Big, life changing disasters elicit a unique kind of trauma, in that it expands beyond the individual and becomes a collective experience of coping, grief, loss, and moving on. The scale of devastation in these moments looms so large that it becomes incomprehensible, even absurd - and the response to this devastation, partly thanks to systemic incompetence - adds absurdity on top of absurdity.
Films that explore this kind of trauma do exist, and this pain takes some time to get translated from disaster to film (though there are a bunch of exceptions.) Filipinos in particular are no strangers to trauma - just look at the sheer number of films about the Martial Law era, and as for natural disasters, we have films like Brillante Mendoza's Taklub (2015) and Joanna Arong's To Calm the Pig Inside (2020) which dwelled on the aftermath of Typhoon Yolanda. The former uses a realist style to try to show the experiences of the people on the ground, while the latter mixes the pain and frustration that people felt following the disaster with how people create their own mythologies.
Carlo Francisco Manatad's Kun Maupay Man It Panahon (released internationally as Whether the Weather is Fine) approaches the material differently, in his own style. In this case, he's fit to tell a story like this. An editor by heart, Manatad has always been adept at communicating ideas through visual metaphor and depicting the absurdity in rigid or established institutions. In Junilyn Has (2015) and Fatima Marie Torres... (2017), personal desires manifest in the background of groundbreaking historical events. In Jodilerks Dela Cruz, Employee of the Month (2017) Manatad explores the value of conforming to a law-abiding social order and the counter-value of anarchy and even revolution; in films like Sandra (2017) he shows the chaos and violence ironically inherent in hierarchies and specifically in Greek letter organizations.
This film is far less abstract and more narratively driven than his other works, as it follows a family in the aftermath of Yolanda. Miguel (Daniel Padilla), his girlfriend Andrea (Rans Rifol) and Miguel's mother Norma (Charo Santos) are informed of an opportunity to leave the devastated town where they live and set off for Manila. All three react to the plan in different ways: Miguel and Andrea see it as an opportunity, while Norma is tethered to the town, or rather her ex-lover, who disappeared in the wake of the events that unfolded. All three actors give the performances of their careers: this is easily Daniel Padilla's best film, and former MNL48 idol Rifol proves she's versatile and has lots of potential.
In the background of their individual quests are people in different states: as scavengers, scraping and clawing their way to another day, or as corpses littering devastated landscapes. It's far removed from the romanticized depictions of resilience propagated in our culture, showing that to be resilient requires compromise, and sometimes ethics and law and order get in the way of that. It's an impulse towards entropy for the sake of survival that we can also see in Manatad's other works. The landscapes that they traverse are landscapes of dystopia, of dysfunction, of devastation and death intermingling with the mundane, reminiscent of works such as Sion Sono's The Land of Hope (2012).
What's probably most striking is how the film visually depicts the absurdity of the situation as mentioned earlier in this review, and also present in many other reviews of the film: zumba dancing in a background of ruins, or military men spewing gibberish as instructions, or disco dancing during an evacuation. These are expressions of trauma, of trying to understand that trauma, or trying to get over it. It may be because of the overwhelming incomprehensibility of the whole situation, or as a coping mechanism in and of itself, or as frustration against a deeply dysfunctional, incompetent system. This is not the first time this has happened, and this will not be the last: Ruping, Rosing, Milenyo, Ondoy, Yolanda, and now, Odette.
As we move towards the film's haunting ending, there is no satisfying sense of closure, but that is expected: the ideal of a quickly healing community sticking together with the government swooping in to save the day is unrealistic, idealistic, and even naive. What we get is a community coming to terms with a grevious loss, slowly hiding scars that will never fully disappear, left to their own devices by an overwhelmed, incompetent and indifferent government, and turning to false messiahs, a means of escape, or the trap of their own nostalgia.
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