Opinion
Leonor Will Never Die is what true love of cinema looks like
The aged heroine of author / director Martika Ramirez Escobar’s Leonor Will By no means Die might not be the picture that involves thoughts once you consider an auteur filmmaker whose creativeness is full of an untold variety of fantasies all craving to be changed into blockbuster options. However the film needs you to ask your self: why not? Why can’t a retired lola from Manilla who’s perpetually late paying her electrical energy invoice even be probably the most good motion administrators of her period and somebody who can solely course of existential crises by turning them into movies inside her thoughts?
All through Leonor Will By no means Die, Leonor (Sheila Francisco) herself not often stops to ponder these questions due to how important filmmaking continues to be to her identification. Despite the fact that she’s lengthy since stopped working professionally by the point we meet her, writing and dreaming up new worlds nonetheless comes as naturally to her as respiratory and her popularity as one of many greats of the Pinoy motion film canon. Leonor tells herself that she’s comfy dwelling in her small condo alongside her resentful-yet-caring son Rudy (Bong Cabrera), however each of them are consistently conscious of how dysfunctional their relationship’s develop into following the demise of Rudy’s brother (and Leonor’s favourite baby in life), “Useless” Ronwaldo (Anthony Falcon).
Although Useless Ronwaldo is not among the many dwelling, he options largely all through Leonor Will By no means Die each as a form of image for his household’s grief and as a translucent spectre who usually talks and interacts along with his still-living relations as if it’s no large deal. Leonor Will By no means Die is purposefully opaque about how a lot of its heightened actuality could be attributed to any precise supernatural forces and the way a lot of it’s a reflection of Leonor’s and her household’s shared love of overwrought storytelling. Leonor’s frustrations together with her sons and her estranged husband, Valentine, as simply as necessary as her love for them of their dynamic as a household unit, however all of their petty points fall to the wayside after a freak accident involving a falling tv leaves Leonor in a coma nobody is definite she’ll wake from.
As alarming as Leonor’s accident is, it’s additionally Leonor Will By no means Die’s main turning level and one of many earliest indicators of the true brilliance and ambition of Escobar’s script. Whereas everybody within the waking world is busy worrying about whether or not Leonor will survive, her coma transports her thoughts into the fantasy world of “Ang Pagbabalik ng Kwago” (The Return of Kwago), a dream actuality with a 4:3 side ratio and an overarching narrative pulled from one in every of Leonor’s unfinished, semi-autobiographical screenplays.
All the unarticulated ache and eager for inventive freedom that Leonor hides from her household is laid naked as she giddily wanders by her private fever dream with an uncanny omniscience that places characters like a fictionalized model of Ronwaldo (Rocky Salumbides) on edge. Leonor herself isn’t completely certain what to make of her newfound means to exist in her personal unfinished tales, however after spending a lot time having her innate want to create stifled and dismissed, she will be able to’t assist however dive headfirst into the escape and journey “Ang Pagbabalik ng Kwago” guarantees to be.
Leonor Will By no means Die performs extra of a playful celebration of basic Pinoy motion options reasonably than a self-series love letter to the style due to how completely it picks aside and performs with its narrative components earlier than piecing them again collectively — virtually as if to remind you the way singular tales could be advised in quite a lot of alternative ways. As Leonor, Francisco charms her method by scenes within the film’s first half with an affability and ease that belies the hazard lurking in all places in “Ang Pagbabalik ng Kwago” and the perilousness of her scenario in the actual world.
The deeper Leonor descends into her fantasy, the extra vitality Leonor Will By no means Die places into drawing your consideration to the intricacy of its a number of stories-within-stories, all of which find yourself becoming collectively in a method that provides you a way of Escobar’s personal private relationship to the filmmaking course of. Leonor Will By no means Die takes a flip in the direction of the postmodern in its ultimate moments which will confound viewers hoping for the movie to shut out by tying up each single one of many fascinating threads it lays out. Leonor Will By no means Die does finish with an air of completeness and readability — not essentially for you as a viewer, and even for Escobar as a storyteller, however definitively for Leonor as a determine who achieves a form of shifting immortality befitting an artist of her simple expertise.
We caught Leonor Will By no means Die as a part of this 12 months’s Sundance Worldwide Movie Competition, the place it received the Particular Jury Award for Progressive Spirit. At the moment, the film continues to be being shopped round for a theatrical launch.
