At the heart of Time Stands Still (written by Donald Margulies) is the crisis of capture, the kind that’s familiar to anyone who engages with more difficult, more violent, more painful current events in order to present these as honestly as possible, without intervening in its story, and in order to do justice to its telling.
Photo-journalist Sarah (Ana Abad Santos) and journalist James (Nonie Buencamino) have gained acclaim and credibility for doing work on conflict-torn territories in the Middle East. Working as individuals together, they find themselves victims of the stories that they follow. James had gone home ahead of Sarah, traumatized by having witnessed a bomb explosion before his eyes. He would soon enough find himself picking Sarah up from a hospital in Germany after she falls victim to a bombing herself. She is in a coma for weeks, and wakes up to a broken leg and scarred face.
The couple comes home to their staid apartment in America, the war they came from now the backdrop of their story, as it is the context of the relationship that is in the throes of individual trauma. It is a relationship that can now be viewed without the urgency of elsewhere. Or so they think.
Love in a time of war
The relationship between Sarah and James is about love in a time of war, where profession and its demands weigh down on the narratives of loyalty and fidelity. Where the ability at erasure is extraordinarily employed as a matter of another’s death, if not one’s own living.
So there is forgiveness borne of an almost impatience, if not a decision to stay. There is nowhere to go, at least not until Sarah has fully recovered, and in the meantime there is a need to find direction, there is the question of what now? If not: where to?
The easy – if not stubborn – answer is back to normal, which in this case is is war and famine. There is obviously love here, as there is companionship, but the romance is one that’s being had with work that they’ve enjoyed in common, that is part of their history as couple.
In the context of this romance with war, America and home is a displacement, an almost entrapment. The lighting (by John Batalla) is always beautifully morose, the video montages that begin each scene haunting. It happens in the apartment of Sarah and James, one that is without walls or doors. There is also a tellingly unused bedroom.
Love as simple
The fundamental crisis of this relationship is one that is individual, and it is rendered questionable by the existence of another relationship in their midst: that of Richard (Nor Domingo) and Mandy (Giannina Ocampo).
Richard’s role is one that is old and familiar, an ex-flame of Sarah, an editor of a magazine that James is freelance contributor to. They all go back years, and Richard is a fan of Sarah’s work. In the midst of crisis he encourages them to do a book project, where Sarah’s photos might be accompanied by James’s writing about their years covering the Middle East.
Domingo’s Richard might be the weakest portrayal here, where the character was too light in his step, too uncertain, for him to come off as an editor who is in a superior position to the journalists. That he disappears in that confrontation scene with James is also a measure of Domingo, where Buencamino’s James had already established an amount of irrationality, if not insecurity, enough to warrant the random outbursts powerful.
But maybe the point of this Richard was to bring into the story Mandy, whose youth and vibrancy, whose simplistic imagining of what the world is – what the world should be – is stark counterpoint to Sarah’s jadedness. Mandy is probably too optimistic for her own good, but she also raises the right questions with regards the work the journalists do: what of capture versus actually doing something?
Ocampo’s Mandy is en pointe, a reminder of the other times I’ve seen her doing comedic timing like it’s nobody’s business in plenty-a-forgettable play with Repertory Philippines. It would of course be interesting to see what it would be like were the portrayal less ditzy and more youthful exuberance, if only to see if that question she raises about journalism changes in weight at all.
Regardless, Mandy succeeds as the intervention that it is to the Sarah-James relationship, where her normalcy and her dreaming, love and simplicity, become counterpoint to the seeming urgency that is in Sarah, aching to get well, wanting to do something now, be anywhere but here.
Fire in the belly
Sarah is the quintessential independent woman, with a career she loves, for which she has gained recognition. She’s with a man who understands her priorities, who knows that theirs is a life shared in places difficult and dangerous. She’s got a fire in her belly, and you know it because there is frustration in the fact of being tied down to that couch, her leg in a cast. You know it because she demands for some coffee, some alcohol, anything at all that she’s told she cannot have.
That fire in her belly is this relationship’s undoing, and you know it the moment you watch how Sarah does not falter. She admits to infidelity without much regret. She agrees to marriage without much romance. It’s like she is elsewhere but in that apartment, dealing with James, the man who knows only to falter.
That is, there is the instability of this man relative to the woman. There is a weight in his step, the kind that is uncertain and insecure, but also there is an eagerness to please. James is the man undone, by the wars he has witnessed on the one hand, but also by this one that he was losing in the face of a woman stoic in her confidence, caustic in her wit. James is sure of what he wants, where he wants to go: he wants to stay, build a life, fall in love. It is romantic for sure, but it is also a tragedy – as is this relationship. One wishes the direction (by Rem Zamora) had captured this tragic relationship better, making sure that the fights did not become mere shouting matches, with words on top of each other. But then again, he has actors who made this relationship real despite words lost in the shouting.
Buencamino takes this character and builds upon its undoing to the point of implosion. Here, where there are outbursts and shouting, what remains clear is the sense of this character’s distress, not so much a balance that Buencamino strikes, as it is a nuance that would’ve gone unnoticed were we watching less of an actor doing it. The contemporariness of this tragedy demanded a portrayal beyond archetype, and Buencamino rises to the occasion of this tragic character, one that is probably the most memorable here.
Justice and capture
The critical question of capture is one that is Sarah’s to answer. Faced with Mandy who questions the task of taking photographs to portray a truth about a subject, instead of actually helping the subject, Sarah is cool but defensive: journalists tell the story, they don’t change it.
But Sarah’s breakdowns reveal that in fact she carries the weight of that question, where she has been told not to take photographs, where she has been judged for doing only that in war-torn spaces. Trapped in her home in America, memory does not only remind her of the dangers she faces, but also of her complicity in injustice. This is at the heart of her crisis which, without the urgency of work, she is forced to contend with. Normalcy is her white noise.
Abad Santos’s Sarah is everything you will admire – and hate – about the powerful independent woman. There is nothing to love about Sarah here, but there is something extraordinary about Abad Santos’s portrayal of her, where one feels for the character’s undoing, cloaked as this might be in her jadedness, in her sense of what is just, in the things that she herself silences. Abad Santos makes the crisis of capture real to any of us who have gone to places ravaged by injustice, and who are self-critical enough to know that there is something fundamentally wrong with speaking for the voiceless, telling stories that would otherwise be left untold.
That this resonates in third world Philippines is not at all about being journalist, nor about love. It resonates because right here is where the wars continue, and need and want and hunger remain untold, if not spun as propaganda to benefit those who do not suffer the injustice.
Time Stands Still resonates because it is here that time is exactly that, and injustice can be nothing but entrapment. And those who engage in capture have to wonder if what they do matters at all. ***
Published in The Manila Times, Arts and Culture section, February 8 2015.