Stop Sleeping on ‘Kung Mangarap Ka’t Magising’
Stop Sleeping on ‘Kung Mangarap Ka’t Magising’
Joey (Christopher de Leon) and Anna (Hilda Koronel) sharing a look in a chapel.
This review contains spoiler for Kung Mangarap Ka’t Magising.
We don’t talk about Kung Mangarap Ka’t Magising as much as we should.
When it comes to Baguio romances, people recall more contemporary works, from the Marvin Agustin-Jolina Magdangal vehicle Labs Kita, Okey Ka Lang? to Antoinette Jadaone’s That Thing Called Tadhana. Even when it comes to Mike de Leon’s filmography, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone more willing to talk about this film rather than Kisapmata or Batch ’81, whose cleverly packaged social critique has defined de Leon’s directorial style.
I would argue, though, that Kung Mangarap Ka’t Magising (which I’ll refer to hereafter as KMKM for brevity’s sake) is worth revisiting not only as a strange turn in a great director's filmography. It also happens to be the quintessential Baguio romance film and, by extension, one of the greatest coming-of-age love stories Philippine Cinema has to offer.
Born between 1976 and 1977, KMKM was de Leon’s sophomore directorial feature after finishing Itim and working as producer and cinematographer in Maynila sa Kuko ng Liwanag. 1977 happened to mark the centennial birthday of his grandmother, Doña Sisang, the founder of LVN Pictures which had been one of the biggest Filipino film studios two decades earlier. LVN lost its footing in the 60s when financial troubles forced the company to stop producing films, exclusively offering post-production services to other studios instead. As tribute to his grandmother, de Leon briefly revived the studio’s movie production arm, helming KMKM as LVN’s MMFF entry that year.
Joey and Anna on a hilltop picnic date, overlooking the province.
Perhaps channeling the escapist spirit of MMFF or that of Doña Sisang’s conventional “formula” films, KMKM took a more bougie turn compared to Maynila… and Itim. Its premise is simple: aimless college student Joey (Christopher de Leon) falls in love with a lonely trophy housewife, Anna (Hilda Koronel), who comes to his university for a brief respite from her crumbling marriage. They strike up an illicit affair against the lush backdrop of Baguio.
On paper, KMKM has the makings of two era-typical films: (1) the sexually-tinged melodrama, replete with the necessary screaming matches and gratuitous love scenes; or (2) a purely escapist, college road trip movie. Of course, the look of the film leads us to believe that de Leon opted to go for the latter route. Peque Gallaga called KMKM Mike de Leon’s “TV commercial ad” movie, and he does so for good reason. KMKM revels in vibrant acrylics and beauty shots, enough to leave you breathless or, if you’re a cynic, sickened by its candy-sweet veneer. Regardless, to reduce the film to its look undermines the depths de Leon injects to the film. He rejects the ease of turning characters into caricatures, instead choosing to paint them as vividly as he does the scenery. As Joey and Anna’s romance blossoms, it becomes increasingly clear that, if anything, KMKM is a deconstruction of that TV commercial ad fantasy.
Joey and Anna’s whimsies, though charming, are products of their failed fantasies. Joey is reeling from his girlfriend’s death, of which he was partly at fault for, while Anna struggles to come to terms with her irreparable marriage. Their coping mechanism is aimlessness. They allow everyone else to dictate the direction of their lives— Anna nods along to her husband, while Joey abandons his musician dreams to pursue medicine.
Their discontent is exacerbated by their loved ones, who stand in contrast to them. Joey’s aunt, for example, is practically dying to begin a new life with her beau in America, leaving Joey uneasy. He understands, however vaguely, the imperative to move forward, but he doesn’t know how to. There’s no one at the other side anymore. The same goes for Anna.
What they see in each other, then, is an opportunity to relive the stability of their pasts while rewriting at the same time. An apt point of comparison would be That Thing Called Tadhana, whose themes (and choice of setting) are undoubtedly derived from this film. Where Jadaone’s leads— also suffering from heartbreak and the need to move on— want to do nothing in Baguio but talk about the pasts they’ve lost, Joey and Anna try to anchor themselves in the present: the walks in the park, the dinner dates, the now, now, now.
But their escape routes lead nowhere. Their TV commercial romance is interrupted by Joey’s ex-girlfriend who visits him in flashes, by Anna’s husband, Freddie (Briccio Santos), who follows her to Baguio with an ultimatum: stay or leave.
Mike de Leon pulls all this off with his signature precision as a director. He allows the external realities to creep up on Joey and Anna, as they inevitably should, but he keeps us in the same headspace as our beloved protagonists. Our focus never drifts to Joey’s parents or Anna’s husband for too long. We’re too caught up in what’s in front of us: the contours of Hilda Koronel’s cheeks, Christopher de Leon’s shy smile, the cherry-red umbrella they share. The rest blur into brush strokes.
Poster for the digitally restored and remastered version of the movie. Joey and Anna at the corner, huddled under a red umbrella. The rest fade into brush strokes.
Still, it doesn’t erase the fact that Joey and Anna’s affair stands on shaky legs, which makes them all the more desperate to mummify themselves in the present, where past and future can’t touch them.
They fail, of course.
But at least they fail with grace— no hysterics on the part of the film. The ending of their affair feels more like a quiet wake-up from a dream. When Joey sees Anna off, never to see her again, he isn’t dewy-eyed. All he does is nod and wave goodbye. Perhaps because he’s come to see their relationship for what it really is: an affair. Brief, sweet, and much-needed. There was real love there, yes— Anna admits it herself— but that wasn’t the point. Their affair was an exercise of their long-lost independence, giving them the strength to reassume control over their lives. Joey finishes his song, makes plans to go down to Manila and finally become a musician. Anna leaves her husband. They grow.
Anna shoots a smile, moments before climbing up the bus and leaving Baguio and Joey behind.
What makes KMKM unique is its realistic, yet surprisingly optimistic redefinition of what Baguio is. It transforms the city from a space of fantasy to a space for transition where a little sprinkle of fantasy is needed to complete it. The film, in other words, speaks of the necessity of dreams, but it also emphasizes the need to wake up from them because this time, Baguio is a stop-over, not the destination.
That probably explains the final scene, where we have Joey smiling down the university corridors. A smile tinged with melancholy, but more so with hope. His love affair with Anna was never meant to last, but that doesn’t make what they had any less special or any less right. Some things just have to end. And that isn’t always sad.
During its initial release, KMKM was often dismissed as a purely commercial joint— a notion I just have to disagree with. I’d rather side with critic Noel Vera’s assessment that KMKM reveals a more personal side to de Leon that we’re not used to. The movie is an outlier in his filmography in that it’s not overtly sardonic; rather, it’s unapologetically sentimental, self-indulgent, and sanguine. I’d wager that this is in no small part because de Leon is meditating on real bygone loves himself: his late grandmother, the dream-factory films she used to produce, and, more broadly, the first golden age of Filipino cinema that he grew up in but must now help usher out.
To his credit, Mike de Leon imbues the escapist qualities of that era with his own self-consciousness as a filmmaker, achieving an intoxicating balance of romanticism and realism that later Baguio romances can’t quite capture. They either come off as too corny (Labs Kita, Okey Ka Lang?) or contrived (That Thing Called Tadhana), in spite of the fact that they all draw inspiration from this film. It is in that way that Kung Mangarap Ka’t Magising remains a timeless classic. It’s a melancholic coming-of-age story that, despite its dreaminess, lays down truths about life and love that continue to resonate even forty years later. At the same time, it appears to have been an avenue for self-indulgent introspection for someone who would soon be regarded as one of the greatest directors in Philippine Cinema.
We should probably stop sleeping on it.
Kung Mangarap Ka’t Magising is now available on iWant TFC or Apple TV.
