By Robert St. Martin
Screening Monday, June 26, at 3:30 pm with Frameline 48 at the Roxie Theatre in San Francisco is Seán Devlin’s Asog (Canada, 2023) – the story of Jaya, a 40-year-old non-binary schoolteacher whose brief career as a comedian hosting a late-night television show abruptly ends due to a huge and highly destructive typhoon in the Philippines. Picking up the pieces in their life, Jaya decides to travel across the country in hopes of winning a beauty pageant and the prize money that comes with it. Flipping the conventions of the road movie on its head, Asog is a one-of-a-kind film that plays with the line between narrative and documentary to become something entirely new.
Filipino culture is far more complex that the standard portrayal shown in many films in the Philippines as wallowing in poverty and crime – often the favored genres of Filipino filmmakers. Here in Asog, the horror is Mother Nature and the visceral damage of the worst typhoon to hit the islands in a century. But throughout this film, the natural beauty of this nation of a thousand islands shines through as well as the love and resilience of its people.
Filipino-Chinese Canadian director Seán Devlin is first and foremost a comedian with a much experience in his stand-up roles as well his comedic sense in writing. His recent work includes Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm (2020), starring Sacha Baron Cohen. In Asog, Devlin’s comic sense shapes this highly entertaining but pointed film. It is most appropriate that the main character in the tale is Jaya, also a comedian in the Filipino tradition of performers who combine jokes, storytelling, dance, and song popular in gay venues and also regular nightclubs.
It is important to understand the title of the film Asog which is the word for feminized men in the Visayas – there being no word for the English term non-binary. The asog assume the voice, mannerisms, hairstyle, and dress of women. Dating back to times before the Spanish conquest of the islands, their traditional social status and recognition have given them access to professions related to the spiritual realm, such as shamans and religious functionaries. Here Jaya is a teacher in a middle school teaching science after the sudden end of a brief success with the late-night television talk show – due to the destruction of the television studio in the city of Tacloban City by Typhoon Yolanda (Haiyan) in 2013.
At the start of the film, we see Jaya busy correcting the homework of students and getting frustrated with the school headmaster. The story takes place in a rural part of an island in the Visayas where there is only a dirt road, and the people live in simple huts built of bamboo and roofed with palm fronds. Being a ball of joyous energy, Jaya flirts with the local ice cream seller Cyrus who is gay, and they soon end up living together in Jaya’s small house. We get a picture of how a person who is asog fits into traditional rural Filipino culture even today. But Jaya’s intrinsic sense of humor infuses all these scenes with something more than quotidian existence. There is joy in life here that reveals the love and humanity of the Filipino people in these islands.
In the Philippines, nothing is as certain as the arrival of a typhoon. It’s not a matter of if but when. After all, at least 20 typhoons visit the country every year. With a death toll of around 6,300 people and damage worth 95.5 billion Filipino pesos, Typhoon Yolanda has claimed the first spot on this list of the top 10 strongest typhoons in the Philippines. No one can ever forget this 2013 disaster. The aerial images of towns leveled to the ground are forever burned into Filipinos’ minds. Storm surges devastated many places such as Tacloban City. Waves measuring up to 19 feet destroyed buildings, knocked over trees, and carried cars away. A lot of people were caught off guard, resulting in injuries and fatalities. Rescue operations were delayed since towns and villages were completely cut off. Affected areas went without power for weeks.
With Typhoon Yolanda and its massive destruction as the backdrop, Jaya’s story becomes a road trip from the large island of Leyte and heavily-damaged Tacloban City to the small island of Sicogon, where there is going to be a beauty pageant for Miss Gay Sicogon. Picking up the pieces in their life, Jaya decides to travel across the island of Leyte and cross the inland sea to Sicogon in hopes of winning a beauty pageant for the prize money that comes with it. But before Jaya can leave, a chance encounter with Arnel, a student going the same way in search of his father, complicates their solitary plans. As they travel seemingly countless miles together on foot, bike, and boat, the unlikely duo find themselves forever changed by each other and those they encounter on their journey. Along the way, the two encounter many people who share their own real-life experiences with their typhoon, its aftermath, the loss of loved ones, and the destruction of so many homes and businesses.
I mentioned the role of the asog as a storyteller and the importance of story-telling in traditional Filipino culture, especially at the time of memorial services for a deceased loved one. Seán Devlin has built into this film as parallel, partially animated allegorical tale of a frog whose incessant riveting at night disturbs the sleep of the local island animal king. This bit of Filipino mythology serves as a counterbalance to the real-life and necessary commentary on colonialism, transphobia, and climate change that is impacting the severity of global weather patterns.
Filipino cinema has produced several acclaimed filmmakers who have gained recognition both locally and internationally. Directors like Lino Brocka, Brillante Mendoza, Lav Diaz, and Erik Matti have won awards at prestigious film festivals like Cannes and Venice, making Filipino cinema an important part of the global film landscape. What I found so interesting about Asog was its combination of comedy, satire and brutal realism about both Filipino experiences and the imprint of foreign colonial cultures on the Filipino life. In some ways, Asog harkens back to a kind of Indy filmmaking that began in the Philippines with Kidlat Tahimik’s Perfumed Nightmare (1977), an award-winning film at Berlin from almost 40 years ago that catches the absurdity of the human condition through the eyes of a resourceful and cheerful young Filipino man.
The film has screened at several film festivals including the recent Tribeca Film Festival and Outfest Los Angeles last July. At some point, the film attracted the attention of actor Alan Cummings who signed on as an Executive Producer. This is the story of Jaya, as told by director Seán Devlin and Arnel, who are the main writers of Asog. I had the privilege of interviewing Seán Devlin and Jaya at Outfest Los Angeles last July and I find them so talented and funny. At the Q&A after the film screening on Sunday, Jaya – in character – said that after the successful screening at Tribeca, “I was feeling so sad . . . because I failed . . . to get an American husband.” Together they have crafted one of the finest Filipino films of recent years – most deserving of a larger viewership.
