A symposium/discussion of sorts followed the screening of Hesus, Rebolusyonaryo this afternoon at the UP Film Center. The panel included writer/director Lav Diaz was there, cast members Ronnie Lazaro and Joel Lamangan, PDI columnist Rina Jimenez-David, Prof. Miriam Coronel and writer Krip Yuson.

Mostly everyone in the panel and those in the audience who were old enough to participate or be first hand witnesses to the First Quarter Storm commented that the film effectively evoked memories of Martial Law. The film is supposed to take place eight years into the future. And in 2011, the Philippines will be ruled by a military junta. There is a scene where people caught outside after curfew hours are forced to sing the national anthem. If you can't remember the words right, you can get killed, mauled, or be one of the desaparecidos. It is a dim and nearly hopeless scenario: two Edsa Revolutions not withstanding, we are doomed to forever repeat the same mistakes and end up with curtailed democracy.

History is a pattern we are all doomed to repeat. That theme seemed quite clear to me -- the song by The Jerks doesn't cease to remind us of it. We are not in the Philippines; we are actually living out the myth of Sisyphus. Hesus, Rebulusyonaryo exists in the realm of myth. All the characters are symbolical and stand for something else. Hesus is a rebel-slash-poet-slash-musician. He has an anthology of poems called Mga Tula ni Ybarra (or something like that -- I can't remember the exact title anymore). When somebody higher up in the revolution orders him to kill his comrades because one of them is a spy for the other side, he does so with the candor of an epic hero. Walk, shoot, bang, and everyone falls dead. He manages to get wounded and ends up in a coma, and the military man Simun saves him, on the condition that Hesus join him and the junta. Their end goal is the same. Ybarra, Simun. Somebody call in Father Damaso.

What bothers me about this movie is not the explicitness or the depiction of rightist-leftist-military junta politics but the passiveness with which the characters, especially Hesus, accept the ideologies presented to him. Ronnie Lazaro tells Hesus to kill his cell group. Sure. You must do this, you must go into the middle of the lake and talk to me. There are no questions, just go. Ideology is almost a religion.

For something that takes place in Manila, 2011, the film doesn't present a sense of time and place. Manila is forever encrypted in darkness, the streets are empty of people and full of trash. It prompted writer Krip Yuson to ask if that was a Blade Runner sort of thing -- all the people have moved away. Of course it can be explained by logistics and budget: most of the exteriors have been shot in the dead hours of the night, eliminating the need for extras and crowd scenes, and also by the fact that there is a curfew and people aren't allowed to venture out. The place reeks of decay, but you still want to ask -- where are all the people?

In the film, Hesus is just around my age, in his early twenties. He wasn't alive during the Martial Law, nor was he old enough to be in the Edsa Revolution of 1986. But he was living in a time and space in which the conditions are almost the same, but as one panelist noted, through the passage of time, the left must have shifted to the right, the right to the left of center. Where is he situated then? What position should he push for? But Hesus is a blank who follows blindly, who only listens to what the Ronnie Lazaro has to say. We have no idea as to what motivates Hesus to go up the mountains, to do the things that he does, to justify all the killings. We do not know what is in his head. Mark Anthony wears an impenetrable scowl, and spends a lot of the film's running time horizontal, presumably pondering his existence. In his thoughts, we are shown images of a field. And in the middle of a field, amid the light drizzle, lies an equally immobile Donita Rose. We later learn that she is blind and cannot hear anything. Immediately, one asks: then why was she lying in the middle of a field? When in the end of the film, Mark Anthony fetches her and they go into the mountains, does that mean that this is a film about the passive leading the blind?

The artist's argument is that a work of art can be ambiguous, and the artist need not explain his or her work, nor the meaning be made immediately available to the audience. Here lies the dilemma: cinema and film lies in the realm of the public. Film is a mass medium. Although I'm not asking for the film maker to bring down his art for it to be palatable to the masses, there is such a thing as a solid story and character motivation. Most of the comments and points raised by the members of the audience dwelled on this. Is it okay to forsake plot and character in favor of theme and polemics?

It's like the case of Bagong Buwan all over again. The film doesn't have characters but symbolisms of the ideology it wants to put forward. In Bagong Buwan, it's not about the young Muslim warrior and the Christian kid, it's about two religions becoming friends and creating a common ground. Hesus, Rebolusyonaryo is more of a treatise on the dissipating cultural memory than a film with flesh and blood characters.

It's a challenging movie, one that makes you think and squirm not just from the polemics, but the sheer heavy-handedness of it all. It's just so damn slow. There are entire stretches with no dialogue, and nothing much happening. There is no business going on except for what is inside Mark Anthony's brain and we aren't even allowed to see that. I thought director Gil Portes would finally say something about it when he quoted Martin Scorsese: "It is the film maker's business not to bore his audience for the two hours he sits through a film." Hesus Rebolusyonaryo isn't even two hours long, but it felt like an eternity.