Barber’s Tales

For most of Jun Lana’s new film Barber’s Tales (alternatively known as Mga Kwentong Barbero), the women who live in the small rural town fraught under Ferdinand Marcos’ regime, in their respective crises are either battered or deprived. If they are not fixtures, they are instruments; never truly people to take full form.

It is important to mention, however, that the film is no Bwakaw — that much is certain — because it doesn’t need to. The second film in Lana’s rural-set trilogy (Bwakaw being the first) is a completely different film, apart from sharing a similar setting. It takes the form of a story already familiar to its native audience, one that the nation has already lived; one that may appeal negatively to some, that is, if it is viewed strictly on a narrative standpoint (“spoon-fed” and “predictable” are among the terms I hear from cinephiles) — but that’s outside the point of the film.

Above all, Barber’s Tales is a skillful rumination of life and how a woman finds her voice in an age where the line between being heard and being listened to is all but a blur.

The town’s ephemeral (and to begin with, ghostly) peace is distorted to rippling waves when a subservient wife named Marilou assumes the role previously taken by her destroyed barber husband. Rebels begin storming by the swarm into the town, with the militia doing their rounds and killing rebels (and people rebels make contact with) at the first opportunity. In lesser hands this could overwhelm the story, but Lana’s lethargic pacing and sensitive direction treats the film just right, and Eugene Domingo as Marilou basically coheres everything intact.

I feel the need to mention how precious a thespian is Domingo; but this, most of the world already knows. Yet her portrayal in the film still comes as a discovery, both to those familiar and foreign to her works (think Ang Babae sa Septic Tank as a go-to example). Throughout the film, Domingo’s eyes are heavy with exhaust, her shoulders almost hunched-over, her voice always frail. Aside from Lana, the film has also found an astute storyteller in Domingo, anchoring us through the various degrees of her character’s change.

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The support female cast is immediately charismatic (Gladys Reyes, Shamaine Buencamino and Sue Prado); and there is a conscious lack of attention to male characters (Eddie Garcia, Nicco Manalo, Nonie Buencamino). They are used as plot devices to move forward the arcs of the women in the film. Manalo, for instance, portrays the role of a rebel who confides with his godmother Marilou — the pebble that is shot, breaking the stillness of the water. Garcia portrays the town’s priest and Buencamino, the town’s mayor.

Barber’s Tales is not about equality as much as it is about resolution. It is different for everyone, this resolution.

As the mayor’s ghostly battered wife, Iza Calzado turns in a disarmingly emotive performance (glances are shot skyward, do picture it for a second), in the scene where she takes the easy way out. Domingo’s Marilou, in contrast, resolves that her existence in a town like hers is only moot and that she had to get away. But not like the mayor’s wife. She finds it somewhere else, somehow eventually, this resolution, where she is given a new name.