Cinemalaya 2025: Habang Nilalamon ng Hydra ang Kasaysayan

 

I think grief is the most palpable emotion one could feel emanating at the beginning of Dustin Celestino's Habang Nilalamon ng Hydra ang Kasaysayan. One does not have to be familiar with the real life parallels behind that grief, though it helps to understand it - the aftermath of the 2022 Philippine Presidential elections. During that period, people experienced hope again for the first time in a long while, and although the numbers showed that it was a long shot at best, there was definitely a feeling that victory was within reach.

The film then follows four characters navigating that grief, or for one of them, experiencing that grief second hand: Kiko (Jojit Lorenzo), a campaign strategist, Bea (Dolly De Leon), daughter of a desaparecido and a history professor, David (Zanjoe Marudo), Kiko's colleague and speechwriter for politicians, and Mela (Mylene Dizon), an election lawyer with dark family secrets. In the spirit of Celestino's Ang Duyan ng Magiting (2023) and following his theater roots, the film is divided into several vignettes, each constituting a small one act play, as these characters converse, process their grief, and move from one stage of grieving to another.

Denial hits mainly in the first half, in hesitant steps to present a speech of concession; depression in lonely silences and thoughts of retirement; bargaining in minimizing speech - "people aren't dying like in the previous administration," and anger in tense exchanges. Celestino is particularly skilled in creating this tension, using the most out of his characters to build it up until it bursts. Hydra is an actors' film, and it shows in the way the characters are lensed: mostly in tight closeups, as if the audience is invited to check for their subtle reactions to whatever's going on, while some shots are off center, as if the characters are leaning in to whisper something in our ear.

Hydra dissects different kinds of truth. The first is truth in the context of history. History itself is a monolith, but no one person can experience it in its entirety; every person experiences it in different ways. For some people, their personal histories constitute truths so horrible that there isn't a word for them. These experiences are so anomalous that people who experience a different facet of that same monolith cannot understand it. In one scene, the daughter of a notorious general responsible for the deaths of many people acknowledges the evil her father has created, but also acknowledges the fact that from him she has always experienced kindness. The way Celestino frames it is that this is not necessarily apologia for their crimes, but rather it is a way of explaining the other side's loyalty and fanaticism. 

There is also the question of whether the grief in the first part of the movie can be shared. Arguably a segment of the audience who will get to see this will experience a level of schadenfreude at the goings-on. It may be a factor into the decision to fictionalize the events and not make it a direct pseudo-documentary to what happened. The film's point of view, mostly from characters that are liberal and middle class, inadvertently exposes how insular that community can be to the realities of life outside that community.

But I do not think the film needs to appeal to a universal audience; to wit, it is not a work that necessarily seeks an audience, but it will find its audience nevertheless. The film's relative insularity reflects its own idea of history experienced differently by "our" people, and not experienced by others.

Regardless of what I feel about it, or whether I agree with the film or not, what got me at the end of Hydra is its idea about hope in a world where truth is continuously being co-opted, obscured, or even forgotten. Truth is our way of understanding the world; without it the world is an unknowable, chaotic place. Celestino uses Greek mythological figures to portray a world where we are left to the whims of capricious gods. But in such a world, as Hydra posits, it is folly to surrender to those whims. In such a world, the only recourse is to revolt, the only truth, defiance. One wonders if Celestino read Camus before making this film.