The utter necessity - and danger - of life's illusions
Except for its objectionable scenes (voyeuristic nudity and steamy sex scenes), I would’ve been comfortably pronouncing pride in having watched Jon Red’s Ilusyon (2005), a film about, as the title goes, the nature of illusions.
Who doesn’t pass through one’s waking life without harboring some kind of illusion? Who hasn’t wished in daydreams that one is a better person, smarter, more charming, richer, more virile? Who hasn’t hallucinated that one’s mother was a more loving woman even as she balanced between her career as dean of graduate studies in psychology and her womanly tasks at home, that one’s father owned and managed all the antique shops in town and stashed away vast profits in Switzerland (or is it Singapore now)? Who hasn’t imagined one were the eldest in the family instead, or the middle, or the youngest, or having a solicitous elder brother or sister? Who hasn't imagined he were his or her father's or mother's clone, that she were that model, actor, heiress to Forbes' and Rockefeller's bank accounts? Whoever is not guilty of having delusions of grandeur in between the grand mal seizures, please stand up!
Who even imagined such a theme can ever be limned on film? Indie director Jon Red can, and the result is quite an effective blurring of reality and surrealism, memory and the whimsy of self-deceptive inventions of the mind. Ilusyon is a story of human survival through illusions.
The central character Miguel is a young man from the countryside in the 1950s who comes to Manila in search of his father. He learns that his old man, a painter/visual artist, is no longer around his rented apartment, leaving only a letter of explanation, followed by a series of strange letter deliveries. In the letter, the father informs his son that he had to vacate the place and go on a hiatus to find himself after losing his love, Miguel’s mother. To get by, Miguel finds a job by being a painter – no, not that kind, but a more humble one: a house painter.
One day, a client of his father – a female nude-painting model – drops by and mistakes Miguel, the housepainter, for his father, the real painter. Miguel, struck by her physical beauty and seeing a chance for love, resorted to subterfuge, pretending to be his artist father.
His grand deception leads him to quietly hilarious complications and subtle yet unforgettable life lessons.
Like Miguel’s many learnings, the film touches on several themes: urban migration and the cruel impersonality of urban life, the search for an absentee father, motherlessness and inconsolable loss, discovery of lust or sexual passion, death, and ugliness or the decay of physical beauty. However, the one tie that binds them all together, though seemingly incoherently to me, is the ridiculous yet necessary matter of illusion as a coping mechanism, a means to get by amid the seeming randomness of life.
In the film, the relativity of reality is depicted as regular interspersing of some banality (the mechanical quality of working life) and some surrealism (mental escapism that is, in fact, a restorative confrontation with the self in dream). In between the switches in levels of consciousness lie the barely conscious delusions, characterized by the attempt to escape pain by living out life differently, seeing its otherwise unremarkable scenes through rose-colored glasses. It is a life of welcoming reality and surrealism but with one condition: by distorting its unacceptable facets into delicious unreality. It is thus a life of constant adjustments, a calibrating of one’s motions to the ensuing conflicts until the rubberband of one’s psyche gives up its elasticity, until the point of no return: the bitter agony of self-confrontation.
The break-off from denial, as we know, is always an emotionally drenched catharsis. When the self declares war against the self, one mentally fights with the self against one's parental imprinting vis-a-vis one’s own choices, because of, or despite, one’s view of the world through mother-and-father-colored glasses.
The self-confrontation is ugly as hell, but as the film says, ugliness is a form of death. Loss of any kind is a form of death. But it is also implied that death, especially death to self, is even far more ugly, really ugly, but it is a form of rebirth, as a caterpillar ‘dies’ into a chrysalis to emerge as a butterfly. It is a graduation from one's shadow life, to sound Jungian about it.
Yul Servo as Miguel has that sympathetic look, but his surprising (because unlikely) everyman voice and diction, though fitting, can be distracting. Manila here possesses a quaint American-era aura that is rarely captured even in Filipino period movies. One anticipates the appearance of all those Art Deco structures along Vito Cruz and Avenida Rizal, but sadly nothing of that delightful sort ever comes. But the tint is very interesting: neither sepia nor Technicolor. This version of Manila is even set against a backdrop of evocative but heretofore unheard of compositions, which turns out to be all original. Some stretches have a dragging despondency to them that teases the viewer to boredom and catnap-land if he survives impatience and uneasiness.
But viewed in the spirit Jon Red intended, Ilusyon works as a story about the utter reality of illusion in our lives, and how it is damaging if left to gnaw at the soul and left ungrieved, which makes the shattering of illusions ultimately an utter necessity.
Except for its objectionable scenes (voyeuristic nudity and steamy sex scenes), I would’ve been comfortably pronouncing pride in having watched Jon Red’s Ilusyon (2005), a film about, as the title goes, the nature of illusions.
Who doesn’t pass through one’s waking life without harboring some kind of illusion? Who hasn’t wished in daydreams that one is a better person, smarter, more charming, richer, more virile? Who hasn’t hallucinated that one’s mother was a more loving woman even as she balanced between her career as dean of graduate studies in psychology and her womanly tasks at home, that one’s father owned and managed all the antique shops in town and stashed away vast profits in Switzerland (or is it Singapore now)? Who hasn’t imagined one were the eldest in the family instead, or the middle, or the youngest, or having a solicitous elder brother or sister? Who hasn't imagined he were his or her father's or mother's clone, that she were that model, actor, heiress to Forbes' and Rockefeller's bank accounts? Whoever is not guilty of having delusions of grandeur in between the grand mal seizures, please stand up!
Who even imagined such a theme can ever be limned on film? Indie director Jon Red can, and the result is quite an effective blurring of reality and surrealism, memory and the whimsy of self-deceptive inventions of the mind. Ilusyon is a story of human survival through illusions.
The central character Miguel is a young man from the countryside in the 1950s who comes to Manila in search of his father. He learns that his old man, a painter/visual artist, is no longer around his rented apartment, leaving only a letter of explanation, followed by a series of strange letter deliveries. In the letter, the father informs his son that he had to vacate the place and go on a hiatus to find himself after losing his love, Miguel’s mother. To get by, Miguel finds a job by being a painter – no, not that kind, but a more humble one: a house painter.
One day, a client of his father – a female nude-painting model – drops by and mistakes Miguel, the housepainter, for his father, the real painter. Miguel, struck by her physical beauty and seeing a chance for love, resorted to subterfuge, pretending to be his artist father.
His grand deception leads him to quietly hilarious complications and subtle yet unforgettable life lessons.
Like Miguel’s many learnings, the film touches on several themes: urban migration and the cruel impersonality of urban life, the search for an absentee father, motherlessness and inconsolable loss, discovery of lust or sexual passion, death, and ugliness or the decay of physical beauty. However, the one tie that binds them all together, though seemingly incoherently to me, is the ridiculous yet necessary matter of illusion as a coping mechanism, a means to get by amid the seeming randomness of life.
In the film, the relativity of reality is depicted as regular interspersing of some banality (the mechanical quality of working life) and some surrealism (mental escapism that is, in fact, a restorative confrontation with the self in dream). In between the switches in levels of consciousness lie the barely conscious delusions, characterized by the attempt to escape pain by living out life differently, seeing its otherwise unremarkable scenes through rose-colored glasses. It is a life of welcoming reality and surrealism but with one condition: by distorting its unacceptable facets into delicious unreality. It is thus a life of constant adjustments, a calibrating of one’s motions to the ensuing conflicts until the rubberband of one’s psyche gives up its elasticity, until the point of no return: the bitter agony of self-confrontation.
The break-off from denial, as we know, is always an emotionally drenched catharsis. When the self declares war against the self, one mentally fights with the self against one's parental imprinting vis-a-vis one’s own choices, because of, or despite, one’s view of the world through mother-and-father-colored glasses.
The self-confrontation is ugly as hell, but as the film says, ugliness is a form of death. Loss of any kind is a form of death. But it is also implied that death, especially death to self, is even far more ugly, really ugly, but it is a form of rebirth, as a caterpillar ‘dies’ into a chrysalis to emerge as a butterfly. It is a graduation from one's shadow life, to sound Jungian about it.
Yul Servo as Miguel has that sympathetic look, but his surprising (because unlikely) everyman voice and diction, though fitting, can be distracting. Manila here possesses a quaint American-era aura that is rarely captured even in Filipino period movies. One anticipates the appearance of all those Art Deco structures along Vito Cruz and Avenida Rizal, but sadly nothing of that delightful sort ever comes. But the tint is very interesting: neither sepia nor Technicolor. This version of Manila is even set against a backdrop of evocative but heretofore unheard of compositions, which turns out to be all original. Some stretches have a dragging despondency to them that teases the viewer to boredom and catnap-land if he survives impatience and uneasiness.
But viewed in the spirit Jon Red intended, Ilusyon works as a story about the utter reality of illusion in our lives, and how it is damaging if left to gnaw at the soul and left ungrieved, which makes the shattering of illusions ultimately an utter necessity.
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