Sonya is alone. Her father lives with her, but refuses to speak to her. Their landlord stops by whenever he wishes, threatening eviction if they do not pay off their mounting debt(s). The family-owned funeral parlor she runs gets too little business and much of her time is spent either cooking food that she does not eat or staring out of the window. This is the Philippines, one of the most densely populated countries in the world, cramming in 392 people per square kilometer; and yet, snug in the midst of its urban sprawl, Sonya’s world is quiet and empty, and she is alone.
Writer-director Dwein Ruedas Baltazar’s third feature film Ode to Nothing (Oda sa Wala) is not in black and white, but it might as well be, for all its muted colors, its drab greys, casting an almost necrotic light over these many degraded surfaces, which is appropriate considering that Sonya’s living is extracted from the dead. Baltazar’s chosen aspect ratio is 4:3, mimicking the style of early cinema; but more than flaunting its “artiness,” this choice just further hems in Sonya’s world, non-diegetically trapping her in its narrowed, coffin-like confines. We see her often in frames that double this shape: windows, doorways, gates. Often barred, grilled and/or shut.
The dominating frame is the large window facing into the family’s dining quarters, and the only element more apparent than its neat composition is its utter dismalness. Sonya is in the foreground, primary yet miniscule, shunted off to the corner; her father moves about in the background, indistinct, yet his almost spectral presence draws attention away from Sonya, especially since early on the viewer is not made privy to their exact relationship.
Two things break the monotony and dread of Sonya’s life: Elmer, a young and handsome taho peddler who on occasion passes through her neighborhood, and the object of Sonya’s unrequited affection; and, most narratively central, the arrival of an elderly woman’s corpse. It is brought to the funeral home in the middle of the night by two men who pay Sonya to store the body until someone comes looking. She is also encouraged, via additional wads of cash, to keep mum as to how it arrived at her door. These are criminals, without a doubt, but money is money, and Sonya’s electricity bill is overdue.
What follows flirts with the fabular, as subsequent strokes of good fortune lead Sonya to believe that they are somehow tied to the presence of the body. Eventually, her father is drawn into this delusion, and their gradual attachment to the corpse provides the viewer with darkly comic tableaus which would be out-and-out hilarious were it not for the looming nature of the family’s despair-in-denial.
This is a good movie, and not because it is without melodrama, or predictable plot elements; these, Ode to Nothing certainly has, but they are balanced out by the atmospheric power conjured by Baltazar’s technical prowess, as well as by her knowing enough to not overplay those artistically weaker moments when they do come. Her camera is for the most part quite static, regarding the goings-on from an aestheticized distance that, far from reducing these characters into mere figurations, actually imbues them with a formal significance. By doing so, Baltazar lifts them out of a decrepitude that would otherwise void their lives of any meaning at all.
But Sonya is not a cipher, or some witless caricature; despite her relative simplicity (one of her defining characteristics is a childlike fear of the dark) she is portrayed as an individual with relatable motivations, and a deep desire for a fuller life. In her introduction, she is shown to be listening to her favorite song, a Chinese folk tune, a lovely melody about a flower that contrasts harshly with the squalor of her environment. She listens to it on an old cassette player, the tape of which crinkles up from over-use. It is an effective symbol of her stunted wants, the beauty she longs for but can only savor through artifice, and damaged artifice at that.
Perhaps my favorite scene, and one of the film’s best, is when Sonya screams for taho in the street. The viewer has not yet met Elmer apart from a lone voice marketing its product, and one is unsure as to why she seems to perk up whenever he comes by. It can’t merely be for the treat, for she rushes out of the gates of her property and screams, almost ferally, for taho. It’s (again) a little hilarious, but also intensely pitiable, especially once her intentions are clarified to the viewer.
This, on top of the gradually more apparent way both Sonya and her father utilize the woman’s corpse as a surrogate for a deceased mother/wife, highlights the protagonist’s stuntedness; a very common trait for those individuals who have had to “mature early” and take on guardianship roles in place of an absent parent. More often than not, the so-called maturity never truly sets in, only the development of a certain façade that conceals a more essential naivete, or even unaddressed trauma(s).
Sonya, however, is not even capable of crafting a reliable façade—but between her ghostlike father and the rapacity of their landlord, as well as the morbidity of her occupation, who can blame her? For as predictable as the turn is, it is genuinely touching to see the zest for life injected into her the more she bonds with the corpse, as it seems to bring her back to a time when her and her father were close. A confession of previous suicidal ideations only further intensifies this pathos, but also, consequently, the severity of the inevitable fallout.
The performance of Marietta Subong (otherwise known by her stage name Pokwang) is very strong, capturing both Sonya’s façade and the immaturity quivering beneath it. It would be all too easy to play this role for either laughs or poverty-porn handwringing—Subong and Baltazar, fortunately, opt instead to portray a fleshed-out individual, however shorn of opportunity. Subong is adept at everything from small chuckle-inducing moments, like her first attempt to converse with Elmer, to the outlet of barely-shed tears. (I was not surprised to learn that Subong is also a comedian, although it is quite common for actors in the Philippines to perform in a variety of mediums/genres.)
As for the title? Although little in the film resembles the sort of elements one would find in an “ode” (the beauty here is less lyrical and ecstatic, more formal and intermittent), one can read the ode as Sonya and her father’s idolization of the corpse, with its nothingness acting as a blank slate for them to imbue whatever figure they desire onto it; or one can read it more literally as an ode to nothing, which is to say, not an ode at all. This latter interpretation reinforces the more darkly comic aspects of Baltazar’s tale.
Ironies aside, Ode to Nothing beguiles, and while the film (which received relatively little attention worldwide, despite winning acclaim in its native home isles) was marketed as arthouse-horror, it is more the kind of bleak social horror one might find in turn-of-the-century pessimistic Russian fiction rather than the supernatural tales of Blackwood or Le Fanu, although the very end steps in that direction. In depicting the miseries of desires deferred, and the slow oppression of hapless circumstance, however, Ode to Nothing more than earns such a designation.
[Note: An additional, and more trivial, takeaway from this film was that it evoked my childhood love for taho, which is a popular street food in the Philippines. We would have it often as a treat here in the States, growing up, and while at first glance it might not look very appealing (the thick tofu globs don’t do it any favors) the taste is delectably sweet. Here is a video showing how a street peddler in the Philippines prepares it.]
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