The Leaving (2010, Ian Loreños)

Unfriended.

If you're a regular Facebook denizen, then you've probably experienced having your name removed from a friend's list of contacts. It hurts badly, especially if you haven't an inkling why you were obliterated from the list.

The emotional pain pales in comparison with the terrible anguish of a Chinoy young man named Martin. He also gets dumped without any explanation. The dumper in this case is his girlfriend! He wanders around Chinatown in his troubled state. He wants to confront her but something deters him and that is the fear of the truth. He knows she is no longer interested in him.

The Leaving deals with the fears of Chinese-Filipinos in Binondo. Director Ian Loreños laments the fading traditions and changing landscape in his neighborhood. There are fewer speakers of Chinese language among the youth. Dilapidated houses are torn down to make way for condominiums and malls. Scores of families leave for better places. This diaspora brings out some fears and anxieties in young Chinoys.

Loreños brilliantly frames their stories within the horror genre. He is quite successful in bringing out the screams although a bit too much reliance on Asian horror imagery (eg. Sigaw's empty corridors and the fiends of Japanese horror films). He fails to maximize the Chinese Ghost Month setting of the movie. A Singaporean movie The Maid starring Alessandra de Rossi was more effective in scaring viewers with Ghost Month tales and traditions. The Kelvin Tong film features memorable spooky vignettes such as the reason behind vacant seats at performances and the punishment for people who've done bad things during the seventh month of the Lunar Calendar. Singapore was shown as hell for Pinay domestic helpers.

LJ Reyes won an acting award for her role as the martyr wife Grace in The Leaving. Her student year/s at St. Stephen High School gave her the tools to portray a Chinese-speaking character. Just like the betrothed lass of Limbunan, Grace gets bamboozled by an elder with the positive aspects of arranged marriages. The gist of her mother's advice is that as long as she (Grace) gets to eat three meals a day then the marriage is fine. I'm sure young Chinese women will raise hell with this pathetic advice. Incidentally, the Singaporean movie The Maid has a vivid hellish view of an arranged marriage.

Unfriended? Dumped? Betrayed?

The Leaving asks you to retreat, pray, move. Moving on is not enough. Martin goes from place to place but ends up distraught at the end of the day. Grace keeps on living her uneventful daily life the same way over and over again. Both characters eventually see the light and reexamine their lives and priorities. They pray for guidance and discernment. They move forward and leave the ghosts of the past.

The Leaving (Ian Loreños, 2010)

Everything is changing, leaving, and returning. There is always a constant transience in this world.   -- The Leaving, program synopsis

            

Strange but one sees little of the transience in question ever dramatized in this film. The film promises movement and what we get is stasis. If nothing else, everyone here is trapped in purgatorial states, a state of imprisonment, which makes transience synonymous with escape. Escape, that’s all – and perhaps a dastardly one. Let’s recite their names one by one. Martin, unable to fend for himself, literally hightails it to the loving arms of his parents in the States. Grace sees transience by giving up on her marriage. The line of least resistance. And those who supposedly make the existential  transition – the transient ones? The lovers, William and Joan – they do so through violence. Violence also takes another neighbor; they find her all broken like the rag doll that is supposed to stand for her missing younger sister. Sick. And how about the ghosts trapped in this haunted apartment building? This film defines transience in the most perverse terms: A function of flight and defeatism. The frightening part is, it seems done in solemn earnest. As such, one tries to see another film altogether. Another review instead, written before knowledge of those lines about transience – unearned, never made concrete.

According to popular notions, the Chinese in this country are so clannish and tight-knit in their ethnicity that it's hard to single out anyone of them who is struggling in life. Mention the word Chinese and this immediately conjures lofty and grandiose images of a business tycoon, or a rich, well-connected fat cat, or a kid studying in the most exclusive schools. In Ian Loreños’ The Leaving, one gets to see the other side of the tracks: Tsinoys who are economically vulnerable and subject to moral and human susceptibilities.

But Loreños -- who wears a number of hats as writer, producer and director for this film -- locates his characters almost exclusively within a middle-class spectrum, which short-circuits some of the exercise. Still, in a film set in a haunted apartment building in the enclave of Binondo, it’s a good college try. Perhaps, there aren’t really impoverished Tsinoys around after all.

Three intertwining stories make up The Leaving: subtitled Martin, The Lovers, and The Wife. In Martin, the eponymous character is the scion of a once-wealthy family who have since emigrated to the United States, leaving him alone to fend for himself. In the ensuing fall from grace, his girlfriend has left him, while he goes applying in futility from one job to another. In The Lovers, Wiliam, a married man, is embroiled in a volatile affair with travel-agent Joan and they tussle with deadly results. In The Wife, one sees a long-suffering character who discovers her husband’s indiscretions and starts a close, almost intimate relationship with the next-door neighbor, Martin. These overlapping lives must also coexist with the ghosts and ghostly ones trapped in the apartment building.

A nagging feeling of familiarity, however, sours an appreciation of this film. What condemns it is an unbridled wearing of influences on its sleeves. The Leaving is a pastiche of all-too-identifiable sources -- from Asian movies, mostly Hong Kong derivations, particularly Wong Kar-Wai, and still more specifically In the Mood for Love. Read above for the plot toThe Wife. From the very Asiatic color motif – red, all shades of red, curtains, calendars, fruits, dresses, and blood, copious blood – to suspiciously familiar shot compositions to the presence of ghosts recruited from Asian horror flicks, Nakata’s The Ring among others, this film is like a shameless collage that would put Picasso and Braque to shame.

It would have been all compensated for had this film recounted fresher, more novel stories, but that, too, is not forhtcoming. Aside from slavishly quoting In the Mood for Love in one part, the other two stories are not compelling enough to sit through either. They are trite tropes that one might generate in a scriptwriting workshop – e.g. someone looking for a job to no avail; a pair of lovers fighting and leading to the most logical extreme. If Loreños feels so compelled to tell stories about Tsinoys, he is better off adapting stories by authors like Charlson Ong, Mario Miclat and other Tsinoy fictionists. Having said that, Loreños had a good premise – the notion of the struggling Filipino-Chinese – but somewhere along the way, he just lost the plot, and ended up paying homage not to Tsinoys but an entire continent.