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.