There are two very human scenes in this movie.

 

Both aren’t really necessary to progress the main story of how former President Manuel L. Quezon (played by Raymond Bagatsing) mounted a rescue of the European Jews with his mostly American poker buddies, at a time when the Nazis were about to cart them off to the ghettoes.

 

The first one is when Aurora Quezon (played by Rachel Alejandro), the First Lady, finds her husband absent from his sick bed after he has had a recurrence of tuberculosis, coughing up blood and collapsing in one scene. Instead, she finds him working at his office, something that his doctors had told him explicitly not to do. In frustration Aurora throws a wifely fit and begs him to stop, not to leave her, because she would genuinely not survive it.

 

It’s something right out of any telenovela that could easily have gone overboard, but was imbued with both touching intimacy and gravitas by the two actors through their skill and chemistry.

 

The second one comes towards the end, when Quezon is about to send off Vice-President Sergio Osmena to Washington, not only to lower their excise tax but also to whisper in the ears of the right people and try to hasten Philippine independence.

 

Quezon asks Osmena to do him a favor and try to use one of the toilets in the White House. He then proceeds to give the VP the precise reply of their current masters and where they would direct him to relieve himself instead: in an out of the way shadowy area, behind some stairs. “They will tell you to use another, because theirs cannot be used by ‘coloreds.’”

 

“But I am not a negro, Manuel!” laughs Osmena. To which Quezon replies that it doesn’t say “negroes,” it says “coloreds.” By which of course Quezon means to say that Filipinos may be treated better because we have votes as a Commonwealth of the US but it doesn’t mean they think of us as equals.

 

By such cordial statesmanship, Quezon lights a fire in Osmena’s ass to try and secure an independence decree sooner, because “1946 is such a long way away.”

 

The effect, for me, was chilling and eerily relevant in an era replete with forced dehumanization by perspective whether framed in the US or locally.              

 

By and large “Quezon’s Game” from ABS-CBN Film Productions and Kinitek Films is carved from the bones of historic melodrama, soaked in period, and conjuring the atmosphere of the Philippine Commonwealth era with idyllic splendor.

 

“What’s the use of governing a tropical paradise, if you can’t enjoy it?” quipped James Paoleli as Paul V. McNutt, High Commissioner to the Philippines. And boy do we get the full on costume, culture, and musical invocation of the years between 1937 and 1941.

 

Though it somehow imagines Manila and the halls of burgeoning power in Malacanang as a place that’s reminiscent of that idealized tropical paradise with natives and kalesas lending a shadow of the fin de siecle mystique and grandeur that was the Spanish Occupation, British-Jewish director Matthew Rosen and his crew weren’t exactly spoilt for choice when he went looking for well-preserved colonial era architecture. So we can forgive the production hitting a weird uncanny valley by doing most of the outdoor shots at the Las Casas Filipinas de Acuzar in Bataan.  

 

Other than that, most of the 125 minutes is spent indoors, breathing life into the race-against-time-tension and bureaucratic frustration of trying to get an initial target of 10,000 Jews from Europe to the country. A cool story and also a very true, but little known story, that.  

 

Though some marketing has billed it as the Philippine version of Schindler’s List, the problem with that is how German industrialist Oskar Schindler actually had first-hand eyeball to rifle experience of Nazis abusing Jews people. So you can expect no close quarters battles or gristly battlefield vistas here, unless it’s in the dramatized imagination of Quezon’s Jewish merchant friend Alex Freider (Billy Ray Gallion).

 

Also be warned that if you hate backdoor politicking, plotting in smoky jazz bars, and loads of info dump through talking heads, there’s a better than average chance you’ll zone out and miss quite  a few minutes of the sprawling and novelistic script that comprises that long running time.     

 

Other than that, history buffs will get a kick from the depiction of how the concerted efforts of MLQ and his powerful friends like future US president Dwight Eisenhower (David Bianco), High Commisioner Paul McNutt (Paleoli), and brothers Alex Frieder (Gallion) and Herbert Frieder (Tony Ahn), we are taken through the highly maddening process and even treated to a dramatic face-to-face confrontation with a Nazi SS officer on Philippine soil. 

 

It manages to build false peaks and bring us down just as deflated as Quezon, whom Bagatsing brings to life here without taint of caricature, opting instead to immerse and give us a very human and relatable Quezon—someone charismatic and oft swaggering, cultured and self-indulgent, politically savvy but also enamored of genuine service to his tender, young nation. For those who’ve been shown the TV and radio broadcasts of the late president, Bagatsing’s diction and syntax and body language are eerily evocative and apt. 

 

That the film contains precious scenes that could be ripped from any soap playbook is a necessary fault, but one that could have been avoided by simply cutting them out altogether and making it a tighter, faster-paced story.

 

In one scene, Sergio Osmena (Audie Gemora) voices the thought that is on everyone’s mind, that not only will this Jewish rescue mission bring him criticism and be used by his political enemies (hello, Emilio Aguinaldo) in their inevitable bid for a praxis seizure, it’s such an ill-timed and resource-draining move for a young country that’d barely thrown off the yoke of one colonial power and should now be focusing on self-governance instead of helping thousands of foreigners.    

 

“Mr. President, why are you doing this? It’s not that we’re belittling the Jews but should the Filipinos be concerned about this?” said Osmena.

 

Replied Quezon, “I can’t turn a blind eye, Sergio. This is the Philippines. We will stand against Hitler.”

 

It’s a huge credit to Bagatsing’s thespian prowess and focus he pulled these lines off.

 

Try to take your grandparents, especially if they’re WW1 or 2 vets, to this film and let them enjoy its evocation of a time whose ideals of altruistic kindness and charity remain sadly germane to our troubled, complex time. Just be prepared to wake them up.