‘Filipiñana’ is a hole-in-one for social satire

As a neatly dressed country club tour guide, Dolly (Pipay Kipay), boards a bus of rich patrons—most of them either Filipino or Chinese—Manuel has Dolly welcome the audience to his strange world by chatting right down the lens. As the vehicle moves through sweltering streets, filled with poor crowds gathered to collect water for their families, these air conditioned confines are the first step of the director’s larger thesis. This expands (or rather, explodes) in the form of an abrupt cut to the golf course where most of the film unfolds, its sprinklers hissing venomously as water is spread freely across the grass.

The contrast is palpable, and it would feel downright evil if not for Manuel’s audiovisual irony, which wraps each dichotomy in a sense of resignation. Most “eat the rich” satires in the vein of Parasite have rested on a narrative tension involving when the feast might take place, but Filipiñana forces you to languish in hunger.

This sensation becomes quite literal when we meet our young protagonist, the quietly rebellious newcomer Isabel (Jorrybell Agoto), as she climbs a mango tree in search of forbidden fruit, as respite from the harsh sunrays. Tee girls aren’t allowed on the golf course where players and caddies congregate—a three-tiered system—so it isn’t long before she receives a talking to. From there on out, we follow her interactions with fellow country club employees as well as ultra-wealthy members, some of whom even tout their common ethnic background with Isabel (she’s Ilocano) as a supposed grounding to the average person. However, whispers of land deals and other forms of displacement hover in the movie’s background as the very concept of land—whether overtly referenced, or subtly extrapolated from the golf course setting—becomes a central theme.

Supporting characters veer in and out of the frame, some of whom never actually interact with Isabel, but they remain central fixtures of the movie’s lavish façade, and help establish its contours. These include the club’s powerful president Dr. Palanca (Teroy Guzman), his caddie and affair partner Charlie (Elle Velasco), an American student wrestling with returning home name Clara (Carmen Castellanos), her own inquisitive and friendly caddie Ina (Isabel Sicat), as well her rich, buffoonish uncle, Tito Renato (Carlos Siguion-Reyna).

As Isabel is sent on errands across the club’s endless acres, Manuel slowly but deftly exposes the song and dance its workers must put on for their clients. These take literal form at times, from faux-exotic welcome songs when tour buses pull up, to a re-election waltz for Dr. Palanca’s campaign, which, in a just world, would be the tongue-in-cheek song of the summer. However, the movie’s rhythms aren’t constrained by literal boundaries. The workers’ routines become songlike too, from the tee girls routinely sorting golf balls and placing them before male golfers—scenes which become uncomfortably suggestive, given the supplication involved—to the factory-like precision with which cleaners move through extravagant spaces while transforming them.

The club’s workers are, at once, invisible and an immutable fixture of its walls, and by following Isabel across a single day at the club, we’re granted complete and unfettered access to the halls of power. However, witnessing this grandeur from scene to scene also means letting go of the notion that anything will come of Isabel’s withheld ferocity, a sacrifice the movie, and the audience, are forced to make in service of the club’s machinery. The movie’s aesthetic approach may seem repetitive or obvious at first, as the camera’s stilted compositions merely repeat themselves from scene to scene (the primary focus is the defeating dynamic between enormous, extravagant spaces and diminutive workers). But this crushing mundanity becomes part and parcel of the movie’s larger point.

Bit by bit, Manuel slyly establishes the inescapable nature of this economic setting, and he makes you feel every crushing constraint. In the process, by the time Filipiñana reaches its gloomy climax, the result is a kind of cheeky anti-drama, where the only possibilities for each character—the moneyed, protected by their checkbooks, and their vulnerable underlings—are foregone conclusions. It’s a gut-punch disguised within a caustic satire, the likes of which you’re unlikely to see replicated this or any other year.