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 experiencing ten different emotional
states.

Easily the best thing about Dennis Marasigan's adaptation of the
play is just that: it adapts the play, serves it as
straightforwardly as possible, making occasional changes 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
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, 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 as the snack food of choice), 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, we get a collage of
impressions of the different people portrayed; sarcastic, witty,
furious, tender and ultimately heartbreaking, the 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, only that in the story's structure it's nominally
subordinate. He keeps up with Adlawan's bewildering cornucopia 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 in 2005.

(First appeared in pinoydvd, 11/12/05)