriters: Marie Jamora & Ramon de Veyra
Producers: Brainchild Studios, Cinemalaya, National Commission for Culture and the Arts
Cast: Dominic Roco, Dawn Zulueta, Felix Roco, Boboy Garrovillo, Alchris Galura, Mercedes Cabral, Kelvin Yu, Jenny Zamora, Marc Abaya, Annicka Dolonius, Sabrina Man, Dayang Enriquez, Ethan Fabella, Leah Johnson, Boy Laguipo, Zarah Pagay, Sunshine Teodoro, Lianne Valentin, Joy Vargas
Traumatized when his twin brother had a fatal accident because of a dare he made, Gibson Bonifacio lapsed into silence, never speaking to anyone since then. He remained particularly wary of his mother, who openly preferred Jamie, his brother. Things remained the same even after Gibson’s sojourn in the US, although unknown to anyone, Gibson maintains imaginary conversations with Jamie, who has also grown up along with him. His relations with himself, his family, and his friends come to a head when he falls for Enid, a pop musician who encourages him but later admits that she’s on the rebound from a breakup with another musician, for whom she still has some affection.
No other contemporary indie production has proved as divisive as Ang Nawawala, owing for the most part to its Fil-Am source. The controversy raised unfair expectations regarding its merits, although these were premised on mutually indefensible ideological differences. The film was denounced on the basis of two crucial properties: its acquiescence to mainstream values, as if a work on pop music could have justified high-art stylistics without courting the danger of pretension; and its focus on a milieu that did not foreground the sociological components of poverty. Its appreciators, also symptomatic of another type of affliction in Pinas film criticism, insistently rhapsodized over what they read as its celebration of bourgeois Americanized culture. Excepting these polarities, and now with the advantage of temporal distance, Ang Nawawala may be more properly considered for its critical take on precisely the culture that both sides misperceived and quarreled over. With a modest retinue of domestic helpers, the Bonifacio family members feel entitled enough to wallow in tragic errors that they sustain for years. It is Gibson’s relatively less-privileged intimates—his socially awkward brother-in-law, his independent-minded fling, and finally his decently discreet father—who provide him with motivations to work on his dysfunctional condition as well as his mother’s. Director Marie Jamora conveys these points without spelling them out (a liability for ideologically fixated evaluators, as it turned out), as well as by drawing out fully sympathetic and lived-in performances from Dominic Roco as Gibson and Dawn Zulueta as his mother, both of whom she tasked with delineating the least reasonable characters in the film.
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