KARNAL (1983)
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Créditos:
TÍTULO: Karnal / Of the Flesh
AÑO: 1983
PAÍS: Filipinas
IDIOMA: Filipino, tagalo
DIRECTOR: Marilou Diaz-Abaya
INTÉRPRETES: Cecille Castillo (Puring), Phillip Salvador (Narcing), Vic Silayan (Gusting), Joel Torre (Goryo), Charito Solis (Storyteller)
ARGUMENTO: Prodigal son Narcing returns to his family’s isolated hacienda with his urban wife Puring. Shocked at her resemblance to his late wife, Narcing’s father lusts after his daughter-in-law...
Karnal/Of the Flesh (1983) has such a classic plot, simple and complex all at once, it would be instructive to inspect a more detailed outline. (And this being a critical survey, “spoilers” are not inappropriate.)
The film opens with a steely-looking woman (Charito Solis) in present-day metropolitan San Juan, addressing us, with a lurking tone of disquiet, about the story of her ancestors in a faraway village called Mulawin. The film soon takes us to a glowing day in the past when Narcing (Philip Salvador) arrives back at the family’s old ancestral mansion with his new wife Puring (Cecille Castillo) whom he met in Manila. He introduces Puring to his father Gusting (Vic Silayan), landlord of a big hacienda; his sister, the diffident Doray (Grace Amilbangsa); and Doray’s husband Menardo (Pen Medina), so submissive to Gusting that he has become a cipher of a man.
Father and son’s reunion is tense. Gusting has not lost his resentment at Narcing’s decision to disobey him by leaving his place as the landlord’s son and trying his luck in Manila. He shows no sympathy now that his son has come back, a failure in the city. Adding to the tension, Gusting is struck by Puring’s resemblance to his dead wife. Moreover, Puring shows a frankness and directness that would have been natural in Manila where she was orphaned early and learned to work and support herself, but her manner strikes the traditional, feudalistic Gusting as insolent.
Narcing, who would rather have a town job than work in the hacienda, finds a spot at the provincial capitol and is away most of the day. He reminds Puring that she should not leave the house and go about the village on her own, as only loose women do this. Puring soon tires of being confined to the house and domestic housework and she tries to persuade Narcing about going back to Manila but he angrily rebuffs her.
She soon learns from Doray that Gusting’s wife hanged herself a few years back after Gusting accused her of infidelity and dragged her naked in front of the villagers. Gusting, for his part, is obsessed with his daughter-in-law’s resemblance to his wife. He initially represses these impulses, finding release in wielding an oppressive hand over the family members and his farmers. One day, while Narcing is away, Gusting prevails on Puring to wear his wife’s old clothes and jewelry. The sight overwhelms Gusting and he forces himself on Puring but is interrupted when his daugher comes into the room.
Puring tries to find some respite from the house’s oppressive grip by talking to the townspeople who look with suspicion at a woman going around by herself. She finds solace in a friendship with the town outcast, the mute coal-peddler Goryo (Joel Torre). Word goes around about her activities and Narcing beats his wife with rage before asking forgiveness in a pattern that would only become too familiar.
One day, Puring loses track of time and overstays in Goryo’s hut. Gusting finds her and after dragging her back to the house, accuses her of adultery in front of Narcing. This leads to a fight between father and son where the father wrestles his son to defeat. When Narcing learns that his father had tried to ravish his wife, he picks up a bolo knife and decapitates his father. Puring soon gives birth to a malformed infant with horns and, wishing to end its suffering, buries it alive. The timid Doray flees the house and her passionless marriage and tries to find her real love Jose. The repressed spinster who is narrating the story is their daughter, and though the past is long gone, its actors long buried, it still manages to exert its destructive influence on her life.
Under Abaya’s inspired direction, Karnal brings together a number of major artists of Philippine cinema at the height of their powers: Lee, with a poetic screenplay and a flair for dialogue that come across as both lyrical and almost insolently direct at the same time; Manolo, whose cinematography and lighting evoke a haunted world; Zabat, whose production design has a diaphanous quality that suggests the permeability of past and present; and Ryan Cayabyab, who wrote and orchestrated a musical score that heightens and sustains the film’s balance of menace and rhapsody.
Indeed, with an irony that attests to the transformative power of art, Karnal comes across as exquisite and delicate, despite the rape, patricide, suicide, beheading and infanticide that drive its story. Well, almost all of the film.
Marring the film’s elegance, an extended passage after the infant burial on through Narcing’s bloody suicide in a Manila jail is so unremittingly punctuated by wailing that it pushes the film over to melodrama. Such strident miscalculation could have sunk many another film, but with Karnal, it only attests to the underlying beauty and power of the work. The film regains grace and balance after the suicide, which is sustained to its haunting end. And indeed, despite its evident flaw, Karnal remains a great masterwork with the hindsight of 30 years.Karnal can be viewed validly from a number of angles: As a metaphor of the iron-fisted Marcos dictatorship then holding the Philippines in its grip; an indictment of a patriarchal, feudalistic system that even now continues to suppress women and the weak in the Philippines and other countries; a psychological study on the porousness of past and present; and a Greek tragedy, with its sense of inevitability and stark depiction of man’s eternal passions.
Karnal premiered at the 1984 Metro Manila Film Festival and though it won the best picture trophy and others for cinematography and sound design, it was initially ignored by the public who were used to more overwrought handling of their dramas. In any case, the film’s reputation continued to rise and by decade’s end, it was hailed by the Manunuri critics group as one of the ten best films of the decade along with Moral. It also became the second of Abaya’s films to gain international attention at film festivals including Sceaux and Paris and eventually, at retrospectives in Munich and Düsseldorf.
Karnal became known as the third in Abaya’s groundbreaking trilogy of feminist films. It’s often said, with good reason, that to refer to a director as a woman director is a gross form of male chauvinism. But it’s appropriate to touch on the subject of women directors here. Abaya herself did not shrink from referring to some of her films as a “feminist film by a woman” yet she never saw herself as any less than equal to her male counterparts. While Philippine women directors, particularly the prolific Susanna C. de Guzman and Fely Crisostomo, were not unknown in the industry’s history, one could count their numbers with the fingers of one hand at any given time and the studios generally confined them to working on romantic melodramas. The only other female directors active when Abaya started working were Laurice Guillen and Lupita Aquino-Concio, both of whom directed some great classics of their own, among them Salome and Tayong Dalawa/The Two of Us by Guillen, and Minsan Isang Gamu-Gamo/Once a Moth by Aquino-Concio. In ambitiousness of projects and budget, box office records set, variety of themes and genres, and international recognition, Abaya would eventually surpass them all, and indeed most other directors of whatever gender or sexual orientation; and in this way, the new paths she opened and rights she procured have accrued to all filmmakers irrespective of gender.
MARILOU DIAZ-ABAYA, OBSESSIONS AND TRANSITIONS
http://www.asiancinevision.org/marilou- ... survey-26/
Ya sé lo que estáis pensando: Una peli filipina del predicador que se titula Karnal, ¡aquí hay tomate!
Pues sí y no. He remarcado una frase del ensayo que creo resume en pocas palabras lo que podéis encontrar. Argumentalmente no puede ser más desenfrenada: La protagonista resulta tener un gran parecido con la antigua señora de la casa, muerta en trágicas y misteriosas circunstancias. Podría uno preveer un desarrollo hitchcockiano... pero esto es un peli filipina. De todos los caminos posibles (suspense, fantástico, melodrama, romance, tragedia), no es que coja el más espinoso, es que va por uno se desvía por otro y regresa por donde nunca esperarías. Y lo más difícil, manteniendo un cierto equilibrio, elegancia y hasta lirismo.Es la #23 de la lista filipina y la primera dirigida por una mujer.
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