Love as rendered: A review of Saving Sally

WHEN confronted with the dilemma of choosing which film to watch among the set featured in a local mall as part of this year’s Metro Manila Film Festival, I had to choose “Saving Sally” by Avid Liongoren because of the internet buzz surrounding the film.

Among the rest of the film entries, the film has gained some word-ofmouth traction leading to the festival’s start beginning this week.

Supporters of the film are complaining about how it is not available in all participating cinemas due to the discretion of mall and cinema owners, perhaps due to ticket sales considerations.

Now that the festival is officially underway and initial reaction is positive, I am betting that sales will pick up and it will be brought in for a longer consistent run in more theaters nat i onw i de.

The film’s proposition is already intriguing as it is for the sheer novelty and ambition, on both counts well worth already the price of admission. All shot in an indie makeshift studio in a house near Teacher’s Village just outside UP-Diliman’s gates with a few actors and a small animation crew of five, the film fluidly mixes manga-like animation to live acting in a rare creative and technical challenge.

The actors act at the foreground of a green screen where animators later on render the intricate and visually stunning re-imaginations of what is unmistakably Metro Manila.

There are exaggerations to the visual cues of the metropolis but the traffic, ubiquitous jeepneys, and droning sound of tricycles make everything very familiar despite the stylized hyperbolic take of the animators.

Though the story centers on the problematic romance of the protagonists, the attention to the detail of every backdrop/ background and cityscape and landscape, steal the attention from the actors every now and then. And in this instance, it was not a bad thing.

It is actually like being given a privileged view of each of the character’s subconscious rendered through the animated-backdrops.

The animation becomes a verstehenlike device, a revelation of the psychological understanding about the disposition, aspirations, frustrations of the characters.

The flow of the visual cues rendered in the backdrop emanate from the characters in this instance making the celluloid universe thoroughly idiosyncratic.

The film reverses the dictum regarding consciousness as the product of social activity. Here, the character’s consciousness creates the imagined social activity as rendered through the animator’s backdrop.

While the film is a unique and impressive cinematic achievement, it also gives us a moment to contemplate how the film as a cultural artifact mirrors dominant modes of understanding the world as of the present.

It is a romantic coming-of-age film and the usual tropes of two persons overcoming obstacles are present here. But these obstacles are playfully rendered in persons the film portray as “monsters,” step-parents/monsters whose homes disintegrate under a cliff, and a boyfriend who is a literal dick.

Both are also thoroughly middle class and therefore none of the class tension inherent in the romance genre as seen in the movies Pretty in Pink and Some Kind of Wonderful are present here.

Millennials will like this film in how it appropriates conflict and contradiction as a play between nerdy superheroes and monsters. And the happy ending, the resurrection of the myth of true love at the end will warm many hearts.

I am reminded of another indie romance film that is far left field and more brutal and honest in terms of how it offers a prognosis for love for the struggling lower middle class and even urban poor set. The 2009 film “Endo” provides a crucial counterpoint to the movie “Saving Sally.” Instead of an imagination on hyper drive, and insular in-ward looking make-believe worlds of the recent film, the celluloid universe of labor contractual tackled in the earlier film is comprised of shared walkman earbuds and drab motels as they build to create an uncertain relationship and future in the age of neoliberalism’s onslaught. The distance between the real and the imaginary cannot be more heightened if you compare the two films which is reflected in the tenor and qualitative difference of how love is rendered across classes. This reading and theoretical scruples aside, “Saving Sally” is a testament to the talent, perseverance, and vision of the film’s creative team who I understand struggled to complete the film for almost a decade, changing actors and running out of funding at some point. It is obvious that the final product has been a labor of love or if not a very productive and extended obsession, both guarantees that you will be thoroughly entertained. Watch it!