By Joseph L. Garcia, Senior Reporter
Movie Review
Isang Himala
Directed by Jose Lorenzo “Pepe” Diokno
EARLIER this year, Broadway star Patti LuPone appeared on the talk show Hot Ones, where, instead of apologizing to singer Madonna about her previous criticism of the singer’s acting skills in the movie musical Evita (Ms. LuPone played the dictator’s wife in the 1979 Broadway run of the musical), she decided to eat an extra-hot wing and proceeded to criticize the singer even further (despite Madonna winning a Golden Globe for the role; there will be no Madonna criticism in this home).
Isang Himala, the movie musical based on the 2003 and 2018 musicals, in turn inspired by Ishmael Bernal’s epic 1982 film (all written by Ricardo “Ricky” Lee, now National Artist of the Philippines for Film and Broadcast Arts) avoids this conflict by casting almost all the same actors from the 2018 run in the 2024 musical, a contender at the Metro Manila Film Festival.
The Patti LuPone vs. Madonna conflict opens up a can of worms about the adaptability of pieces from the stage to the screen. We’ve seen its success in Broadway’s latest offering to Hollywood in the critical acclaim achieved by Wicked (Part 1), but will this same effect translate to an all-Filipino show? We’ll try to answer that in this review.
For starters, Isang Himala is shot on a set instead of arid Ilocos as in the cinematic source of the musical’s source material. That’s okay — the movie wants to resemble the musical, not the original movie.
If anything, it highlights the artifice in the story: Elsa (a provincial maiden originally played straight by Nora Aunor; cementing her status as local Superstar) claims to see the Virgin Mary and begins a faith-healing journey that shoots her to a degree of celebrity; the journey ends in tragedy. The film was regarded then as the best this country could offer, and what that story says about us, I’d rather not think about.
A colleague had told me that I should watch this movie because I was the only one among the Lifestyle reporters to have seen the musical’s 2018 run (related story: https://tinyurl.com/9nmu35n3). Big mistake: all I did in my seat was compare the magic of the theatrical run to the experience in the cinema, giving this review an unfair slant. I do, however, envy those who will see the musical for the first time in this form, for it really is quite a good movie — if you hadn’t seen the musical.
For example, one of the musical’s highlights was the interactive set (the theater at Circuit Makati was comparatively small) where actors would pop in at your side, and the sound of howling winds wrapped around your seat, making you truly feel as if you were part of the story. The movie version really made you just a watcher, though the character of the filmmaker, Orly (played by David Ezra), would often attempt to break the fourth wall. We also feel that new songs were added and the character of the prostitute Nimia (Kakki Teodoro) was expanded — to the detriment of Aicelle Santos’ Elsa.
Ms. Santos has a beautiful voice (I once described it as “having a certain purity”; she won First Runner-up in 2005’s Pinoy Pop Superstar), but her solos are few and far in between. Everybody and their mother gets a song (even the town lunatic gets a few lines) in this film, detracting attention from Elsa’s town-wide stardom. But I guess that’s okay: what the play added to the movie was making the townspeople of cursed Cupang into a hungrier and needier chorus, adding to the pressures of being Elsa.
Speaking of wasted opportunities to showcase Ms. Santos, I was very excited to hear “Gawin Mo Aking Sining,” a song that Elsa sings in the theater version while being dressed by her attendants as Orly takes videos of her. It’s a very powerful song about photography-as-immortality (I don’t think there are many songs in this theme) and self-delusion. In the movie, she just sings this as part of an interview, robbing the number and Ms. Santos’ voice of grandeur. As I’ve said, however, I will envy the person hearing this for the first time, because it really is a great song (it still gave me goosebumps after all these years). Frankly, I’d watch the movie again just to hear it; we wish they’d release a soundtrack.
As we’ve said, the movie musical is shot on a set instead of on location. While this gives more control for lighting and other elements (as needed in the story), the scale of the stage followed on the medium of cinema has a hand in diminishing its epic qualities. In the original movie, scores of people flock to Nora Aunor’s Elsa, so you can really feel the suffocation of small-town drama. In the stage production, a limited number of people can be forgiven due to the limits of the venue’s size. In this movie production, the score (singular) of people who follow Elsa around don’t really hit the spot. Furthermore, while the theater stars who populate the film have some screen experience, their acting in this movie seems to fit better onstage instead of on-screen. The entire effect seems like one of those live American TV specials of Broadway musicals.
The film, much like its source materials, is an intellectual exercise. The movie is great — but you have to want to watch it. You watch it to compare it to the musical. You watch it to compare it to the movie. You watch it because you liked the story, the singing, the actors; et cetera, but I can’t see any Juan off the street entering the theater to watch this on a blind buy. It is an excellent piece independent of its influences, but we’re all only human, and we are shaped by the things that have come before. It’s also to its handicap that the theater is often open only to those who can afford it, so the movie’s appeal will be limited to the theater’s small audience.
Still, despite all my nitpicking, the cinema where we watched it saw a full house. We truly wish for a miracle for this production — that it can go beyond its limited, fashionable audience and pick up a few new fans along the way.
MTRCB Rating: PG
