SENIOR YEAR Review
While Confessional (2007) and Mangatyanan
(The Blood Trail, 2009) are all
very well made films, introducing director Jerrold Tarog as a very able and
promising filmmaker, Carpool (2006),
a short film that is mostly set inside a car where friends are rambling about a
recent break-up, indicated Tarog's ability to capture youth's virtues and
vices, from its loose sense of camaraderie to its abject frivolities. Senior Year, although it is the supposed
sequel to Faculty (2010), a short
film that featured a debate regarding social activism in schools, shares more
of its moods and devices with Carpool than
any of Tarog's previous works. The film, drowning its melancholic overview of
adulthood with charm and gratifying levity, is simply irresistibly delightful.
The film is very modest in
scope. Mostly limiting itself with the few months in the final year in high
school of several students of a private school, the film feels like it is
circling on dangerously familiar grounds, risking redundancy for the sake of convenient
storytelling. However, the film, without burdening itself with pretenses of
pertinence or relevance, communicates the universal truth of what really
happens decades after the highs of high school, when the lows of the real world
has consumed the optimism that youth can only fuel for so long.
The film starts with a man, bespectacled
and in an obvious state of nervousness, sitting inside his car which is parked
outside a high school where a homecoming of its alumni is about to happen. Self-deprecating
quips, defensive remarks, and rationalizing witticisms prevent him from
stepping out of his car, registering his name, and enjoying the homecoming. The
man, several years ago, is the expected valedictorian, beaming with promise,
which has not gone unnoticed by his teachers, one of whom instructs him to
prepare a valedictory speech that would both inspire and incite social concern
among his peers.
While it is happiness, depicted
through moments of lighthearted banter and expressions of youthful love, that
makes reminiscence pleasurable, it is disappointment and pleasurable that marks
the past with utility to endure the banality of what lies ahead. Tarog thankfully
details the high school experience with equal amounts of joy and pain. All of
the film's characters are carved from stereotype. Tarog seems to acknowledge
this, but instead of relying on the narrative crutches that working with a bevy
of stereotypes provides, he concocts stories that are hardly complicated but
fluently communicates the simple pleasures and hardships of that stage in life.
Senior Year is
most enjoyable when the stories of the characters intertwine and erupt into a
chorus of emotions that seem so distant now that we've preoccupied ourselves
with more pertinent matters. Tarog, much more than delighting by reveling in
the affairs of the youth, processes such delights to elicit a more spirited sense
of nostalgia, one that is not only concerned with the past but as to how the
past relates to the present. While the film is brimming with poignant moments,
it is the unseen but certainly felt sense of regret that the alumni express,
through casual jokes and remarks, while reminiscing that carries the film from
being just another high school flick into a heartfelt portrait of our
inevitable ordinariness in the midst of a world that is far bigger than any
high school campus.