Serguei, a Russian immigrant who wanted to be a cosmonaut as a kid, tells a familiar joke: “Everything they told us about communism was a lie…The worst thing is, everything they told us about capitalism was true.”
Serguei is one of those laid-off dock workers in the Spanish film “Los Lunes al Sol,” directed by Fernando Leon de Aranoa. Translated as “Mondays in the sun,” the term also refers to the thousands of displaced workers in Northern Spain who, stranded jobless, find themselves idled on Mondays under the sun and mooning for better lives abroad.
Serguei’s statement perhaps reflects the sentiment of many post-Communist Russians who were beginning to see more of the world. It was either that I felt old or I shared Serguei’s thoughts when I was watching Joel Lamangan’s movie “Dukot” over the weekend. The viewing came as one of the highlights of the social sciences celebration of the University of San Carlos.
“Dukot” is a movie about present-day desaparecidos, at the height of extra-judicial killings of journalists and activists. The story focuses on two sweethearts who were abducted my military intelligence operatives. At this time, the boy is deeply involved in the armed communist movement while the girl is trying to reclaim her life mainstream.
The movie begins with the abduction, perhaps living up to the title “Dukot,” but goes on with a series of flashbacks to give the viewers grounding. The girl’s father was shot by unidentified men while he was being convinced by protesting co-workers to join a picket. The year after, she confronts her mother and tells her she had become an activist.
On the other hand, the boy’s political awakening came somewhat too academic, as his father, the “liberal” in the family, told him once. Later, the boy would drop much of life’s prospects for a volunteer job in the mountains. Their commitment to the “party” would soon deepen, although at some point, that of the girl waned. Family needs softened her idealism.
While the movie keeps itself busy telling their story, there might have been missed opportunities. It didn’t show that political transformation, no matter its scale, is always personal. A viewer could not fully sympathize with their cause because the story treated the transformation as though it was just drawing a line between two dots.
Narratives run as cause and effect, and a good grounding on cause paves the way for maximum effect. To nail some pathos, the story used the relentless beating by their abductors to draw sympathy to the victims. In the end, the viewer pities the victims’ skin and limbs, not the larger body of context that brought them there in the first place.
Where “Dukot” failed, Lupita Kashiwahara’s 1976 film “Minsa’y Isang Gamu-gamu” succeeded. You’d know that when lead character Corazon de la Cruz says she is “Galit!” she hauls an entire history of reasons that pushed her to that end. You join her cause.
“Dukot’s” story assumed that viewers know why activists become what they are, and there’s no need to tell that part of the story, or perhaps tell it as a kind of token. Consequently, it might’ve chosen the wrong moment.
Instead of illustrating the anatomy of a transformation, it showed the spiral of death. In the end, a presumably clueless viewer still wonders about the nature of the characters’ conviction. You understand the scale of that conviction, the heroism and doggedness, but you’re left wondering what the cause was.
But it’s a courageous, and at best noble, effort to write and film “Dukot.” It trains our eyes to that which, otherwise, are merely crude inscriptions on the activist’s placard. In the season of “Wapakman,” “Dukot” is simply redemption.
(januarinbox@yahoo.com)
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