The Revisionist and Post-Realist World of Sisa

There will be more movies portraying Philippine history in revisionist, or at the very least, semi-historical terms, if Jun Robles Lana's latest film Sisa, now out in local theaters, is any indication , and especially after Lav Diaz's Magellan and Jerrold Tarog's Quezon. These three projects are all predicated on the idea that history is a slippery ideological construct, susceptible to critical interrogation and artistic reinterpretation, in much the same way as cinema is a medium of omission.

From the get-go, Lana triple-underlines that his revisionist take on José Rizal's eponymous madwoman, who over time has become a trope and a symbol of female victimhood, is decidedly feminist, a rare gesture in the context of local period movies. He also makes it clear that the film is an approximation, and not an adaptation, of Sisa's story.

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Set in the early 1900s, instead of the Spanish colonial period in which Rizal's novel Noli Me Tángere (explicitly referenced here) unravels, the movie follows the protagonist as she is seemingly lost in a desolate American concentration camp, where a community of enslaved Filipino women reluctantly assimilates into the ways of the colonizer for survival -- some more than others. The empire's scorched earth campaign comes alive in the eerie colony, where those who walk barefoot and eat without cutlery are deemed savages.

Played by Hilda Koronel, returning after 13 years of onscreen hiatus, Sisa doubles as a strategic subterfuge. She is, in fact, a rebel leader slyly spying on the proceedings in the mountain village, hoping to find another hand sympathetic to the revolutionary cause. She will come across that and more, including the Stockholm-esque affair between the widowed Leonor (Jennica Garcia) and the garrison commander (Kuya Manzano), how Ofelia (Tanya Gomez) mourns the capture of her husband, or the way a pedantic White teacher (Isabel Lamers) insists on educating local kids in English and parading the women in elegant gowns in the interest of making the occupied as "civilized" as the occupier. In this way, the film draws focus to the complex textures of benevolent intervention, from the economic to the cultural.

Like Diaz and Tarog's visions, Sisa is intimate rather than epic in scale. Lana strips the film of the grandeur of battles and bloodbath, but the cruelty is no less profound or felt. If anything, it is far more violent to see the women perform domestic tasks, forage for food, and abide by curfew hours -- to lead lives under constant surveillance, lest they become part of the carnage.

Leonor's belief in the American captain's good heart and that she has a bargaining power as his concubine, for example, speaks not only of her desperation but of the kind of life and freedom every native woman in the colony has been deprived of; she is just coping differently. Jennica Garcia, fresh off another stellar turn in Antoinette Jadaone's Sunshine, is arresting in her refusal to abandon her twisted resolve.

Koronel is, no doubt, the centerpiece. She brings the crazed character to life with a stifled, burning rage reminiscent of that of Insiang, determined to see her mission through to the fatal end. Her Sisa is deeply discerning and compelling in her stoicism, with a spectral score by Teresa Barrozo that mirrors the character's precarious psyche. Lana barely offers her lead dialogue, at least until the final act, but Koronel seems unconcerned by this, evoking her character's pain through sorrowful gaze and striking body language.

Eugene Domingo is similarly top-tier as Delia, who lost her entire family to the carnage, save for her teenage daughter Nena (Angellie Sanoy) whose growing attachment to their captors troubles her. Delia may seem restrained at first, in spite of her apparent discontent with the Americans, but when things take a grim turn towards the end, she does not hesitate to make her fury felt. Then there is Jorrybell Agoto as the scene-stealer Cedes, in a portrayal that steers clear of her usually subdued mien and openly reaches for humor. The main ensemble acquires more emotional power as the story progresses.

That the performances are never self-effacing is deliberately part of the design. Over the course of the movie, Lana is less interested in diagnosing the oscillating levels of madness than he is in reminding the audience that the work is a hyper-aware exercise in artifice, wending onward as he desires. "When we make historical movies, we're really obsessed with capturing it in a really detailed and realistic way, as if realism equates itself to truth," said the director in a talkback during the film's special QCinema screening.

Shifting aspect ratios, skies of oversaturated blue and orange, night scenes shot during daytime and vice versa, a soundscape steep in foreign sounds, and the Dutch angles cinematographer Carlo Mendoza incessantly shoves into the movie surely tip Sisa in a direction that rejects the allure of vérité drama, thus adhering to a post-realist approach to history. Tarog takes a similar meta route in Quezon via a film-within-a-film conceit to articulate his notion of nationhood and heroism. If there is any real insight to be gleaned here, it is that you cannot view history divorced from its writers the same way you cannot sever a film's story from the manner in which it is told.

Suffice it to say that the filmmaker activates all parts of the image here, leaning on his maximalist impulse, and the effect is as disorienting as the way the camera replicates the delirium at work, tracking the characters on foot, though it still leads to some stunning vistas redolent of Ishmael Bernal (especially Himala, in scenes on the hill where Sisa's towering silhouette evokes a spiritual presence) and Lino Brocka (particularly Insiang, via its signature zoom-ins and pan-outs, even some of its compositions). And the director is bent on making us notice the pulling of the strings and his reference points.

Yet again, Lana fashions a film that cannot exist without his signature long take, which, on one hand, exhibits the strengths of the Filipino ensemble, but, on the other, exposes the insufficiency of their American counterparts. More critically, the oner feels like it suits a more melodramatic and plot-driven piece. At the same time, Lana and editor Lawrence Ang invoke, like in the film's coda, the burning screen as a visual flourish, recalling Bi Gan's sci-fi time epic Resurrection.

Such stylistic choices, of course, belie the kind of period piece or revenge thriller the trailer and film promo might have promised. If anything, Sisa's historical sheen registers as rather schematic and perfunctory, servicing Lana's pet narrative motives: rape and death, crucial turning points that, in this case, are easy to excuse as a function of war, which is shrewdly depicted here as a genocide.

Yet these plotlines are far more revelatory than they ought to be, shedding light on the rest of the director's body of work and its defeatist nature, achieving catharsis at the expense of his protagonists: from Trisha in 2016's Die Beautiful to Dharna in 2021's Big Night! to Bambi in 2024's And the Breadwinner Is. Lana's feminist inclinations, it seems, work only within their limits, for he cannot imagine a world in which Sisa's women actually succeeded and survived. It is telling that Lana, time and time again, sees his women and queer characters as typically no more than sacrificial, just as he pictures the people's war as a defective recourse.

This is where the movie merits an inescapable parallel to 2013's Barber's Tales, which also stars Domingo as a widow who finds her place in the revolutionary struggle. Comparing the two movies, especially the way Lana concluded them, one might dangle the question of whether his sense of hope and sharper politics has dissipated over the years.

That cynical tendency, at the same time, extends to the film's parroting of the U.S. empire's known anti-insurgency tactic legitimized under the Brigandage Act of 1902, branding the Philippine revolution as banditry as a way to demonize it, as shown in the portrayal of Filipino guerrillas as threats to their own people and rebel men as rapists, as Leonor is debased by a revolutionary named Santiago (Nico Antonio). Is the alternative so unthinkable that the only way to depict the infighting among revolutionaries is through rape? Color me surprised, because how radical!

The slick style can only hold on for so long, because, at its core, Sisa sweats under ideological dissonance. It is instructive then that Lana describes the film as merely "anti-amnesia" and "not anti-American," which undercuts the film's supposedly anti-colonial assertion and therefore opens a Pandora's box. In doing so, Sisa shares, perhaps not by accident, what Tarog's Heneral Luna has echoed: that we are our own worst enemy, far more than the Americans are. Such surrender, which I never really resonated with, only ever privileges the oppressor and absolves its genocidal project of any historical accounting. Where is the resistance in this remembrance if it cannot recognize that our collective amnesia is a harrowing legacy the empire practically built?

Whereas Lana flips Sisa's iconicity on its head, that gesture here is only notional: Sisa is more a cipher for historical memory than a fully realized character. What is her history as a person, as a woman, apart from her family being burned alive, beyond the brief flashes of her past? Lana proceeds to train the camera elsewhere, revealing the insularity of his vision. "What kind of world makes madness the only way to survive violence?" asked the filmmaker in the talkback. Sisa is a resounding response, for better or worse.

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