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REVIEWS
Despite its convent
setting, Sandoval’s
film is not overly
concerned with religion.
Apparition
Filipino director Vincent Sandoval follows
his transgender drama Senorita with a story
about nuns living in a remote convent during
the Marcos years By Deborah Young
THERE ARE FEW SIGNS OF
faith in the remote mountain
cloister in Apparition,
where a small group of
Catholic nuns practice poverty,
chastity and obedience. What
director Vincent Sandoval
(Senorita) seems most interested
in is using the convent as
a metaphor for Filipino society
in the Seventies, which buried
its head in the sand while
president Ferdinand Marcos
Eden
Megan Griffiths takes an
alternative approach toward
otherwise lurid subject matter
in this fact-based drama
By John DeFore
GRIM BUT GRIPPING, THE TRUE-STORYinspired
Eden tells the survival tale of
a Korean-American girl kidnapped
by a prostitution ring in 1994. A big change
from director-co-writerMegan Griffiths’s last
feature, The Off Hours, this one is impossible
to ghettoize as a festival-only film and has
strong prospects, in art houses and perhaps
in a wider theatrical run.
Winner of SXSW’s Audience Award for
narrative feature, the picture takes a nonexploitative
approach to lurid material. Jamie
Chung plays Hyun Jae, a New Mexico teen
declared martial law and
police tortured and murdered
opposition protestors. Fans of
Xavier Beauvois’ contemplative
art house hit Of Gods and Men,
which has several points of
similarity, are likely to be disappointed
at Sandoval’s mundane
focus, though its well-shot subject
could attract some interest
outside festivals after its Busan
and Vancouver bows.
When bright-eyed novitiate
12
Sister Lourdes (Jodi Sta. Maria)
arrives at the convent of Adoration,
tucked way up a forested
mountain, she finds a dozen nuns
living as a family protected from
the world around them. Mother
Superior (Fides Uyugan-Asensio)
is strict but not a monster, the
mature Sister Vera (Raquel
Villavicencio) a little dour and
forbidding, and the others are
sweet-faced ladies who just want
to follow the rules and pray.
Nothing wrong with that, were
it not for the disturbances happening
outside. Protest rallies
are taking place almost daily
in Manila and the brother of
Sister Remy (Mylene Dizon) has
been arrested by the police. Not
surprisingly, Mother Superior
(who reads the newspaper and
knows what’s going on) advises
her sheltered brood to sit tight
and say their prayers.
Of course the outside world
eventually impinges on their
peaceful, see-no-evil lives. First,
independent young Sister Remy
sneaks a radio into her room and
then begins attending political
meetings against Marcos. Since
she and Sister Lourdes are the
convent’s two “externs,” only
they are allowed to make the
long trek through the woods to
get supplies in town. On one such
occasion they are late in returning,
and in the dark get attacked
who gets into a stranger’s car and winds up
deep in the desert, imprisoned in a self-storage
facility where dozens of girls are forced to
work as call girls by a team whose boss (Beau
Bridges) is a corrupt Federal Marshall.
After unsuccessful attempts at escape, the
girl (nicknamed Eden) adapts, accepting
her plight to such an extent that she helps
drug-addled captor Vaughan recapture other
escapees in order to curry favor.
As Eden becomes part of the organization’s
day-to-day operation, Chung and
Griffiths refuse to overdramatize the psychological
tradeoffs survival demands. Eden’s
decision to put her conscience on ice is a
mostly internal struggle; she’s usually as outwardly
cool as Bridges is, though both characters
encounter one or two surprises that
make complete unflappability impossible.
By putting the script’s emphasis on Eden’s
adaptation instead of on the violations she
by a band of thugs, who brutally
gang rape one of them.
With the safety of their
monastic sanctuary violated,
the nuns are no longer in peace.
The rest of the film follows
their reaction to this disaster,
which includes an unwanted
pregnancy, deep emotional
scars and guilty consciences.
Though there is a lot of praying
in the chapel, the film never
suggests any divine comfort. As
the opening quote about a sick
society from Communist leader
Antonio Gramsci suggests,
Sandoval’s is a lay approach that
has little to offer to religiousminded
viewers. More importantly,
the characters begin to
have improbable reactions that
question their credibility. Would
a meek Catholic nun furiously
demand to have an abortion,
for example? As the metaphor
of the convent as society in
miniature takes precedence over
realism, the rape’s aftermath
becomes less and less involving,
despite the film’s perfectly
adequate all-female cast.
New Currents
Production companies:
Autodidact Pictures, Cinemalaya
Foundation
Cast: Mylene Dizon, Jodi Sta.
Maria, Fides Uyugan-Asensio
Director: Vincent Sandoval
Eden won the Audience Award at SXSW.
must endure, the filmmakers both avoid having
to show the most degrading action and
make the story easily embraced by those who
feel women onscreen are too often viewed as
mere victims.
World Cinema
Director Megan Griffiths
Screenwriters Richard B. Phillips,
Megan Griffiths