Cinemalaya 2024: The Wedding Dance

 

The last time I talked to my late uncle, the famed Tausug artist and painter Rameer Tawasil, we talked about film. He talked to me at length about his desire to make a film showcasing Tausug culture - something that depicts the many daily rituals and rhythms of Tausug life, from birth to death. Unfortunately, that film will probably never get made, but if it did, it might look like the first hour or so of Julius Lumiqued's The Wedding Dance. Based on the story by Amador Daguio, the film is about a husband and wife on the eve of the titular dance. The thing is, Awiyao (Arvin Balageo) is not dancing with his wife Lumnay (Mai Fanglayan), the two are separating, and Awiyao is being wedded to Madulimay (Christal Dagupen) because Lumnay is unable to give Awiyao a child.

That's basically the entirety of the story, and while the film tries to fill in the gaps with some rudimentary worldbuilding, a sideplot involving a Japanese soldier and a bunch of flashbacks, it's not very successful in fleshing things out. A few days after seeing the film, I don't remember anything remotely romantic about the two during this initial period. That's not to say the film's cast tries their best; Mai Fanglayan, perhaps best known for her lead role in 2018's Tanabata's Wife, does her best with the material.

With all that said, it doesn't mean the film has nothing to say: even now, in our deeply patriarchal Filipino society, there are societal pressures for couples to have children. Back then, the reasons for this are practical: as Awiyao says at one point in the film, without children, no one will inherit the fields, and no one will continue the tribe. Wedding merely for love goes against the community and can be construed as a threat to the community's survival. But as the film tries to tell us, that process leaves the wreckage of many dreams in its wake.

The film's odd structure is one thing, but the climactic confrontation (basically the first dozen or so paragraphs of the short story) gives way to its infamous ending, an interminable slog that should honestly have ended 30 minutes prior, which then bafflingly, abruptly ends with a drone shot that feels like a jump scare. Other reviews of the film are right, in my view: it just doesn't work.