One thesis I’ve heard about national cinemas is that they often focus on moments of the nation’s origins - the Civil War for the U.S. (Birth of a Nation), the French Revolution in France (La Marseillaise), the Boer War for the Australians (Breaker Morant). Since Ousmane Sembene’s 1966 film Black Girl (recently in a spiffy DVD release), anti-colonial struggle and globalization have been just as important for incipient national cinemas.
Homecoming, a recent release from the Phillipines, is a case in point. On paper, the film could well be a typical disease melodrama: Abby, a Phillipine guest worker in Canada returns to her hometown, only to find out she has brought back SARS with her. Her town is put under quarantine and the villagers begin to ostracize her family. What had once been blind adulation of foreign guest workers turns inside out.
Two things save Homecoming from hokum, however. First, it’s a simple story told well. Director Gil Portes puts the thesis on the backburner enough to engage with the emotions and interpersonal dynamics of the individual characters before backing up and showing their stories to be larger than themselves. Unlike many world cinema entries being shot and edited for the small screen, the classicism of Portes’ direction gives a humble grandeur to the village’s simple life.
Second, the pathos of the melodrama (diseases are beyond our control, the villagers stigma is understandable) is given a political charge that’s both subtle and easily readible. And in the process, the film is concerned with the fate of the Phillipine nation as much as it is Abby. The final sequence I found particularly effective, wherein the narrative opens up from Abby’s narrative to the fate of a series of real guest workers.
In my review of Syriana, I mentioned that the narrative engages History as a central character. Here, too, the narrative is more than an individual one, but instead of trying to unearth large-scale historical forces, Portes is trying to tell the big picture through the small one.
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