Sundance Is a Feast of World Cinema

Manuel’s approach to narrative is as original as his sense of cinematic form, and his gift for documentary-style observation is balanced by a refined sense of style. (He sketched this method and this story in a short film of the same title, which premièred at Sundance in 2020 and involves several of the same characters and actors.) The two women’s stories crystallize only gradually in the course of the feature, through the accretion of tiny details that, like the arrival of the hostess in the first shot, emerge amid a profusion of related distractions. Isabel, for instance, is introduced upside-down, lying on the grass, under the spray of one of the many sprinklers that water the course in a sort of mechanical ballet. (As she lies there, a little girl dashes by—one whose whereabouts will later become a major yet elusive plot point.) Renato is introduced by way of sunlight gleaming off what looks like the blade of a sword but turns out to be the shaft of a golf club. As for the tourists, their van pulls up, far in the background of a long shot that gazes through the grand lobby of the hotel—where, in the foreground, a small folk orchestra of blind musicians, accompanied by a dance troupe’s festive gyrations, provides a showy welcome.

The substance of “Filipiñana” is serious, even harsh, but its tone is wry and bittersweet. In this regard, as in the movie’s intricate tableau-like aesthetic, Manuel’s art is in the tradition of Jacques Tati and Wes Anderson. The many fixed-frame images (realized by the cinematographer Xenia Patricia) aren’t at all exemplars of so-called slow cinema, in which still frames distend action; rather, the effect that Manuel creates is crowded cinema—his compositions abound with activity of which the drama forms only a part. The end credits, teeming with his screen-packing array of golfers, dancers, staff, guests, and passersby, resemble a local phone book. The golf course and the hotel offer Manuel vast spaces to work with, in breadth and depth; the fixed frames lead the eye through those spaces in a way that suggests the interconnectedness of all that takes place within them. He delights in anything synchronized, whether mechanically or bodily, by design or by accident. A scene of workers stacking chairs in a ballroom brings to mind the giddy artistry of Jerry Lewis in “The Bellboy”; Chinese tourists, all clad in white, swing their clubs in synch on the driving range; and, as the tee girls sit in formation washing and restocking golf balls, their boss repeatedly declaims Chinese phrases that the tee girls repeat in unison, in preparation for interacting with the tourists. Manuel also jangles this apparent order with the striking visual trope of disorienting disproportions of scale—figures appearing unexpectedly small or large in the course’s expanses.

Amid these absurdities, Manuel coaxes out the cruelty of the resort’s hierarchies. In a sumptuous dining room, Dr. Palanca’s wife, a former Miss Universe, grouses about how her identity has been absorbed into her husband’s even as he’s carrying on brazenly with one of the course’s caddies. (The caddies, all young women, are often obliged to wade into one of the course’s water hazards and fish out golf balls, some of which are said to be resold for more than a resort worker makes in a day.) Isabel, sitting in a driving-range stall, is nearly hit with a ball when a clumsy golfer clangs it off a metal railing. Such scenes are framed in ways that call attention to the relentless labor that the resort extracts: in the background, trucks bring fresh trees that workers then plant on the course, caddies dash across the grounds as if being chased. When Dr. Palanca does karaoke for a group of guests, the camera pulls back from him to reveal the caddies, in peach-colored uniforms, arrayed behind him on stairs and a balcony to sway and clap along.

Music and dance are among the most demanding of cinematic subjects; even good choreography can be rendered banal by mediocre direction (see: Fred Astaire). The musical sequences in “Filipiñana”—not staged numbers but integral parts of the action—are filmed with filigreed flair, gathering infinitesimal gestures into choreographies of panoramic grandeur. These rise to sublime heights in a scene of a genteel rally for the reëlection of Dr. Palanca as the golf club’s president, which features a sinuously catchy campaign song, a suavely breathtaking dance, and, punctuating the spectacle, a piercing dramatic moment between the candidate and Isabel. In thinking about “Filipiñana,” I’d gladly just try to describe it in detail for the sheer pleasure of recollection. Its scenes are finely composed and precisely staged yet fluidly energetic. They are exemplary in their sensory beauty, in the delicately understated (and thus all the more powerful emotions) that they embody, in the world that they conjure, in the analytical insight that they unfold. With “Filipiñana,” Manuel opens new vistas in the future of the cinema.