Because of the many scars of our past, any retelling of Philippine history is bound to carry a certain lugubriousness for those who are heirs to this history. Sisa, directed by Jun Robles Lana, is no exception.
This was especially true for me as I watched the film just a day after the passing of the historian Vicente Rafael, whose books point out that such is the violence of colonialism that it is not just imposed by the colonizer but also, in varying degrees, participated in, tolerated, embraced, even if in many ways also resisted, by the colonized.
Still, the much-anticipated return of veteran actress Hilda Koronel to the big screen as the mysterious character dubbed by the villagers as Sisa (after Rizal’s anti-muse) was a worthy reminder of the importance of revisiting, and indeed recovering, our past.
Of course, the past decade has seen a resurgence of historical films, led by Jerrold Tarog’s Heneral Luna, Goyo, and Quezon, all of them featuring (as historical orthodoxy does) male protagonists. Sisa, however, offers a welcome counterpoint not just to this male dominance but also to a “grand history” that foregrounds famous people, events, and places. The only well-known character in Sisa, Artemio Ricarte, is relegated to a weak figure (somewhat inaccurately and perhaps unfairly, given that he famously refused to swear allegiance to the United States); in place of Intramuros or Malacañang, the viewer is brought to a nameless rural village reminiscent of Akira Kurosawa’s samurai westerns.
In this way, Sisa follows the tradition, not of Tarog’s trilogy, but of Nora Aunor’s films, particularly Tatlong Taong Walang Diyos for its evocation of a wartime past and Minsa’y Isang Gamu-Gamo for its depiction of American military violence. (Incidentally, both those films were released in the 1976, at the height of martial law: another moment in Philippine history that cinema has contended with.)
Chief among Sisa’s forerunners, of course, is Gerardo de Leon’s 1951 film of the same title, starring Anita Linda as Sisa from Noli Me Tangere. (If you haven’t watched this classic, you should.)
Foremost among the women foregrounded is the titular character, Sisa, compellingly played by Hilda Koronel. Like the Sisa of Rizal and of De Leon, she is seemingly mad, but the film reveals madness as a ruse—leading to the obvious question of who is actually crazy in a time of war. Like the other characters in the film, Sisa weaponizes Americans’ prejudices about her—and about Filipinos in general—to her own advantage, but she is not immune to the maddeningly brutal realities, contradictions, and moral dilemmas of the war.
Then there is Delia (Eugene Domingo), the long-suffering mother who leads the cohort of women widowed and rendered destitute by the war, who are basically, in her words, “prisoners” in a concentration camp. Although she has always been resentful toward the occupying forces and thus has embraced subtle forms of “everyday resistance” (in the language of James Scott’s Weapons of the Weak), she eventually comes to take Sisa’s side, embracing the conclusion that “it is better to die fighting for one’s freedom than to live as a slave.”
Two of the female characters are tragically afflicted with “white love,” much to their undoing—even if they tried to reconcile their feelings with their solidarity with community and country. The beautiful Leonor (Jennica Garcia) embraces the role of the American commander’s querida, convincing herself that his feelings are those of love and that her feelings are reciprocated. Despite this conviction and the stigma she receives from the rest of the women, however, she still harbors feelings of solidarity toward community and country. The 13-year old Nena, intelligent but naive, succumbs to the advances of an American soldier, but not before showing how (mis)translation can be a source of power and resistance, how language holds subversive potential.
Meanwhile, yet another woman in the film is the American schoolteacher Miss Warren (Isabel Lamers). Verging on the satirical and absurd, Warren is at one point carried by four Filipinos on a litter; she throws a ball in the midst of revolution and hunger and makes the women dress up in old clothes. She tries to empathize and seems well-meaning, even interceding on Sisa’s behalf at the beginning. But she is hopelessly trapped by her own colonial gaze, and she is not immune to the amorous temptations posed by the soldiers that dominate the surroundings, undermining her moral ascendancy. By being white but female, her character sharpens the glimpse afforded by the film on the intersections of white and male privilege.
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One European critic labelled the film as a “political lesson,” as though that were a pejorative, and suggested that the film verges on “torture porn”—an accusation that betrays profound ignorance of the film’s historical context. If anything, the film understates the scale of American colonial violence as evidenced by the massacres at Bud Dajo and Balangiga (to name just two notorious examples), as well as the more insidious forms of colonial violence.
More reasonably, another foreign critic took issue with the “very frugal” settings of the film while praising the cinematography and “geopolitical, historical and gender commentary.”
As for the Filipino audiences—the film opens in Philippine theaters on March 4—it remains to be seen whether there will be a willingness to engage with that ignominious moment in history. Thirty years after World War II, the horror of Japanese occupation was still palpable in Minsa’y Isang Gamu-Gamo, and even today we are rightfully horrified by the atrocities in Balangiga and Bud Dajo. But we still have much to learn about our colonial past, especially from the lived experiences of those on the receiving end of epistemic injustice.
Which is precisely why, beyond its artistic merits, Sisa is both an important and timely film: one imbued with power by Hilda Koronel’s ethereal performance, and pathos from Eugene Domingo and the rest of the cast.
Indeed, if Sisa were a “politicized historical lesson,” then it cannot come soon enough—both for Filipinos who have forgotten (or never truly learned) our history and for foreigners who continue to think they know better. CS
This piece has been updated with the name of an actress.—Ed.
Read more: ‘Quezon’ and the politics of memory: How cinema rewrites history
Gideon Lasco is an anthropologist and physician currently serving as professorial lecturer at the University of the Philippines Diliman and as Takemi Fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health. A Palanca Award-winning essayist and longtime commentator on health, culture and society, he is the author of five books, including “The Philippines Is Not a Small Country” (2020), a winner of the National Book Award.
