ANG AKING JUAN LUNA (LUNA Y SALVACION)
Synopsis
Juan Luna, one of the greatest Filipino painters wins first
prize for his masterpiece El Spoliarium in the world-renowned Exposicion de
Bellas Artes in Madrid 1884, at a time when colonial natives were thought to
have still lived in trees. Juan Luna amazes the civilized world: its
aristocrats, its royalty, and its art connoisseurs. His victory is celebrated
by all Filipinos who are fighting for respect and esteem, but blind to racial
and colonial disdain. Juan Luna proves for that one shining moment, the
colonial native can stand side by side with his master. And yet, many allege
that he was deprived the highest “Prize of Honor”only because he was a
non-European.
Several years after, 1892, at a brief moment of despair and
a horrible jealous fit, Juan Luna shoots and kills his wife, Paz and his
mother-in-law Julianna in their Paris apartment. This crime of passion, almost
completely eradicates the glory of his achievement in 1884. Ironically, the
very same regard to colonial natives, perceived by the European civilized world
as savages and unable to control their primal passions, was the key to this
great artist’s reprieve and eventual acquittal. Juan Luna, true to his name,
was struck by a temporary insanity, that must have been understandable to “Indios”
like him.
This film tells the story of Juan Luna through a contemporary
fictional character, Salvacion, an overseas Filipino domestic who takes care of
Purita, an elderly and frail Spanish-French woman who eventually passes away in
her small home in Madrid. On her deathbed, Purita, moved by Salvacion’s
devotion to her, gives her caregiver a gift, a rolled up canvas. Upon returning
to the Philippines, Salvacion is confronted by financial problems. She realizes
that all the hard work and patient suffering she endured in a country that
renders her invisible and insignificant are not enough to sustain her own
family. When she starts selling some of her possessions, she finds her
inherited canvas and unrolls it, and finds that it is a damaged painting -- a portrait
of a woman. The edges of the canvas are burned. Not knowing anything about the real
value of the painting, she thinks of selling it to whoever might be interested.
A neighbor of Salvacion accompanies her to an unscrupulous antique and art
appraiser.
Salvacion, ignorant of the real value of paintings, readily
accepts an amount a hundred times lower than the actual value of this gift, for
it turns out that the painting is a portrait of Juan Luna’s wife, considered
lost forever but was mysteriously spared, when Paz’s brother, Trinidad,
overcome by grief and indignation over the murder, burns all of Juan Luna’s
paintings left in his studio. This portrait’s discovery becomes the celebratory
toast to Juan Luna’s greatness among Manila’s elite. And yet, Salvacion is
unaware of all this. She lives the life of a Filipino, whose main concerns are
simple. With a family that is torn apart by migrant work, she like Juan Luna,
is also regarded as a second class citizen in a Europe that extols the value of
art, as an index of civilization. And right in her own country, she fails to
share the ecstatic celebration of Filipino art lovers, like other Filipinos
whose historical and aesthetic awareness are completely dissociated from the
class that hails itself as “enlightened.”
The film takes thematic comparisons between a Filipino
colonial artist in Europe and a devoted Filipino caregiver/domestic -- both motivated
by leaving their home to make good of themselves and their lives in another
country; both struggling with a their sense of “value”, how the painter creates
it in his art and gives honor and life to a national identity, and how the
caregiver fails to recognize it in the face of real need; with both losing that
which they truly value.
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Work In Progress / August 2021
For inquiries, please email to davefabros@gmail.com
