John Torres’ ‘Lukas Nino’: Cinema as prayer

MANILA, Philippines – “Don’t applause [sic]! It was boring!” a man screamed as the lights went up and people clapped for John Torres’s new film “Lukas Nino” (Lukas the Strange). I could understand where he was coming from. The film is far from mainstream Filipino film fare, and it isn’t a work that is offered up as an entertainment. Make no bones about it, this is a challenging film, one that demands a lot of its viewer. If you aren’t ready for a movie that will leave you to think, will force questions upon you, and you want something that is just fun, then you best stay away from it.

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The thing with John Torres’s films is that they are incredibly introspective and they buck the notions we have about film. To say that Torres is an indie filmmaker isn’t enough, it’s just to lump him in and not consider the things that he is trying to do with his style. And though this might feel stripped down, this is a definitely stylized film, where if you pay attention you can see the choices that the director makes to express himself through the medium.

We are accustomed to narrative film where plot drives what happens onscreen. We are used to one scene leading into the next, the narrative engine pushing things forward and leading us through the basics of the 3-story arc, the building up of tension, climax, and denouement. We come expecting character development and revelations and explanations and a sense of all things being answered at the end.

But this film resists these things. While we are accustomed to the drive of a narrative, a story taking us through the film from point A to point Z, this film turns from that tradition of narrative and operates more like a poem. Like a poem it has characters and conflict and different elements coming together. But rather than move from event to event, the film asks us to look at specific scenes, think about what we are experiencing, and then piece it together, not as plot, but as different pieces of emotion bound within the same space and thematic framework.

The experience comes through multiple layers of the film medium. There is, of course the immediate image. And we are used to image and audio of the film matching each other. Here again there is resistance and new meaning created through these things. We get an image. Then we get the audio of the film. The audio of the film is rarely if ever in sync with the image onscreen. Then we get subtitles. The subtitles sometimes convey something different from the audio, and sometimes there is no audio but there are subtitles. This means that an active viewer is regularly parsing through the different meanings created not only by each element, but by the interplay between these elements.

Loss, memory, identity

The film invites us to engage in intellectual exercise. It invites us to think about the various meanings within elements, and the new elements created by the juxtaposition. When you add in the element of editing and how each of these scenes follows the other, your mind is creating meanings and interpretations. It helps that Torres’s style is decidedly meditative, asking us to think, to stop, to take our time with moments and take it all in.

For all of its play on the medium, it also brings in a lot of contemplative thought on the ideas of loss, memory, and the development of identity and self. It adds an extra frame of a film being made within the context of the film we are watching. And then it explores how a town handles the filmmakers’ intrusion. It follows the titular character as he tries to deal with the idea of his father leaving the family because he is a “tikbalang” (man-horse). The town has a river, like the river in Greek mythology, where people can go to forget everything, but they emerge with scars from the forgetting. It has all of these mystical elements, but then all of these mystical elements are played as straight and matter of fact, nothing really to take much note of. It’s the kind of stuff that people can talk about while getting a haircut at the barber shop.

There’s a lot of heart at the bottom of it all. And a lot of head too, since we see all of this formal exploration. John Torres makes very different films. They will try the viewer who isn’t accustomed to films like these. But I hope that viewers will try to meet this film on its own terms, and perhaps come to appreciate the many joys it has to offer.

READ ALSO: John Torres: Out of his shell

Here’s a silent-portion clip of ‘Lukas Nino’: