New York Asian Film Festival 2024 (July 12-22 FLC) REVIEWS

[Chris Knipp]

CARLO AQUINO IN THE MISSING

CARL JOSEPH E. PAPA: THE MISSING (2023)

Through delusion to healing

In this unusual animated film, which was the Philippines' Best International Feature Oscar entry for its year, an alien about to abduct a child speaks to him in Tagalog. Wny not? The influence of Gregg Araki's Mysterious Skin seems obvious here, though the abduction is the clearest part of it, and how the film feels about events is different.

Araki's film begins with a man's sexual abuse of two young boys, Brian and Neil. Fast forward to years later when they're young men who react dramatically differently to this traumatic event. Neil, now played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, is a gay hustler. Brian, played by Brady Corbet, blocks out the childhood abuse with the belief that he was abducted by aliens. So there is something of Brian in Eric (Carlo Aquino). Eric and the present-time part of the film is rotoscoped. In using this process Papa has said he was influenced by Richard Linklater's Waking Life.

Eric is closely in touch with his mom but lives alone in an apartment and works as an animator, and his colleague, the one we see, is Carlo (Gio Gahol). They seem attracted but communication may be impeded by lots of things, first of all that Eric is mute. Not only that, he has no mouth. The animation omits it, and later he loses an eye, and other parts. Eric's traumas as a child are gradually indicated by flashbacks in a more childlike and naive kind of animation. These short, staccato, more stylized passages are rather opaque at first. When the chatty Tagalog-speaking alien comes for Eric it's clear enough. In these childlike animations we see Eric, aged nine, when he was still able to speak (voiced by Jeremy F. Mendoza. And eventually we'll find out the secret that has been imposed on him and we guess why.

It seemed a good choice on Araki's part not to show us Brian's fantasy memories of alien abduction. But Papa has a wholly different approach to childhood sexual trauma. While in Mysterious Skin Neil, Joseph Gordon-Levitt's character, gets most of the attention, this is as if from the point of view of Brian, who in Araki's film seems beyond help but here finds healing. Maybe Araki would have shown the aliens if he'd been making an animated film. The beauty of Mysterious Skin in how grounded it is in the real. The beauty of The Missing is that it takes us emotionally through its protagonist's trauma and out into healing.

A folksy Filipino flavor comes with Rosalinda, Eric's caring mom, who turns out to be open to Eric's gayness and his nascent "thing" with Carlo. Rosalinda is played, rotoscoped, by Dolly De Leon, the actress playing the shipboard cleaning lady who takes over the second half of Ruben Östlund's Triangle of Sadness.

The action of The Missing is slow to get started at first. Eric is tormented and blocked. He has a lot to deal with and what really troubles him isn't made clear, through the primitive flashback animation, until an hour into this ninety-minute film. Earlier, Rosalinda sends Eric (he goes with Carlo) to look for his uncle Rogelio (voiced by Joshua Cabiladas, who also does the Blurry Man and the Alien), who's been unresponsive, and they have to break into his apartment, and find him dead in his bed - and not recently, which is scary and disturbing. Now Rogelio’s daughter Precy (Christela Marquez) appears, and she has become as mute and mouthless as Eric.

In a car trip Carlo sensitively plays along with Eric's irrational fears of aliens, which seem very real and emotionally disturbing, and by sharing helps him work through them. Eric's battle with the burden of trauma embedded in aliens, helped by Carlo and a little by his mother Rosalinda, leads him to a dramatic ritual of healing and he gets back all he has lost, his eye, his ear, his penis, his hand, and finally his mouth. He can throw away the whiteboard he has been wearing around his neck to communicate with. Sitting symbolically near Rogelio's grave, Eric speaks to Carlo and Rosalinda, and the first thing he says is that he has something to tell them.

The film is another example of how animation can be used to delve into imagination and find shorthands to complex emotional truth. It seems laborious at times, but that emotional message is powerful enough to explain the Oscar submission. Papa uses his sources in a new way. The Missing is a touching, heartfelt film.

The Missing/Iti Mapukpukaw, 90 mins., debuted the Philippines (Cinemalaya) Aug. 5, 2023; also shown at Rotterdam, Palm Springs, Jeonju, Netherlands. It was screened for this review as part of the 2024 NYAFF (Jul. 12-28).

SCHEDULE:
Sunday July 21, 4:00pm
Film at Lincoln Center


GIO GANOL, CARLO AQUINO IN THE MISSING