REVIEW: ‘Isang Himala’ is a harrowing journey to the center of Filipino trauma

There was a time when, if claims were to be believed, the Virgin Mary made apparitions in nearly every corner of the country.

I was a schoolboy when relatives urged relatives to hire jeepneys to troop to Agoo in La Union, to watch the sun dance after every time a local youth took dictations from the Blessed Virgin, who appeared to him in a glass box mounted on the trunk of a tree.

There were times the hired jeepney was to go to Lipa, Batangas, where the most generic-looking of Madonnas wept blood or sweated a fragrant oil, or rose petals fell from the sky.

Always, there were claims of miracles. Himala. So-and-so’s hunched grandmother stood erect again. This grandfather’s perennial cough disappeared. This tito (uncle) stopped needing dialysis. This tita (aunt) was healed from breast cancer.

My maternal grandmother, in the throes of terminal cancer in her abdomen (we never found out from which organ it started) in 2001, went looking for her himala among the renowned shamans – albolaryo, manggagamot, manghihilot, witch doctors – of Calabarzon.

There were no more local apparitions of the Virgin Mary at the time, and there wasn’t money to go to Lourdes or Fatima.

My grandmother was a UP-trained educator. She became the principal of our province’s main high school. She had been a devout Catholic, then a devout Evangelical, then a devout Catholic again — she concerned herself with God and compliance with the holy will. But in her despair and disbelief in her doctor’s prognosis, she tried everything to access supernatural unction, never mind the orthodoxy of the source.

This contradictory, conflicted relationship with the supernatural in the face of life’s impossibilities provides the premise for Isang Himala, the movie musical by Ricky Lee, Vince de Jesus, and Pepe Diokno, now showing in certain cinemas — the apparent underdog among this year’s entries to the Metro Manila Film Festival.

Yes, it’s the same story that had Nora Aunor declaring “walang himala” in front of a kitschy religious icon, a leafless tree, and her mother — a scene the new film faithfully recreates. It was so iconic, it became the stuff of spoofs on TV when I was a kid — the equivalent of today’s memes.

Isang Himala places the destitute town of Cupang on the arid crags of a mountain — a mine, Diokno told Rappler in an interview — which creates a sense of desolation. It could be anywhere in the Philippines, and yet nowhere at all. The set of near-identical wooden shanties built on faux stone evokes the precarity of poverty and the gloom of isolation, and cues the audience that they’re looking at a diorama of a community in limbo.

If this film avoids specifics, if it banks on the stereotypical, it appears to support a desired effect. The story is intended as a parable. It supposes a familiarity with the scenario — divine visitation upon an erstwhile godforsaken people — so it can go ahead and state its opinion.

Irredeemably poor

If you’re a Filipino who was raised Catholic, schooled Catholic, or simply participated in the social life of this largely Catholic country, then the story will resonate like a hymn in a cloister.

A maiden of humble circumstance goes into the wilderness and receives divine visions. She tells her mother and then the parish priest, who disbelieves and discourages her. She performs a miracle — she’s quick to attribute it to the Virgin — and draws a following she and her community are not ready for. Opportunists cash in. Outsiders introduce disruptions. Relationships are tested. Convictions are challenged. Then, as though some primordial page has turned, the visionary is suddenly beset by torments, and her faith and credibility are put on the line.

Isn’t this also the story of Bernadette Soubirous, Lucia dos Santos, Faustina Kowalska, Teresing Castillo, and most others who’ve ever claimed to have received divine visions in contemporary times?

And always, the question is, do we believe them? Do we put their word above what our own senses tell us? What would it mean for us if they were telling the truth? And what would it cost us if we believed them and they turned out to be frauds?

The stakes are especially high for Filipinos because many of us feel eternally, irredeemably poor and without consequence in this world, and our society’s collective poverty has held us down for so long.

So, if miracles are real, then how do we get one? Because we are desperate for even just one.

Elsa, the visionary played by Aicelle Santos in Isang Himala, unequivocally calls on the crowd to believe her. To throw in their lot with her. Because she offers access to the divine. To miracles. To solutions.

Her pitch resonates because it taps into the source of the people’s fatalism. The people of Cupang believed their misery was punishment for once turning away a stranger — yes, very Beauty and the Beast — and only divine pardon could lift the curse and end the drought they were living in. The Virgin appearing in their town must’ve meant God’s forgiveness and, therefore, the reversal of their misfortune.

Predestination by a perpetually displeased God was a convenient concept for the religious orders that enforced Spanish colonial rule. To Filipinos, God’s face became that of the scowling, disgusted friar; the proper response to His wrath — the tortured heart and despondent disposition of the Lady of Sorrows.

And so for the people of Cupang, the movie’s proxy for the Philippine nation, the philosophy seems to be that if God wills human suffering, then only God can will it away.

And as above, so below: The way many Filipinos think of religion is also the way they think of politics. A good citizen is one who is unquestioningly loyal to their patron, as though that loyalty would be repaid with some inexhaustible reward. Marcos pa rin. Duterte pa rin.

At some point between when I was a child and when I became an adult, local apparitions seemed to cease. No one claimed to be seeing or hearing or conversing with the Virgin Mary or the Santo Niño or any of the saints anymore. Instead, people rallied behind politicos who vowed magical solutions.

When faith disappoints

The trouble with faith, whether in God or in people, is its propensity to disappoint. People wait in line, make valuable offerings, sacrifice their time and energy in exchange for divine or political favors, and yet not even God promises a quid pro quo reward for piety. Politicos may do so, but they are not God.

At the height of her power and popularity as a supernatural healer, Elsa and her closest friend and disciple Chayong, played by Neomi Gonzales, are met with tragedy (which I shall not specify because we all hate a spoiler), and it sets off a devastating series of consequences.

Feeling betrayed by God or the Virgin (in the world of Isang Himala, they appear to be interchangeable) Elsa goes into a crisis of faith. Alone in the darkness of her mother’s shack, she sings one of the musical’s most heart-rending numbers, “Magpakita Kang Muli” (Show Yourself Again).

“Madaya ka!” Elsa lashes out at God. You’re a cheat, she tells the object of her worship. She who had nothing offered up the only thing she could — her entire being — to the cause, and she meets the worst fate a woman devotee ever could.

How could God be so gracious to everyone else, yet silent in our hour of greatest need? Elsa’s pent-up grief bursts into an accusatory prayer such as many believers may have wanted to hurl at God when supplications went unanswered, and may or may not have felt it was in their place to do so.

It’s the question at the back of even the most fervent believer’s mind. It is also a potential turning point — disappointment of this magnitude can lead to doubt or, worse, apostasy. But it’s also a confrontation with the truth, and as the good book says, the truth sets free.

In the film, this is where Elsa learns to become honest with herself and to listen to the people around her. She takes in the impact of her actions and acknowledges her responsibility. She then decides to take accountability.

‘Walang himala’

And so we find ourselves on that barren hill. With the odd trinity of the icon, the tree, and her mother in the background, Elsa — in full, gorgeous belt — declares that there has been no miracle. Walang himala.

Chaos ensues. Tragedy strikes (again, no spoilers). The camera pans to the faces of the hapless crowd — gutted, disillusioned, enraged. I sink in my seat and stifle sobs. This is the face of the Filipino nation in the face of all the impossibilities and dashed hopes they’ve had to live through since God knows when.

Filipinos have prided themselves in being the beacon of Catholicism on this side of the world, and in being the bulwark of democracy, the prophet of People Power. And yet here we are, as poor and as desperate as ever, always rating high on happiness surveys because we’ve become so good at grinning and bearing our misery.

I was supposed to attend a screening of Isang Himala that included a talkback with the creators, but I went to the wrong mall and missed it (I just watched the movie in that “wrong” mall). Just as well, because I wanted to ask the creators a question that, I now realize, is better left unanswered.

Did Elsa really see the Blessed Virgin? I wanted to know whether, in the creators’ minds, Elsa was genuine or a fraud.

Because, on the one hand, her rage at having been betrayed by God could only have come from having made a real pact with the Virgin. But, on the other, she categorically denies all of it in the end.

But I understand now that getting the answer from the creators would have jumped the gun. The very point of the movie is that the audience must decide for themselves what they think of Elsa.

The virtue to covet is not piety or loyalty but critical thinking. Critical thinking is what the people of Cupang failed to practice, and it kept them poor and vulnerable to hoaxes. Blind, spoon-fed belief was the curse that needed lifting, and critical thinking was the antidote.

Taking the view of the movie as parable, we are warned against throwing our lot in with characters who make magical promises, whether in spiritual or temporal realms. In the middle of her crisis, Elsa tells a deathly sick boy’s fervently pious mother to take him to a doctor instead of waiting on her prayers.

It’s a powerful moment. It’s what we all need to be told at one time or another: Use common sense. Take action. Don’t wait for a miracle. That’s not to say miracles aren’t real — it’s just that you can’t sit around waiting for one. The world doesn’t stop when you kneel to pray.

That the film is a musical helps the pill go down. Diokno said the songs articulate the meanings of the silences in the 1982 film. The style is reminiscent of kundiman, so don’t expect radio hits — the songs just really drive the character’s journeys and give the film a quality of timelessness.

The movie was hailed Fourth Best Picture on awards night (out of 10 entries) and won a Special Jury Prize. Vince de Jesus won Best Musical Score. Juan Karlos’ take on “Ang Himala ay Nasa Puso” (The Miracle is in the Heart) won Best Original Theme Song.

The cast are theater veterans who already have a relationship with the material. It’s riveting performances all around. Kakki Teodoro, who plays Elsa’s childhood frenemy Nimia, won Best Supporting Actress. Bituin Escalante as Aling Saling, Neomi Gonzales as Chayong, and Aicelle Santos as Elsa deserve awards, too. The entire ensemble serves power and vulnerability at once.

It’s no spoiler when I say the movie is a tragedy. Most of us will already know that coming in. It doesn’t take away from the experience. What befalls Elsa and the people of Cupang is both familiar and cautionary: the way out of haplessness is accountability — moral and intellectual. To be alive is already its own miracle (although many may disagree); to expect more is asking too much, and foolhardy persistence leads to perdition. – Rappler.com