ANGEL Aquino in “Palawan” videograb
“Palawan,” the first of four “Maalaala Mo Kaya” 20th anniversary drama specials showing this month (every Saturday) on ABS-CBN, was telecast last Oct. 1, and exemplified both the virtues and flaws of the long-running drama anthology’s oeuvre.
It focused on the life and mission of an exemplary woman played by Angel Aquino, who devoted her life to worthy causes, especially the banning of mining in her once pristine island-province. Her husband (Yul Servo) and children sometimes complained about her lack of time for them, but she persisted—even after she was struck blind.
The special episode was truly inspirational in its depiction of its ordinary protagonist and her extraordinary dedication to her selfless and thankless mission to prevent the pollution by mine tailings of Palawan’s rivers and farmlands. Despite her looking too lovely to believably play the grassroots heroine, Aquino was generally able to surmount the physical incongruity by focusing on credible details in her portrayal.
The drama also acquired greater significance and value by visually showcasing Palawan’s natural beauty, as a pointed reminder that it would soon be fatally corroded by the insane invasion of progress, unless enough people backed the ban on mining.
To give the movement a big push, the program intermittently urged viewers not just to watch, but join the antimining campaign.
These and other creditable thrusts made “Palawan” a truly significant drama—until the show’s standard narrative way of developing its plots and characters prevented the conflict from sufficiently building up, complicating and peaking to effect a truly dramatic and psychologically transformative denouement.
Structurally weak
We’ve been writing about the basic flaw in the program, because it often ends up limiting its drama’s power to genuinely move and enlighten viewers.
In the case of “Palawan,” the drama started becoming structurally weak after the protagonist lost her vision. The conflict then shifted, from townspeople versus mining companies and their political backers, to the blinded woman and her loved ones.
Before she fell ill, they put up with her extra-familial activities, but once she became blind and “useless,” they turned churlish and ungrateful. OK, but what about the central political conflict? It ended up playing second-fiddle to her personal drama—which contradicted the episode’s main thrust.
In addition, the personal dramatic conflict was resolved in too facile a fashion with the husband realizing that she had been right after all, because his own farmland had become polluted and the kids similarly admitting that they had been surly and ungrateful, so they started supporting her campaign (which, ironically, she had undertaken to preserve the promise of their future).
At the end of the episode, the family’s woes had been resolved, but the mining problem had not. So, instead of forcefully and insightfully peaking, the drama just dribbled away in a sort of anticlimatic or, more properly, “preclimactic” mumble that left this viewer informed but insufficiently moved.
“MMK” really must get away from its narrative exposition and opt for the truly dramatic approach.