Why do Filipinos like love stories? The abundance of such stories in our popular culture exist as a sort of curiosity, but is also understandable. We want to love and be loved, and we want to live this fantasy through stories, it's only human.
Maya (Nadine Lustre) creates these fantasies. She is a storyteller, but she is relegated to making the kind of disposable romantic fiction that saturates our popular culture. Her beliefs are informed by mythology and superstition, and those aspects seep into her daily life. Its depiction is a deft melding of magic and reality that is unlike anything we've seen before in Philippine cinema. Yet on the other hand, Ulan tells us about another kind of mythology, a modern-day kind that we have created for ourselves, the kind seen in Precious Hearts novels and Wattpad scribbles and long, rambling posts on Facebook.
Ulan is a story about love stories, and how they shape us. It's structured like a fairy tale, but the things that happen in that fairy tale betray that notion. During the entire first half of the film, we see Maya encounter all sorts of potential romantic partners. These are men that would be solid romantic leads in any other mainstream romantic story, but that's not the case here. The old flame has moved on. The charming and dashing man is selfish and superficial. Maya tries to cry, but she cannot. Her personal mythology (the romantic stories that she has consumed all her life) tells her to cry, but there are no tears, because in the end, her friend is right: she is in love with the notion of love, and not the relationships themselves. Reality and myth don't match up, and this disconnect becomes a problem to Maya.
Ulan also questions why love stories are the way they are. For example, Maya learns that two Tikbalangs cannot marry. Why is that love forbidden, and who decreed that that should not be so? When Maya is told that she doesn't love because she lacks sensuality, why is that a thing? Who creates the rules of love, and why shouldn't we just love freely, regardless of who we are?
It's perfectly valid to consider Ulan as a simplistic film with a straightforward, even predictable plot, but there are too many things going on beneath the surface that I cannot discount the film. The fairy tale is only a facade, an entryway into something deeper, something that reaches beyond the text and into the realm of metafiction. There's a certain loose quality to the film that reminds me of last month's Elise, and how that film viewed memory as a number of disconnected, floaty scenes.
There are other things that come to mind. Maya's creativity is shackled thanks to her chauvinistic boss, the storyteller forced to make stories viewed through a gaze not her own. She finds out that her boss, too, is informed by his own set of mythologies - perhaps harmful ones - and she gains the power to tell her own stories through that realization. Maya's ultimate realization is to come to terms with her own myths - to see the discrepancy between reality and fantasy - and to find out that to love others, one must love one's self first.
Ulan is admittedly not for everyone; its strangeness can make or break one's appreciation for the film. But it is loaded with so many things that I find it hard to dismiss.
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