Faith may flicker and wane, but it will never die out
By Finnlay Victor Dall
Sisters guide their way by candlelight, their flames low compared to the consuming darkness of their ancient monastery. Their faces find themselves aglow in orange as they share their last flames with each other. They fight the water streaming past their ankles, chucking buckets of it out open windows. These women of the cloth work diligently in the dead hours of the morning. That is, until a scream from a far off corridor heralds something. An intruder? A monster? Whatever it is, it is a sinister omen for the evil yet to come.
You may be surprised to learn this is not the beginning of an 18th-century Gothic novel, but the feature debut from Australian-Filipino director James J. Robinson. Titled First Light, the film is a treatise on faith, corruption and class in the modern Philippines, asking what it means to be good in a world that needs incentive for doing the right thing.
Our heroine, Sister Yolanda (Ruby Ruiz) is staunch in her Catholic faith. Despite the walls of her archaic convent crumbling around her and injuring her fellow sisters, she still has time to give, and a kind word to say about everyone. Indiscriminate in her aid to others, she’ll lend a hand to the sick and destitute, but also help the church’s largest donor, Mrs Dela Cruz (Maricel Soriano), to take care of her ailing mother. A longstanding devotee to the church, Sister Yolanda believes kindness to be a natural part of her profession, something that everyone of Catholic faith is privy to. But while mentoring the convent’s newest recruit, the timid and doubtful Sister Arlene (Kare Adea), Sister Yolanda is called on for an emergency blessing. And when the dying soul on the hospital’s operating table is a young man linked to the Dela Cruz family’s highway construction project, her faith will be rattled like never before. As her investigation reveals more and more of God’s cruel jokes, she’ll be tempted by a different kind of faith, one that isn’t bought and sold with the silver dollars of men, but tended to by the collective consciousness of life, land and sea.
A softer thriller, First Light offers no less dread under the surface, showcasing not overt cruelties or even the banalities of evil, but the nauseating effects of blind influence, silent coercion and deaf stubbornness. With its Gothic opening and the uneasy distance that keeps from other overly cheery scenes, Robinson creates a feeling of discomfort that sits perfectly as a background to the rest of this relatively ‘harmless’ film. Something as simple as the head of the church passing Sister Yolanda a bottle of the same sparkling water that Mrs Dela Cruz uses creates a level of unease; especially when she opens up about the possible murder at the hospital. Or take the several moments where Sister Yolanda’s whole body seizes up, as if there’s always something approaching out of frame, and that we may be about to witness a bloated corpse or unknown monstrosity. Whatever subtle technique is used, it’s made clear that Sister Yolanda is never quite out of reach from the corrupting grip of Catholicism, and as a result begins to doubt her own goodness as well.
While the Gothic is not front and centre in the film, it does influence it. The old convent, with its high walls, billowy white curtains and crucifix-shaped dining halls are beautifully evocative of Powell and Pressberger’s Black Narcissus (1947) – in which a group of nuns, isolated on a mission to the Himalayas, come into contact with the locals and their outside influences; becoming corrupted by their own internal, ugly and selfish desires as a result. Yet for Robinson – whose naturally lit and vibrant vision is all the more impressive for imbuing the magic of “The Archers” set design into real world locations – the style serves a playfully devious purpose. When Sister Arlene senses the supernatural presence of a spirit in the woods, the audience is primed for her to become corrupted by some malevolent force.
But it is the older and wiser Sister Yolanda who ultimately delves into the dark side of matters instead – the middle aged woman’s patience with the church constantly tested. Her hospital blessing is particularly nightmarish as she’s forced to watch the young man bleed out on the table. While he pleads for his life, the surgeons, nurses and police who could still help idly gawk at him and his spiritual saviour before slowly leaving the theatre one by one. As if choreographed, the performance almost sets sister Yolanda up to be framed for the boy’s murder (at least metaphorically). We begin to feel this feature-long, human betrayal in our bones, to the point that the call of the spirits might not be some unknowable and ancient evil after all, but a truer, universal and more compassionate faith than either Sister Yolanda or Arlene could have anticipated.
Truly, the film’s only sin is that, once the truth is revealed rather anticlimatically, plot threads are snipped and pruned unceremoniously, leaving Sister Yolanda’s spiritual journey ending with half an hour to go. And while that time is carried incredibly well – with a more philosophical interest than an emotional one – dropping the mystery earlier than expected braces the audience for the inevitable end way too soon. But, paradoxically, it also places the audience in a fun headspace – ‘what happens now?’ being an experience we get to share with Sister Yolanda herself. So, in a way, the ending, while maybe unsatisfying to some, may be a leap of faith worth taking.
First Light goes beyond its humble Vicscreen funding to produce something not only likely to be blessed by international acclaim, but bold enough to make an enlightening statement on Western religion in Eastern countries, and how corrupting forces they facilitate can take us away from the goodness that exists in us, in others, and in the land beneath our feet.
First Light recently screened at the Melbourne International Film Festival aka MIFF, where James J. Robinson won the Blackmagic Design Best Australian Director Award for it. It will next screen in Melbourne at a MIFF encore on Friday October 10 from 7 pm at ACMI.
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