Filipiñana announces an astonishingly assured new talent: writer-director Rafael Manuel, who makes his feature debut. Something of a slow-cinema musical, Filipiñana consists of striking, impeccably framed tableaus, in which movement and rhythm are added to create acerbic juxtapositions. It’s choreography as social commentary. Set on a luxury golf course in the Philippines, Filipiñana follows new employee Isabel (Jorrybell Agoto) over the course of a sweltering day. A 17-year-old “tee girl,” Isabel’s job is to sit at the feet of golfers practicing their shots, placing a ball in position before each of their swings. (“Getting hit isn’t the worst thing,” another tee girl tells her, noting that the offending golfer will usually leave a big tip.) Among the sly compositions Manuel stages is a riff on the famous image of Dustin Hoffman seen between the legs of Anne Bancroft in The Graduate; here, at the golf range, Isabel’s blank face is framed by the inverted “V” of a golfer’s legs as he swings his club. Elsewhere, Manuel employs wide or long shots to create compositions that slowly become cinematic over the course of a long take (Jacques Tati and Roy Andersson come to mind, although Manuel is more sardonically funny than both). In one wide shot of the pristinely manicured course (cinematographer Xenia Patricia gives the images the same sheen as an ad in a travel magazine), a pink-clad caddie stretches in the middle of the frame, while a group of red-robed priests can be seen on a green in the background. Then, a gaggle of caddies (all the caddies are female) come running and giggling across the screen in the foreground as a golfer chases them, spritzing them with water. Sometimes these compositions become full-on musical numbers. In another fixed shot, the camera rests on a phalanx of musicians and dancers, all standing perfectly still in the resort’s lobby. As a van of tourists pulls up to the entrance, the employees snap into a song-and-dance routine—which is followed by a montage of other workers sweeping, pool skimming, and chair stacking to the same rhythm. If some of the movie’s messaging is blunt (it begins with a hard cut from people standing in line for rationed water in urban Manila to the vast array of sprinklers watering the grounds at the golf course), it becomes even more so, in a dark way, in the film’s final section. I won’t reveal how, except to say that with the ending Filipiñana, Manuel has devised a diabolical way to get an audience to stay through the end credits.
(8/31/2026)
