Life
is like a bus, or in the case of this movie, a routed taxi cab. We meet people
along the way who share in our journey. Some stay longer than others, some
drift away as soon as they came. But the truth is, we are all passengers in
life, waiting patiently to get to our desired stop.
MNL 143 is a social realist film
mostly set inside a transport taxi cab. The protagonist, Ramil (Allan Paule),
is a former OFW who returned to the Philippines to search for a lost love (Joy
Viado). After years of futile efforts and disappointment, Ramil decided to
return abroad. The film chronicles his last day of searching for his lost love
and the passengers he meets along the way.
It is ironic how the film is able to
go beyond the cramped space of Ramil’s mini-van and is able to explore entire
lives intersecting along the busy streets of Manila. As passengers come and go,
we see snippets of their lives and personalities revealed unintentionally. A
mother is broken hearted as her son reveals in a text that he did not remember
her birthday. A woman chases after a snatcher after realizing her cellphone was
missing. A student drowns the world away with her earphones. Aspiring
filmmakers try to impose meaning through symbolism in an amateur film they
taped inside the mini-van.
We only see tidbits of the
passenger’s lives. Our imaginations, however, were left with a wide horizon of
questions. How did the mother celebrate her birthday, then? Will the woman
discover that she was after the wrong man? Where is the student headed? Would
the filmmakers be able to make a decent film?
In all the characters he met every
day, it was very serendipitous that his lost love would choose to hail his taxi
on the last day of the search.
The
love story, however, took up a very small part of the main narrative. The
narrative was mainly concerned about revealing how many people went through the
grueling process of sacrificing comfort, safety, and sometimes integrity in
their public commute. The film did a wonderful job of defamiliarizing something
that we saw and did every day. Suddenly, commuting and the politics of it
became fascinating. As a participant, and bathed in the mundaneness of it all,
we do not realize that we meet interesting people every day. We can then ask
questions we never thought we could ask, “Where is she going?” “What are they
fighting about?” “Why does he look so tired?” All of a sudden, we realize that
we are just a very small part of this sprawling city where different lives play
out.
The
taxi cab in this sense serves as a diluting mechanism. Different people who
otherwise would have no other reason to associate are brought together, even if
just for a moment, to share in a single journey. When we choose to pay
attention, we can learn a lot from the things that we do every day.
The
cinematography was very adept at showing and letting the audience experience
Manila. A lot of the shots were always cramped, indicating the lack of space,
literally and figuratively, that plagues the city. This is further exacerbated
by passengers clamoring to get seated in the overloaded taxi cab. In the
outdoor scenes, the color tone was very warm – ranging from yellow, red to
orange hues. You could almost feel the sweltering heat that is characteristic
of the capital city.
Ramil’s story ended much in the same way as
the passengers he encountered – very open ended. We can never know if Ramil and
his love would get back together, especially after it was revealed that she was
terribly bitter over the entire affair. But even if she does decide to get off
Ramil’s taxi for good, it is oddly comforting to note that despite the terrible
odds, Ramil had the chance to take his lost love as a passenger once again.
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