The Ghost of Vietnam Rose and How it Feels Like to be Reckless and Sentimental
by Elise Shick
It takes a lot of courage to look at old text messages, to recall partially lost memories. This process of forgetting and remembering blurs the boundaries between the truth, the imagined truth, and the fabricated truth.
On April 19, 2006 Alexis Tioseco posted “A Conversation with John Torres” on Criticine. It begins like this:
“John Torres sits beside me in a coffee shop, his long hair tied behind his head; a hesitant but proud smile jostles for time with a more serious expression. It is 2.30 a.m., and we have just finished watching his first feature-film Todo Todo Teros.”
TEN YEARS AFTER, I met John in Kuala Lumpur. His hair was short, with a thick, long fringe covering his forehead and the traces of silver in his hair gave away his age. Sitting at one of the long tables at the KL Journal hotel, John called me as I passed him by and told me about the film he was working on. It was the legendary Filipino director Celso Advento Castillo’s unfinished classic The Diary of Vietnam Rose. If I remember correctly, John was writing the dialogues. I have to admit that for a split of second I wondered whether it would be another unfinished film.
The same year, I heard that he had completed the film (after verifying with him recently, it was indeed completed and then premiered in October 2016 in the Philippines). He added “People Power Bombshell” in front of the original title. People Power Bombshell: The Diary of Vietnam Rose altogether leaves a more striking impression, alluding to the setting of the film (Philippines’ People Power Revolution in 1986) and the nineteen-year-old charming rose Liz Alindogan, who became one of the producers of the new film.
Finishing an unfinished film must have placed a huge sense of responsibility on a filmmaker. Castillo’s twenty reels of original 35mm footage are layered with John’s invented dialogues and the interviews with the original cast and crew. Whether the dialogues come from John’s imagination, association with the images, assimilation of real conversations into the imagined world, or unexplainable intuition, they fill in the gaps between the original footage and the newly shot scenes, forming a linear narrative for the film on the surface but also making some of the characters sound unreliable at times.
The monologues, interviews, and dialogues that overlap with one another continue to remind us that in this film, the reality intertwines with one’s imagination, and imagination unveils one’s yearning. Set against the vastness of the sea, Liz’s intimate diary unlocks the door to her desires and dreams. But as the boat beats against the waves, she swings back to the reality: hunger, death, greed, the unfinished film, and hopelessness. It is the diary that makes her naïve dream of becoming a star unattainable, especially when it is read through another person’s eyes. Yet at the same time, Liz is the one who dares to dream and talks about it, keeping these twenty reels of footage under her bed and making this film possible 30 years after the shoot came to a halt due to financial issues.
I watched John’s film for the first time in 2017 and these lines, though purely based on my fading memories, took root in my heart then:
You asked me to just feel,
now, look what happened.
I become someone else when you ask me to feel.
It’s like I escape reality.
This film is brutally honest in a tender and empathetic way, like many other films made by John (and also like John in person). He once told me that this film has a life of its own and has traveled to many different festivals after its completion. Perhaps it has something to do with John’s transcendental sense of cinema and therefore this film and his other works are able to connect so dearly with the audience.
Among others, Todo Todo Teros (2006), Years When I Was a Child Outside (2008), and Lukas the Strange (2013), also deal with many emotions that we share but also deny as human beings: love, possession, infidelity, and the sense of loss and belonging. John’s films resurrect the scars in the past, exposing audiences to his vulnerability and insecurities. Not only daring, they are also very personal, humble, sincere, and strangely intimate altogether. Even though his films seem transparent and light, the aftertaste lingers on and haunts me. Just as Vietnam Rose has done for the last three years. I know it will continue to haunt me.
“But with my films, I have to make filmmaking count for me, and this is where I have to be honest. And this is where my films will become living testimonies of who I am. And as I've told you, I have to be honest in each one, because they will haunt me when I grow old, they will talk to me, and when I die, they will still be there. Who is going to believe me, a dead person from the past? But then they watch these films that are so alive, who are they going to believe? So there’s no way I can make a film that will not count because I would want to die for those films, to give a part of me, to give a large part of me to those films. It has to be painful, no it doesn’t have to be painful all the time, but painful in a way that you really, really devote much time and really give a lot of your effort, your blood, and yourself to the making of it.” [Extract from Alexis’ interview with John.]
I re-read the old text messages John and I sent to each other ten years after Alexis posted online his conversation with John. I must write about them in order to let go. John said, “can’t believe it’s been ten years since our friends’ passing.”
This writing is dedicated to Alexis, Nika, and our reckless, sentimental selves.
Elise Shick is a film producer and film programmer based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. In 2018, she was selected for Working Title Workshop organized by Japan Foundation Asia Center to receive training for screening professionals. She’s currently a producer at Kuman Pictures, a production company founded by Amir Muhammad and specializing in horror films and thrillers.