When the trailer for the new Nadine Lustre movie Ulan (showing March 13) made its rounds on the Internet, many were confused as to what exactly the movie was.
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BY KEANE VIRI
THE EGG CREATURES AND TIKBALANGS IN NADINE LUSTRE'S ‘ULAN’ IS MAGIC REALISM
BY KEANE VIRI
Feb.21.19
“It’s interesting to see the audience reaction to the teaser and trailer of Ulan. There were a lot of Youtube reactions and comments asking if Ulan is horror or fantasy. But it is actually a mix of genres. It’s romance with bits of magic realism sprinkled on it,” says Irene Villamor, who wrote and directed the movie.
“Ulan is from a short story I wrote right after college (UP, Major in Film, 2001). I was still a script continuity supervisor for Direk Joyce Bernal. Back then, I wrote stuff and Direk (Joyce) saw [what I wrote] and told me to make a screenplay out of it. So that’s Ulan, the young me reading a lot of Isabel Allende- and Gabriel Garcia Marquez-type of stories rich with magic realism,” Villamor recalls.
The encyclopedic definition of magic realism is “a matter-of-fact inclusion of fantastic or mythical elements into seemingly realistic fiction.” It’s generally considered a movement in Latin American literature and among the heavyweight authors are the ones Villamor said she read. Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude is required reading for literature majors; Allende’s The House of the Spirits became a Hollywood movie. In these books, the fantastic melds with the mundane—in Marquez’s work, the dead come back to life not as ghosts but as people they once were, able to communicate with the living; in Allende, clairvoyance is a given.
So when Nadine Lustre sees Tikbalangs get married, she is not hallucinating. The egg creatures may be figments of her imagination, but they could just as well be real people she interacts with. “Medyo bago ito sa mainstream cinema natin [magic realism] pero matagal na sa international cinema. Siguro ang pinaka-recent example is Pan’s Labyrinth and The Shape of Water [both directed by Guillermo del Toro],” Villamor says.
(Magic realism is new to our mainstream cinema but it has long been shown in international cinemas. The most recent example may be Pan’s Labyrinth and The Shape of Water.)