A conflicted policewoman is placed in charge of investigating a crime that she herself committed in Isabel Sandoval’s moody noir, Moonglow. In many ways about the deadening quality of life under authoritarianism, the film contemplates complicity and resistance along with the “paradise of progress” that is touted as the modern Philippines though it faces many of the same problems as in 1979. You may think of yourself as some kind of moral crusader, Dahlia’s aunt warns her, but you’re no match for them.
Sister Therese may have a point. The news is full of stories of abandoned bodies and mysterious fires. Dahlia (Isabel Sandoval) characterises her theft as an act of rebellion and retribution. She does not keep this large sum of money taken from her corrupt boss’ safe for herself, but gives it to her aunt, a nun, with the instruction that it’s to be used to help the victims of a slum fire that later turns out to have been orchestrated by the police chief who is getting kickbacks from construction firms and envisions a bright future for himself in politics.
Going into politics seems to be the ultimate goal for many. Charlie (Arjo Atayde) was also being groomed for office, but chose to emigrate instead after being confronted by the ugly side of his family’s elite status. The nephew of police chief Bernal, he’s just returned from America to look after his ailing father having become a lawyer rather than law enforcement official. Nevertheless, Bernal appoints him to the investigation presumably assuming he’s a safe person to ask because he’s family and therefore no threat to him. Old flame Dahlia, however, remarks on meeting him again that he now wears glasses, as if signalling Charlie’s ability to see things with more clarity than those around him whose vision has been blurred by continued exposure to life under the Marcos regime.
Dahila, who chose to stay rather than leave with Charlie, has indeed been compromised and is to an extent at least complicit as an agent of authoritarian power and according to some Bernal’s right hand woman. She says herself that she’s summoned in ghost in Charlie’s return and is haunted by the person she was before along with that of lost love. Each of them have repeated flashbacks to a lavish party shortly before Marcos took power which seems to hint at the coming future as Bernal introduces a man soon to be governor who echoes the contemporary radio broadcasts speaking of an era of prosperity hovering the horizon.
Alvaro manipulates Bernal with promises to make him his political successor, while it’s clear that any “prosperity” to come will only be for some. They burn slums to seize the land for shopping malls and luxury apartments leaving hundreds of people homeless and others of them dead. Alvaro later implies that some of the stolen money has been used to get the victims legal representation to challenge the government, a power that he also believes to have been “stolen” in that they have no right to it. Indeed, the authorities silence contrary voices without compulsion offing an investigative journalist reporting on the fires and later coming after Dahlia. Charlie reminds her that Bernal would sacrifice anyone, and indeed later implies he may do so with him when he starts asking the wrong questions about how much money went missing from the safe.
Yet Dahlia’s tragedy is that in the end she can’t escape herself or her past. She can’t make all of this right through her act of rebellion, but neither can she accept the ways in which she did not resist or leave as Charlie had. That other life is also haunting her. Sandoval’s frequent use of dissolves signals the foggy quality of life under authoritarianism in which it becomes impossible to think or see clearly when every moment is self preservation or active complicity. Past, present, and future come to co-exist with Dahlia stuck somewhere in between, longing for a return to an elusive past while fearing that the future is no longer possible. She and Charlie are now, as she says, different people. Their romance belongs to another era which has now become inaccessible, or perhaps existing only in the realms of memory as a painful reminder of that which could have been.
Moonglow screens in Amsterdam 11th/12th April as part of this year’s CinemAsia Film Festival.
Trailer (English subtitles)
Windows on Worlds 