We
live in the present, for the future. The past only becomes part of the present
through memories, which are but figments of the imagination, collections of
reality as perceived, designed and fashioned by the creative mind. Memories are
never conjured spontaneously. They are urged, perhaps, through people, objects,
faces, or emotions. It is this very malleable aspect of memories that makes
them infinitely fascinating. We trust them but never fully, knowing that they
are hardly objective, rarely completely reliable. They are dreams dreamt while
awake. They are preludes to a trance subsisting on pain, joy, and everything
else that have become requisite ingredients of evoking nostalgia.
Shireen
Seno's Big Boy is a film that lives
up to the feeling of being in a trance, of being transported in a place that
could only exist within the boundaries of the mind. While familiar and unfamiliar
episodes of somebody else's childhood flicker on screen, its audience's very memories
are urged, eliciting emotions that are at once both daunting and comforting. Adapted
from Seno's own memories of her childhood in the province, the film's plot
details the experiences of a boy who is routinely stretched and served with
fish oil by her parents so that he can be tall enough to be the poster boy for
their business of selling fish oil.
True
to the very element of memories that Seno attempts to replicate in the film,
the plot is overtly disjointed, with points voluntarily left unseen, untold and
unexplained like events consciously forgotten for whatever reason. Apparently,
the film has bigger ambitions than merely telling a very personal story. In fact,
the way the story was told with points consciously left out alludes to the
limitations of memories, how some events, especially those done in repetition
or coupled with violence or other things that would render them indelible,
become ironclad memories and how some are simply forgotten.
The
film attempts to replicate remembering, where sights and sounds are products of
the imagination rather than of the senses. Cinema however is an art that is
reliant on the senses, making it Seno's task to create in her film sights and
sounds that resemble the ones seen and heard by the mind during the act of
remembering. Shot in Super8, the film persists as a lyrical artifact of a
forgotten era. The soft daytime hues, the kerosene lamp-lit nights, and the
timeless Mindoro town become relatable images of a collective past. Conversations
are inaccurately dubbed, with conversations jumping from Tagalog to the local
dialect seemingly unplanned.
Seno
regards memories as imperfectly crafted episodes. She pinpoints to the idea of
remembering as a very personal effort, modified in time by the vast differences,
whether in morality, politics, beliefs, the language spoken and other things,
of the person remembering during the time when the event happened and the time
when the event is remembered. Memories, in a way, are akin to fiction. Although
more grounded on actual events than ordinary imagined stories, memories are still
just fragments of the reality that gave birth to them. Big Boy, in that sense,
with its very intimate story of a town still enamored by its past as an
American colony, weaves memories and fiction together into an intoxicating
portrait of a people who are unable to forget.
(Cross-published in Lessons from the School of Inattention.)