Jippy Pascua – Windows on Worlds

“Not all women want to be mothers” according to the heroine of Anna Isabelle Matutina’s 12 Weeks, yet this is apparently largely what society expects of them. Faced with an unexpected pregnancy at 40, Alice decides on abortion though it is technically illegal in the fiercely Catholic Philippines and she finds herself having to offer justification for her choices while trying to process her complicated relationship with her own mother who often tells her that she too wanted an abortion but obviously did not go through with it and left shortly after Alice was born to become a domestic worker in Hong Kong.

The irony is that Alice (Max Eigenmann) works for an NGO supporting people displaced by natural disaster or civil unrest but is to an extent displaced herself in her estrangement from her mother, Grace (Bing Pimentel). In a poignant moment after having been made aware of the pregnancy by Alice’s violet ex Ben (Vance Larena), Grace brings out a box of baby clothes that once belonged to Alice only she never got to wear them because her grandmother who was raising her told Grace not to send anything but money because she had no way of knowing what size her daughter was. Grace is excited about the prospect of becoming a grandmother because it gives her a second chance at the motherhood she was denied by economic circumstance especially as the implication is she could play a larger role in their upbringing while Alice continues with her career.

But even considering the strained relationship between them, Grace is far from supportive more or less taking over booking doctor’s appointments on her daughter’s behalf without really consulting her. Aside from the awkwardness and upset of the situation, Alice cannot discuss the abortion with her mother because of its illegality and the risks it might cause to herself and those otherwise involved in it. To be able to access an abortion safely, she has to undergo a counselling session and is then told that her operation will take place at 11pm hinting at its illicitness that it must take place under cover of darkness. The counsellor is sympathetic and clear that she isn’t trying to change her mind even if some of the questions seem invasive or patriarchal. Asking if Alice has been subject to domestic violence she offers help making sure that she’s not being pressured into an abortion she might not want by violent partner or the necessity of escaping them.

Ben is indeed violent and it’s a fact that if she changes her mind and keeps the baby it will become much more difficult to keep him out of her life. Slightly younger than she is, he is moody and insecure while financially supported by Alice and living in a home she owns. He is not a responsible person with whom to raise a child though places extreme pressure on her to have the baby and manipulatively leaks the pregnancy news to Grace knowing she’ll do the same. Alice discovers that in reality everyone else is making her decisions for her, including a colleague who suddenly cancels a trip she was supposed to make to a disaster area on the grounds that his own wife has recently had a miscarriage and in his opinion it’s not safe for her to go.

Set during the imposition of martial law on Mindanao in 2017, the film implies that a kind of martial law already exists for women who are unable to make their own decisions about their reproductive health or exercise their own autonomy. Alice is repeatedly told that she should have the baby because she is already 40 and the chance won’t come again though little thought is given to whether she wanted the chance or not while her own thoughts surrounding motherhood are clouded by the relationship she has with Grace which was largely affected by the economic realities that forced her to become a migrant worker. In part she rejects becoming a mother out of anxiety worrying that she is not suited to it, but is also conflicted in its inextricable ties to Ben and with wider patriarchal violence in general depriving her of the ability to choose from all angles. In the end a choice is made for her in the cruellest of ways leaving her more or less powerless with only the small comfort of female solidarity.

12 Weeks screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

If you knew of a device which would give you “a beautiful human life”, wouldn’t you want to get hold of it? The heroine of Shireen Seno’s Nervous Translation longs to do just that, tantalised by its promise of the ability to write simply and convey one’s thoughts to others with ease. Living in anxious times, Yael is an anxious little girl who knows little of the chaos going on outside her ordinary home but continues to find herself uncertain even here.

Yael (Jana Agoncillo), often home alone, is a shy little girl left largely to her own devices until her harried mother, Val (Angge Santos), gets back from her job in a shoe a factory. Taking some advice from her absent husband a little too literally, she “retires” from being a mother for the first 30 minutes after arriving home, insisting on total silence and shutting herself away in her room as if her daughter did not exist. Meanwhile, Yael pines for the father she only really knows from the voice recordings he sends home on cassette tape and which she is not, technically, allowed to listen to despite their being addressed both to her and her mother. On the tapes, her father seems to be employing some kind of code so the messages will be suitable for a little girl’s ears (her mother is not quite so careful in her replies), but talks of how much he misses his family and regrets missing out on so much of his young daughter’s life.

Painfully shy, Yael’s only other real contact is a friend from school, Wappy, whom she calls up on the telephone for a “mad minute” of maths. It’s also to Wappy that she turns when she realises she’s accidentally taped over quite a sensitive moment in one of father’s messages, hoping her male friend could help by putting on a deep voice to re-record the words she’s already memorised only for him to remind her that he’ll still be eight years old and probably no help even if they wait ’til later.

Yael’s innocent attempts to repair the broken tape hint at both her childish worldview and her ongoing desire to “translate” herself through the medium of mimicry. She is captivated by a very bubble-era Japanese ad on television for the “Ningen Pen” (human pen) which promises that it is easy to write with and makes expressing yourself to others simple. One could, of course, say this is true for almost any kind of pen but Yael, still a child, is more interested in the promise of the shiny magic gadget than actively keyed into the power of writing as a path out of her shyness.

We never learn the reason for Yael’s bandages or the skin complaint which seems to affect only her arms and possibly keeps her wary of other children, at least if her cousin’s “are you some kind of mummy?” question is anything to go by. We do know, however, that her father was shy, like her, and also had a physical “deformity” as someone later puts it in that one side of his body was much shorter than the other. His twin brother (Sid Lucero), by contrast, is a handsome rockstar now living the highlife in Japan where his wife complains about their expat existence and her inability to make friends with the “picky” Japanese. Possibly down to the soap operas which too closely reflect her own life, Yael seems to pick up on an awkward tension between her mother and uncle but in the end he is the one who tries to “restore” the family by fixing the broken boom box and saving Yael’s bacon by swapping out the damaged tape for another one at just the right moment.

Given the external chaos, however, the family cannot yet be fully repaired. The adults are just as lost and confused as Yael, struggling to parse the sudden changes in society and in their own lives. Val resents her husband’s absence and the economic instability which provoked it while also resenting her labour intensive job in the shoe factory (perhaps a slightly ironic touch given the former first lady’s mania for footwear). She has no time for her daughter, and perhaps resents also the loss of her youth in service of the traditional family life of which she has now been robbed, longing for the intimacy of her long absent husband. Yael “translates” all of her anxieties into a rich fantasy life, reordering her experience in miniature as she cooks tiny meals on a candlelight stove, determined to get the money together to buy “a beautiful human life” in the form of a shiny Japanese pen. Charmingly whimsical but with irresolvable anxiety at its core, Nervous Translation is a beautifully fraught picture of difficult childhood set against the backdrop of political upheaval which manages to find the sweetness in its heroine’s self-sufficiency even while casting her adrift in uncertain times.

Nervous Translation was streamed online by Mubi and screened as part of the Aperture: Asia & Pacific Film Festival courtesy of Day for Night.

Festival trailer (dialogue free)

Tag: Jippy Pascua

12 Weeks (Anna Isabelle Matutina, 2022)

Nervous Translation (Shireen Seno, 2017)