The Age of Entertainment

Film Review
Title: Aliwan Paradise (1992)
Director: Mike De Leon

In 1975, the late auteur filmmaker Lino Brocka once again placed the Philippines on the cinematic map with his film Maynila: Sa Mga Kuko ng Liwanag. Based on a novel by Edgardo M. Reyes, Maynila won 6 Famas Awards including Best Picture, Best Screenplay and Best Director and remains to be the only Filipino film that is consistently listed in the world’s top 100 films. Collaborating with two gifted young artists (screenwriter Doy Del Mundo and producer/cinematographer Mike De Leon), Brocka was able to produce a contemporary masterpiece unparalleled since the glory days of Lamberto Avellana and Gerardo De Leon. Seventeen years later in 1992, a year after Brocka’s untimely demise, Mike De Leon, now one of the country's most respected film master, and Doy Del Mundo resurrected the characters from Brocka’s opus with Aliwan Paradise – a film that satirizes the overwhelming influence of the entertainment media among the Filipino masses. This was released a few years before the political scene was actually flooded by showbiz personalities running for public office, chief among them Joseph Estrada.

In his essay Aliwan Paradise and the Work of Satire in the Age of Geopolitical Entertainment, Robert Silberman cites Aliwan as the most outstanding among the four films featured in the omnibus Southern Winds (the other three are from Japan, Thailand, and Indonesia) for two main reasons: first, because “it does not present a return to the rural past or traditional values as rejuvenating,” and second, because Aliwan is “reflexive and satirical and presents the vision of a rural past or moral reformation as a dream.” If I may add, among the other films, Aliwan is also the most cynical in its view of contemporary urban and country life.

As I mentioned earlier, Aliwan brings back the two main characters from Brocka’s Maynila, making it a sequel of sorts or a reworking, or, better yet, a re-imagination of the original. Aliwan’s setting is unknown, though it suggests that it is sometime in the near future. It opens with a promotional TV ad encouraging everyone to audition for the state-sponsored search for a radically new form of entertainment. Julio Madiaga (now played by Julio Diaz), down on his luck in the big city, joins the long queue of hopefuls. He accidentally runs into Ligaya Paraiso (now played by Lara Melissa De Leon), who is also there to audition. As in the first film, Julio goes to the city in search of his long-lost love Ligaya and when they finally reunite, they realize that the city has taken away their innocence. But that is where the similarity in the plot ends. Maynila is a tragedy, while Aliwan a farce.

Ligaya seduces the impresario (Johnny Delgado) and convinces him to send her abroad as a sexy singer so she could earn the much-needed dollars. Upon learning this, Julio, in front of all the judges and the impresario, begs Ligaya to come home with him to the province and start a new life together. As they embrace each other, the impresario claps his hands and declares to everyone that Julio and Ligaya’s suffering is the radically new form of entertainment they are looking for. “The agony of these two wretched creatures,” he tells the judges, “is our agony.” We next see Julio and Ligaya starring in a movie about the hardships of urban life. The impresario, now acting as a director, films them scavenging in Smokey Mountain, a garbage dump that perfectly symbolizes Third World poverty. Misery and poverty, as it turns out, are the new forms of entertainment, and the impresario is bent on exploiting that. It is this kind of farce that mocks the tragedy in Maynila. Everything in Aliwan is a fantasy, including the short scene in the countryside since it is only part of the film-within-the-film. Even the Smokey Mountain scene may use an actual site as location but is no less a cinematic construct. Julio and Ligaya are going home, but only in the make-believe world of entertainment.

Aliwan Paradise is unique not only because of its humor but also because it is the most honest in depicting, or maybe predicting, Filipino life in the years to come. At the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 21st century, there has been a significant shift in the kind of entertainment we Filipinos watch. With programs like Wish Ko Lang and Wowowee, we have indeed come to enjoy watching misery and poverty on television. Even most of our soap operas in recent years typically revolve around the story of a poor girl who falls in love with a rich boy only to discover in the end that the poor girl is actually the daughter of a wealthy family.

Like in Aliwan, we now live in a society where the entertainment media is the strongest force that shape the way we think. It is the one telling us who we are. In that sense, Aliwan Paradise is way ahead of its time.