Unfortunately I've never seen Tony Perez's Sa North Diversion Road onstage, but it's easy to see why this is a perennial theater favorite, constantly being restaged: it's the story of ten couples, of different social classes, occupations, and temperaments, driving at different times down the same road, dealing with the man's infidelity to the woman. The metaphors are obvious--life is a long road, taken by different people as differing experiences, with different destinations along the way; the pleasure in this piece is in the actual execution, a dramatic tour de force for two actors as they play ten different people in ten different emotional tones.
Easily the best thing about Dennis Marasigan's adaptation of the play is just that: it adapts the play, making changes where necessary to exploit the medium of film. Flashback sequences are inserted when necessary, mostly in the beginning of the picture, to ease us from the usual film narrative to the more radical one of the play (funny how narrative theater, with its spatial and temporal restrictions, seems on the whole more adventurous than narrative cinema when it comes to plot structure). On a tiny budget he achieves a variety of lighting schemes and music to accompany each story, from an austere darkness and stark piano score (indicating Ingmar Bergman angst) to a bright and sunny farce, the characters' thick Bulacena accents providing the rhythm and melody. There's a silent slapstick interlude (one of the film's comic highlights), a '70s Bohemian laugh-a-thon, even a science-fiction-y segment, with two intellectuals decked out in stark white (a nod to THX 1138?) literally overanalyzing their relationship to death.
Marasigan rises to the Hitchcockian challenge of spending almost the whole ninety minutes in a car's confined space, and still making it visually interesting--he gives us a variety of angles and cuts fluidly and interestingly to differing beats (from languid long shots to nervous quick cuts), depending on the story he's telling. He keeps the different storylines clear and distinct where it could all easily become confusing.
But the glory of the film is his work with the actors, and the performances they give. The film is a true duet, with John Arcilla and Irma Adlawan (Marasigan's wife) as the ten troubled couples, and where Marasigan supports them with lighting and music and costumes and the occasional prop (a hilariously ubiquitous bag of watermelon seeds, for example, which seem to transcend social class and background), most of the work and effects are created through the actors.
This may be mainly bias, but with the exception of a few segments, it seems to me Adlawan's character sets the tone and carries most of the picture. She either dominates the scene or is Arcilla's equal, and as we run through the different stories, a composite or collage impression of her character emerges--sarcastic, witty, furious, tender and ultimately heartbreaking, the different characters merge to give us the bewildering, ever-changing complexity of the human soul.
Arcilla gives support, but this is no small thing; I've never thought 'supporting performance' ever meant the performance was inferior, or less crucial, only that in the story's structure it's nominally subordinate. He keeps up with Adlawan's bewildering cornocupia of characters, matching her every change of mood, no easy feat. When he's given his own aria--the devastated husband dealing with his mentally incapacitated wife--he's simple, direct, moving. One of the best films, Filipino or otherwise, I've seen this year.
