“Goodbye My Shooting Star” @ Taumbayan
Where: TAUMBAYAN
40 T. Gener Street cor K1 Street (near Kamuning Road)
Quezon City, Philippines
When: June 3, Wednesday
8pm
FILMLESS FILMS presents
PAALAM AKING BULALAKAW
(GOODBYE MY SHOOTING STAR)
This is not a film by KHAVN
Starring MERYLL SORIANO
Running time: 73 minutes
K. loves Ana. Then Ana went missing. But now she’s back. And so is K. The walk through the old school. The strange encounters. The eye doctor. The rekindled memories. Chance? Or design? What we talk about when we talk about love are the things unsaid. The words that fail. The lovesongs in your head. The poetry between the lines.
Jolina and Squatterpunk have nothing in common and you’d be right to think that but you’d be also be wrong. They have one – - – Khavn. The teleserye mush of “Gusto” comes from the same place as the apocalyptic gorepunk of Three Days Of Darkness. The avantpop filmmaker has a flipside and a hopeless devotion to love and lovesongs. And he wears his secret heart on his sleeve on Paalam Aking Bulalakaw (Goodbye My Shooting Star). Forget John Lloyd & Sara. Spike the senti. Bittersweeten the punch. Love is love and loss and regret and long goodbyes all the things you want to say but can’t. And let’s walk and talk about love on Wednesday night.
FESTIVALS
42nd Pesaro International Film Festival, Italy
5th La Palma International Digital Film Festival, Spain
CREDITS
Featuring ELMO REDRICO, NELLA SARABIA, & EGAY ROXAS
Translators MIKAEL DE LARA CO & MERV ESPINA
Songs & Poems KHAVN
Guitar Solo JONNY SALVADOR
Sound Engineer ARVIE BARTOLOME
Dialogue by KHAVN & MERYLL SORIANO
Editing RALPH CRISOSTOMO
Cinematographers ALBERT BANZON & KHAVN
Director, Writer, Producer KHAVN DE LA CRUZ
REVIEW BY DODO DAYAO
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Who knows what came to pass between K and Ana before today? K is, of course, director Khavn himself sort of, the man with the movie camera whom we never see, and Ana is Meryll Soriano, his obscure object of desire whom we can’t take our eyes off. They talk and it’s not as if it gets so obtuse as to resist parsing. Just weightless and hesitant and stumblebum . There are no codes in the conversation to decipher. What we talk about when we talk about love are the things that go unsaid anyway. The inarticulate speech of the heart. So maybe we should just take Khavn’s word for it that K loves Ana and that’s as far as it got. Which then makes this. . . what? Chance? Or design? Date? Or destiny? Unrequited? Reunited?
The Linklater parallels you invoke only to cut a long story short and to peg what can be a bitch to peg, what is better off seeing for yourself- – - Before Sunrise at 30 f.p.s. on a shoestring. The parallelism does take, somewhat- – - the walking around, the talking around, the going everywhere, the going nowhere. But there’s no arc in this first person love story, no fate playing matchmaker, no intrusions from the universe. Only the brutal symmetry – - – the solipsistic economy and delicate equilibrium and minimalist stasis- – - of its POV.
It’s the longest goodbye in the universe when your shooting star burns out, shooting star here’s used loosely, figuratively. It rings more poetically in the vernacular – - -bulalakaw. You call them that because they burn so bright, because you wistfully look to the sky for their trajectories to cross your radar again even after their orbits have passed most likely forever, because you wish on them. But you knew that and maybe you knew that out of having had this extraterrestrial hurt too, out of having the unforgettable face of that lapsed darling afterimaging in your head long after her radio silence, her invisibility, her supernova before your eyes. And all of this is in K’s head. Like the lovesongs falling on deaf ears, like the poetry in the details, like the words that fail, like the wishfully-thinking extraterrestrial hurt it hooks me with.
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