Tatlong Taong Walang Diyos
I FIRST saw Mario O’Hara’s Tatlong Taong Walang Diyos ( Three Years Without God) in the 1996 Pelikula at Lipunan (Film and Society) festival two decades after its initial commercial run and was convinced it was the finest Filipino film ever made. Sitting down to watch the picture two decades later today I have to approach carefully, gingerly, like with an old friend who has long since dropped out of sight: Has it lost its power? Has its edges dulled with familiarity and time? Does this World War 2 drama still speak to us — to me — with eloquence and force?
Oh, it creaks in places. This was only O’Hara’s second feature and his inexperience (and ambition) shows: Actors pause and deliver long deliberately paced monologues; some lines sound awkward rolling off the tongue. A climactic confrontation in a cathedral is awkwardly staged, a supposedly punitive head shear less than impressive — but few films can be called perfect, I submit, and no film that pushes boundaries can ever truly be called perfect (if it was perfect it didn’t push hard enough).
The film begins with Crispin (Bembol Roco) telling his sweetheart Rosario (Nora Aunor) that he’s joining the guerrillas in the mountains to fight the Japanese invaders; she’s angry but quiet, resigned to the fact that he’s leaving but stubbornly unwilling to sweeten his departure with anything more than sullen gestures of affection. The film ends with the same Crispin sitting on a church pew, at the edge of losing his faith, asking a priest that oldest of questions: is there a god?
In between the two losses we have war, we have rape, we have murder and massacres, a whole panoply of cruelty and bitterness and madness and despair. Compared to relative newcomers like Lars von Trier or Gaspar Noé or Takashi Miike, O’Hara’s violence may seem mild even old-fashioned in its restraint — but he modulates dark moments with affection, tenderness, even love, and the contrast I submit is what keeps him relevant. The bits of humanity doled out sparingly here there among the film’s characters (“Who knows when” they must be thinking “a chance will present itself again?”) feel all the more precious because of the circumstances, because of the times.
Von Trier, Noé, and Miike traffic in a nihilistic philosophy that declares the world to be a cesspool out of which we have no hope of climbing. O’Hara agrees somewhat — the world is a cesspool — and for prima facie evidence offers Rosario, who loses her beau, her family, her innocence and more. Unlike Von Trier’s martyred fools however, Rosario remains a sharp intelligent strong young woman; the more she’s pulled down the more she stubbornly digs in.
How strong is she? In the film’s first half while the Japanese are winning Rosario remains defiant; she insults Masugi (Christopher de Leon) a drunken Japanese-Filipino officer who chases her down and rapes her, and she’s still defiant. She’s only a small- town schoolteacher but as fierce as any guerrilla ( judging from Crispin and the comrades he brings down from the mountain with him, perhaps fiercer).
The world having gone through a looking-glass eventually accepts the invasion and the inverted order of things ( Filipinos bowing to the enemy, America a distant useless ally, town church turned into POW camp), begins the process of accommodation and collaboration — and still Rosario doesn’t give in ( her virginity may be compromised but her will remains inviolate). Rosario finds herself not just overwhelmed ( by the might of the Japanese military, by Masugi’s own physical strength) but wrong: the Japanese are here ( her parents tell her), are the authorities now; it’s time to, oh, admit defeat, move on, come together and build a nation. Why can’t she accept things the way they are?
Because, as Goethe has Mephisto tell Faust: “You are when all is done — just what you are. Put on the most elaborate curly wig, mount learned stilts to make yourself look big, you still will be the creature that you are.” Rosario unlike Faust doesn’t even try being different; when her defiance comes to a crisis, O’Hara, in arguably the single most dramatic shot in the film, perches her at the apex of a high bridge, looking down into a deep gully at the hard rocks washed by a thin stream far below, her will now at odds with her humanity. Will she break? Should she break?
In the film’s latter half, Rosario (in effect going through the looking glass again, this time inverting herself in the process) is a changed woman resigned to her new loyalties, her new life — and she’s still wrong, now more than ever: the Japanese are losing the war, the guerrillas and Americans coming in an unstoppable tide.
Rosario knows what this means of course: one of the bitterest secrets of the war is that the Japanese military, for all its legendary cruelty and sadism, had nothing on the Filipinos who rose up seeking revenge ( and Rosario is a Japanese collaborator — to their eyes worst than the soldiers). The implications make Rosario pause — several points you see her working things through in her head — but she never gives up the struggle.
The film ends on a transcendent note — and here is where I submit O’Hara leaves Von Trier, Noé, Miike and the rest of the Cinema of Outrage behind: he dares introduce hope into his film. A daring gesture, I think, possibly the cruelest of all: in the worst of times hope sustains you, buoys you beyond reason and physical ability, props you up to step forward and suffer some more. Despair gives you certainty and a measure of peace; hope keeps you ambivalent and open to the possibility of pain.
Does the film still speak to us? I think so, now more than ever. Six years of a Duterte administration or four years of a Trump presidency or three of a Japanese Occupation will make anyone turn their head heavenward to ask; you probably won’t get a proper reply, but with this film at least you’ll get one man’s thoughts on the subject.