It is hard to talk about Jun Lana’s “Shadow Behind the Moon” without spoiling the would-be experience of the audience. To describe it on its form is already giving it away: it is a single-take drama with analog-video aesthetics. The treatment places the writer-director Lana into the spotlight of technical exposition and, interestingly, goes on to fill this exercise with an equally indulging material.
The film is prologued by a series of on-screen texts to provide some context: the story is set in the early 1990s during the intensified military campaign against communist rebels in the Marag Valley. Caught in this struggle are “internal refugees” who are displaced from their homes, but relocated within the area. Joel (Anthony Falcon) and Ema (LJ Reyes) are part of these “internal refugees” with no permanent residency but cannot leave the valley. They are friends with Mando (Luis Alandy), a soldier who helped them when Joel got sick.
The decision to open the film with a frame of Ema finishing her bath time, covering herself with a towel and entering a wooden bungalow with the two men loudly talking to each other immediately paints an unusual tension between the three. The openness of the interior is weird, and the house is unusually big to exist without any division, even by the standards of a countryside bungalow. There isn’t even a place for Ema to wear her clothes in private. It is even a more suspicious signifier for having no secrets: this openness clearly is a place for hiding in plain sight.
Of course, there may be some technical reason for it. Seems like Tonee Acejo and Rajiv Idnani‘s production design is meant to cater to the motion of the camera as it follows through the characters. The house is big enough to be a square theater.
The advent of digital filmmaking in the Philippines enables long-durational imagination, as early as Lav Diaz‘ “Evolution of the Filipino Family.” Feature-length single-take movies are experimented with by Remton Zuasola in “The Dream of Eleuteria” (2010) and “Swap” (2015). But in contrast with these attempts, Lana seems to take the recorded stage play approach similar to Jonas Mekas‘ “The Brig” (1964). The choice to only shoot the movie within a single location seems to limit the “cinematic” contrary to, say, “The Dream of Eleuteria” where there is a passage between points that allows the camera motion to explore more than the characters, a whole environment. Besides, the VHS treatment brings this recall of a recorded stage play as if viewed from an archival material.
But it seems like this theatrically-leaning treatment is what best fits the material. “Shadow Behind the Moon” seems to me more of a work of dramaturgy than cinematography. What Carlo Mendoza‘s camera-work contributes is to merely function as an avatar for the audience-spectator. The frames may seem intimate but what this does to the material is to make the audience focus on the performances, which probably are the strongest point of the film.
Every character is depicted by their respective actors at the top of their game. Falcon’s Joel the simpleton is played with enough care to be empathized with. Alandy’s Mando the officer exudes the arrogance of his uniform making his presence annoyingly uncomfortable. Reyes’ Ema relays the complexity of a woman comfortable with her skin while being equally guarded towards the two males.
The highlight of the drama is this space filled with tension between Ema and Mando. In a sequence when Joel is absent, that space of tension explodes in a decisive clash in bodily intimacy. Ema’s firmness in retaining their affair behind the shadows challenges Mando’s pursuit of control. From this point on, it is revealed that what is being fought for is more complex than the question of their desires. The three, after all, are still caught in the crossfire between the resistance and counterinsurgents.
“Shadow Behind the Moon” eventually goes back to this conflict that Lana sets in the prologue. In the movie’s penultimate course, the spectator camera eventually shifts into a perspective, marking its only “cinematic” moment. In a way, this shift into a perspective retroactively reframes the whole material as if to be considered as a plot twist: the whole drama may after all be through the gaze of this perspective. True to the theme of infidelity and betrayal, all attempts, then, to achieve the archival aesthetic seem to be betrayed in the final seconds of this shift.
What “Shadow Behind The Moon” achieves at best is ultimately technical. Despite the lack of novelty, a single-take composition stretched to almost 120 minutes, is no simple feat. It is also not that simple to steer this composition even seconds in the end, to shift the gaze from the third-person to the first-person. Like how every twist of betrayal in the drama of Ema, Joel, and Mando is exposed, this flip is a sleight of hand, almost deceitful cunningness that can fool even the most committed rebel.
