WRITTEN by a Filipino (Jaime Pacena II), Kono Basho fortuitously surprises us as it ushers us quietly, tacitly, into the heart and mind of a young Japanese woman. This is unexpected; this is most unusual. Where this narrative could have been, once more, an attempt to understand the Filipino diaspora or at least the effect when migration causes relations to be formed across cultures; after all, the conflict between siblings are always at the core of melodrama easier to access, and lovelier to exploit. But something happens along the way-the Filipina anthropologist travels for the funeral of her Japanese father and from hereon time slows down, space becomes the temporal equivalent of emptiness or silence, and we are given the treasure of life longing for its own life. Or banishment.
It’s an interesting trick, a literary trompe l’oeil, to situate the focus of the tale not on the Filipina, the perspective that we understand naturally better, but on this young woman whose ego is not only obscure to us but rather unknown, i.e., foreign. But here lies the excitement of this strategy of telling, for now we are not only not keen to understand her more but we are poised to know her more, to find out how she is in this moment of grieving.
Early on, we know more or less how Ella feels. But we don’t know how Reina is responding to the loss. What the film does is merciless: it immediately gives us the daughter as she stands there in front of the mirror, fragile and yet towering, vulnerable and yet solid. It is a brief moment before the shoji-the latticed screen door-opens and the mother enters to tell Reina they are ‘arriving.’
Nakano Arisa the actor stands there, the head bent to the side, the quintessential face of a Nihonga in perfect, languid repose. Here is the face that has no expression not because there is nothing to say but because the body has drained its face of commitment and commentary. This is, of course, rare, hitherto not achieved or aimed at on the Philippine cinematic screen.
To make sense of this, we can be referential.
Junichiro Tanizaki in his classic essay In Praise of Shadows has written how ‘lacquerware decorated in gold is not something to be seen in a brilliant light, to be taken in at a single glance; it should be left in the dark, a part here and a part there picked up by a faint light. Its florid patterns recede into the darkness, conjuring in their stead an inexpressible aura of depth and mystery, of overtones but partly suggested.’
He continues writing how ‘the sheen of the lacquer, set out in the night, reflects the wavering candlelight, announcing the drafts that find their way from time to time into the quiet room, luring one into a state of reverie. If the lacquer is taken away, much of the spell disappears from the dream world built by that strange light of candle and lamp, that wavering light beating the pulse of the night. Indeed the thin, impalpable, faltering light, picked up as though little rivers were running through the room, collecting little pools here and there, lacquers a pattern on the surface of the night itself.’
The scene in front of the mirror takes a long gratuitous time.
Then the character of Ella arrives, unsure of how she appears. The camera catches her from afar; the Filipina aunt with her. She reminds Ella to be more poised, circumspect. We are gaijin in a foreign land, she seems to remind Ella. She stands before the door, the gestures tentative and even the language uncertain; in fact, there is the query about whether languages being spoken are understood. In a beautiful conceit for the camera, Ella is left to walk alone on the rohka or hall until she makes the turn, to find herself in the middle of the living room, where the ososhiki or funerary ritual is to take place.
At this point, Ella as played by Gabby Padilla is now standing in front of her half-sister. All throughout, Ella seems oblivious of Reina, the psychology being that she had traveled a long way and she is navigating the difficult manner of mourning in the Japanese way. Reina on the one hand remains in the background, the eyes downcast, terribly self-effacing and yet in the process declaring herself present in great sadness.
Consistent is the narrative even up to this point-we are on the more exacting life of the Japanese girl. We have journeyed across the globe to know the fragility of the loss, or the strength in what this village has discovered about itself. We are here for what lessons this place-kono basho-has for us. There is much to know from this village, grand teachings even from the Ippon matsu or the fact that a single tree has been memorialized, the one that has survived the great waves.
Like the focus of the tale, Kono Basho, in its cinematography and production design, unerringly pays tribute to our perceived Japaneseness of the social universe. Without fear of exoticising the landscape, one feels an overwhelming ephemerality immediate and present, and here is that age-old mono-no-aware-things are beautiful because they do not last. And when the two sisters stand together in front of the aged temple, you know the words between them shall not matter anymore. Something older, something mythical, a greater story will bind them to this place.
Like the black mofuku or mourning kimono, the essay of Tanizaki summons the image of ‘lacquerware decorated in gold is not something to be seen in a brilliant light, to be taken in at a single glance; it should be left in the dark, a part here and a part there picked up by a faint light. Its florid patterns recede into the darkness, conjuring in their stead an inexpressible aura of depth and mystery, of overtones but partly suggested.’
Toward the end, the audience can best summarize the film Kono Basho in all its wistfulness as a tale of forgiveness and healing. But let us not forget how cinema is about the art of artifice, and once more a tradition as old as the Japanese art can be a wellspring of inspiration and wisdom. Again, the old essay of Tanizaki whispers to us: ‘And so it has come to be that the beauty of a Japanese room depends on the variation of shadows, heavy shadows against light shadows-it has nothing else.’
It is for this and more that the Gawad Urian for Best Actress was given this year to Nakano Arisaka in a performance that was nothing else and nothing more for adding things or ‘luster here would destroy the soft fragile beauty of the feeble light.’
Kono Basho was directed by Jaime Pacena II. The film also won the Gawad Urian for Best Cinematography for Dan Villegas. Production design is by Eero Yves Francisco.
Translation of Junichiro Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows is from Leete’s Island Books 1977.