‘Bonifacio’ for the present

Despite, or perhaps because of, its mixed reviews, “Bonifacio: Ang Unang Pangulo” is worth seeing. It is necessary to take the film on its own terms. As a biopic, it unfolds within the given limits of this genre: the tendency toward melodrama, for example, and the hero worship that uncritically accepts the role of the individual leader over that of the collective in the Revolution. Hence, one has to take the good with the bad—in this case, Robin Padilla’s one-dimensional acting, the Hollywood-style fighting scenes, the evil frailes and the malevolent figures of Emilio Aguinaldo’s Magdalo followers, including the cold and detached El Presidente himself. One can quibble with historical details, or with the flattening of historical context (for example, the different conditions of Cavite into which the Bonifacios entered, the rumors swirling around Andres Bonifacio’s motives, the coup he planned after his ouster from Tejeros, etc.). But all these aside, this film is significant especially when one considers that it is less about the history of the Katipunan and Bonifacio as it is about a reflection of the present moment’s relationship to its alienated past.

First of all, it is a film about the Revolution produced in these mostly unrevolutionary of times. Twenty-eight years after Edsa, how is it possible to depict the first revolution and market it to this generation of upper, middle and aspirationally bourgeois classes? How does being a revolutionary make sense in the globalized age of SM consumerism, BPOs and OFWs? How does one go about organizing and fighting a revolution when nearly all social movements are avowedly nonrevolutionary, and the only revolutionary party has been largely relegated to the margins? Who would be the enemies and what kind of leaders would emerge? What would be the aims of a revolution, and who would define it, and how would it be realized?

The film responds to these difficult questions by displacing them onto the play of personalities. In the end, it’s not so much about the revolution as it is about the tragedy of Bonifacio (and only tangentially about the life of Gregoria de Jesus who had an equally interesting existence after him). Focusing on individual figures, the collective gets shorted. The “Filipino people” as a revolutionary force and historical agent are relegated as the backdrop for the rivalry between good guy Bonifacio versus bad guy Aguinaldo. While the film starts out with a clear sense of the enemy—“mga Kastila” and especially “mga frayle,” always depicted eating sumptuous meals in between overseeing the torture of hapless natives—it gives way to the travails of Bonifacio at the hands of the cruel Aguinaldo.

Indeed, the film begs the question: Who exactly is the enemy? What was the revolution all about? And if Bonifacio is indeed “unang pangulo,” what does this make of Aguinaldo? Does he then become a usurper, a pretender, and worse, a parricide since he orders the death of the “father of the revolution”? And what about those who follow him—Gregorio del Pilar, Artemio Ricarte, and later on, Apolinario Mabini? Would they all be complicitous in this originary murder? If so, then the foundation of the nation would be built on good intentions gone very wrong, on deception and duplicity (from Tejeros to Malolos to Manila), on vanity and fratricide, and on the calculation and collaboration, first with the Spaniards (post-Biak na Bato) and later with the US forces. Is this the logical conclusion that we are to derive from this narrative?

By focusing on Bonifacio’s martyrdom and insisting on the belated recognition of his primacy, the film raises, then quickly sidesteps, these questions (signaled by the head-shaking resignation of the museum historian played by Eddie Garcia). As the credits rolled, the audience in the packed movie house at Rockwell where I saw it broke into applause. I wondered what they were clapping at, this comfortably middle-class audience. Were they, perhaps, saluting the revelation of the corrupt foundations of the Philippine Republic seen in the travesty of the Tejeros elections and the tragic ending of Bonifacio? Or were they relieved that these matters were closed off and not pursued by the film? Were they thinking that, thanks to Bonifacio’s murder, the revolution now could begin its course toward a counterrevolutionary direction, and that it is this counterrevolutionary legacy that now makes it possible for them to sit in a mall and watch kitsch depictions of late 19th-century life? Or were they simply glad that they had, on a Sunday afternoon, an alternative to Vice Ganda’s “The Amazing Praybeyt Benjamin”?

The poster for the movie says, “Hindi pa tapos ang rebolusyon,” a reiteration of the historiographical theme from the 1960s of the “unfinished revolution” deployed by Teodoro Agoncillo, Mila Guerrero and Rey Ileto (whose influence is felt in the neat animation sequence on the story of Bernardo Carpio, which makes me think that the next historical film should be totally animated). Back in the 1960s when revolution really did seem like a possibility, reclaiming the Katipunan project seemed to make sense. But today?

The value of the film then lies in spurring discussion not only of its historical content but also of what it says about our present moment, about our ambivalent relationship to the very notion of “revolution,” and about the vexed realities of our counterrevolutionary life.

Vicente L. Rafael is professor of history at the University of Washington in Seattle.