Filipiñana Review | Manila Golf Club Unravels Colonial Violence In Rafael Manuel’s Astonishing Debut

Vivid unease throbs as a subterranean secret in Rafael Manuel’s formally stunning feature debut, Filipiñana. Premiering at the Sundance Film Festival, it expands Manuel’s own 2020 eponymous short into a disconcerting meditation on the unsaid, internalised and condoned. There’s astonishing mastery of the mise-en-scène, each carefully wrought element culling forth tension, ambiguity and brazen horror in a deliberately spare screenplay. 17-year-old Isabel (Jorrybell Agoto) lands a job as a tee girl at a swanky Manila country club, abuzz with posh expats.

Between the elite club members and working-class caddies, Manuel situates a roiling sense of repulsion and disdain, nonetheless dressed up in niceties. There’s no fudging, however, of who holds the cards here. Isabel, who’s come from Ilokos, stumbles upon far bloodier ground than she could have ever fathomed. Soon, her big-city journey cuts through disguise and disaffection. Unfolding over a single sweltering afternoon, the film trails Isabel, who’s tasked with returning a golf club to club owner Dr. Palanca (Teroy Guzman). The day seems to elongate as the return turns a means for laying bare a vicious past smoothly flipping into the present.

Scorchingly atmospheric, Filipiñana builds its slow, accruing power from suggestion and implication. So much purports to be hidden, yet it’s also starkly in the open for everyone to see. No resistance exists. All simply hum along. It’s this troubled dichotomy Isabel unsettles furthermore. The well-heeled and the servile maintain an unspoken code of shared complicity in entrenched hierarchies. As Isabel slips deeper, learning to prise through chuckles and evasions, histories open up. Yet, Manuel never accentuates any dramatic moment. We cower and shrink as the film polishes the brunt of its sting.

It’s the kind of film that trusts you to catch its most fleeting clues. Manuel reposes faith in our intelligence and desire to connect the dots. He trusts us to dig through austerely blanketed pockets of quiet dread and concealed fuming rage. DP Xenia Patricia mounts compositions to the effect of blades slicing in. Insect buzz tapers into an aural schema that is steely and hypnotic.

The pace is languorous, dolorous, deliberately stretching how long we can remain curious sans excess stimuli. Having also edited the film, Manuel pulls at time in a subversive blend of both the particular, the momentary and wider heave of history. There’s a blistering confidence in his vision, sharply aware of all the cross-currents it’s invoking only to undercut and provoke. Behind its well-oiled machinery of labour, the club contains systems of oppression. The film’s sluggishness purposefully emanates from how the upper class have established the club as resting ground for blunt dominating impulses. A visiting American girl, Clara (Carmen Castellanos), and her nasty uncle become mired with Isabel. It’s a generational habit, a coloniser’s smug way of working, blithe to whomsoever needs to get trampled for leisure. Clara postures being shaken by and not avowing of the club’s traditions. She calls her uncle harmless. Filipiñana shrewdly uses her to uncover casually inherited subjugation and its dislodging. Clara fusses and flaunts her liberal beliefs to Isabel. But you wonder how different she really is from her family. Land keeps getting occupied by industrialists, villagers displaced. Cycles of deprivation repeat till the poor are left with nothing. They exist only to serve the very people who’ve stripped them of everything.

Isabel’s observant, indicting gaze is key to Filipiñana. Without the crutch of excess dialogues, Agoto brandishes a fierce presence smelting through structural, overbearing powerlessness. She manages to ooze a vulnerability that’s simultaneously sheathed in certain unsparing judgement. Filipiñana’s immaculate design constricts its heroine as well as empowers her with sneak attacks. Its eerie tautness feels borne of granular, blinding intensity. There’s no jumpy, frantic-to-impress trick—rather a controlled elicitation of capitalist violence going on, unrestricted since forever. This is a shellshock of a debut that instantly marks Rafael Manuel as a director to watch. Its tableaus of disparities will sear themselves into your mind.

Debanjan Dhar is covering the Sundance Film Festival as part of the accredited press.