MIFF Play #9: WHETHER THE WEATHER IS FINE

A weather report animation of a typhoon gives way to a satellite image of it which gives way to a scene of the devastation it left. A teenaged boy is sleeping on the splinters and rubble of a house. Around him are corpses already going grey. He rouses and gets his bearings, visibly disgusted by some prayers droning nearby. He wanders to his old place where his girlfriend catches up to him before they both wander off, he's concerned about his mother and Andrea, girlfriend, just wants to get one of the evacuation ships that will take them to safety in Manila. They track down Norma, Miguel's mother, and find she's happy to get to the boat but must first connect with her estranged husband. Together then very much apart, the trio wends its way through a landscape of natural disaster, beset by thieving children, religious groups whose worship ranges from the quietly dignified to the crassly showbiz, and masses of screaming pain and need.

Writer/director Carlo Francisco Manatad lived through the super typhoon Yolanda when it hit Tacloban where this story is set. He had wanted to make a film about his experience immediately but circumstances forbade the production until 2021. I would bet that the time in between gave him hourly opportunities to think about what he had lived through and how he might best paint it on to a cinema screen. What we see here is a strangely mellow surface given to the cataclysm's aftermath in which the people act almost as they might if it hadn't happened but are making their way around its damage. It also suggests Manatad had the time to develop an approach that remained light enough to allow tints of satire here, magical realism there, and an overall compassion for the people who lived through the same.

Daniel Padilla as Miguel gives us an everyman who understands the extremity of the situation and the measures that survival might demand but stops short of Andrea's impulsive violence and self entitlement. He sees her amorality and eventual bizarre elevation with equal bewilderment. Charo Santos-Concio brings the weight of the world to Norma whose determination to mend the breach between her and her husband transcends thoughts of her own survival and even present wellbeing, the results of which are quietly poignant. Around them, this film plays and rolls like a gentle, warm dream where the violence hurts but the will to live levitates. An odd and oddly moving piece.