The Philippine Online Chronicles

It’s all in the shoes.

Meet Lucas (Marvin Agustin), an aspiring filmmaker slash wedding videographer whose firm belief is that you can judge people by the shoes they wear. Lucas’s preoccupation with shoes is interspersed with the story of his family, girlfriend(s) and acquaintances, their favorite shoes, the collapse of the Manila Film Center, Martial Law and the 1986 People Power revolution, and the lady Imelda and her shoe collection.

Lucas is only preoccupied with two things, shoes and the past: memories of his father Domingo (Tirso Cruz III) who was buried in the collapse of the Manila Film Center, his manicurista mother Chat (Liza Lorena) who knocks on several ispiritistas’ doors in the hopes of talking to the ghost of her late husband, and his love affair with a childhood sweetheart, Bettina (Nikki Gil), accompanied by all the heartaches of a rich girl-poor boy romance in addition to the pressures of growing up too soon and keeping his feelings bottled up.

Told in nonlinear form, The Red Shoes (2010) is a whimsical warmhearted story about people caught adrift in history. The events of violence, tragedy, and triumph serve as catalyst for character growth. It's not the type of movie that will make cynics cringe nor will it make you want to cry buckets of tears, but it's a contemplative love story on the boundaries we are willing to cross in order to show that four-letter word. It’s moral without being preachy, telling us that remembering history does not necessarily mean you’re honoring it.

The twists and turns surprise you when they do come, and it's a refreshing break from your typical valentine movie.

But the real stars of the story are the shoes. The characters quote Rizal’s own shoe story throughout the film, with the shoes serving as poignant central images that carry the metaphors of character, of acts of love, of despair, and the entire spectrum of human emotion.

The writer says the story came from learning about Edsa on television in his own youth and his desire to have his own Edsa story. He made Red Shoes a love story, changing the tone and creating something not “outrightly political”, something more inclusive than divisive. People power became divisive. That’s what the current president of the republic told the public on the eve of Edsa’s 24^th anniversary. Marcos’s son called the bloodless revolution a failure. The Manila Times EIC Rene Q. Bas hit back by saying that Edsa fulfilled its original aims and the subsequent troubles stemmed from human failures. Businessworld’s Luis V. Teodoro called People Power a restoration and not a revolution, something that failed to give back to the Filipino people.

Edsa, for all its talk of unity, did not unite the country and satisfy all sectors of society. But no one occasion has preoccupied the minds of a generation and echoed through so many families. In Lucas’s case the revolution was his chance to show love. When the throng stormed Malacañang he went with them and stole a pair of Imelda’s red high-heeled shoes. One shoe for his grieving mother who never got the new shoes his father promised her on her birthday. One shoe for his childhood love, who lost her brother and father before Malacañang fell. A consolation and a beginning. A perfect pair.

Edsa is not this one story of triumph, but it is not one story of cover-up and defeat either. As Lucas walks through his own life shod in the white sneakers that remind him of his father, he confronts his past and present and shows us one overlooked facet of history: that history is a personal journey and facts are malleable to perception and prejudices. Much akin to what former president Fidel V. Ramos said, EDSA is not the story of one family, it’s the story of every family. We all have our own Edsa.

But time has a way of distorting memory and making feelings more pronounced. To paraphrase poet Maya Angelou, people will forget what you did but they will never forget how you made them feel.

And that’s the part Lucas is good at: remembering people and their shoes. His father was a working-class man who preferred to go barefoot to be able to feel where he stood, where he walked. His mother, who made a living caring for other people’s feet and had no favorite shoes of her own, is too caught up in her chase for a man who left no shoeprints behind, only footprints easily blown away by the wind. His childhood love Bettina, shod in pink and seemingly out of reach, is there but seems to Lucas like someone too easily stained by the likes of him.

Those stilettos are political

Imelda Marcos - who reportedly had 3,000 pairs at one point in time – a lady whose iron-clad fist once ruled Manila, is mentioned almost as much as that revolution. Last year 200 pairs of Imelda's shoe collection housed at the Marikina Shoe Museum were spared from the floodwaters following typhoon Ondoy (international name Ketsana).

The collection though diminished still survives the ravages of time, as do their original owner, her infamous record, and the living and written memory of those turbulent times. What use is that though? To only know one truth, to only own one pair. To only know one Edsa. Like Rizal said, as paraphrased in the film, "Aanhin pa yung isa kung dapat dalawa."

Some shoes, though, are just the wrong fit. It’s a fashion and generation thing. Some shoes make more sense in the moment you wear them than twenty-four years in the future; they’re your shoes, your time.

As the First Quarter Storm, Martial Law, and EDSA 1 were all markers of the previous generation's central themes, they are valued not only for their political significance but more so for their emotional significance. My generation's own induction into consciousness came when former President Estrada fled from Malcanang during the height of Edsa Dos. We are far more likely to remember Erap and his "eraptions" than Macoy and his sex tape because we are more emotionally bound to that Edsa.

I can still recall with clarity the telenovela-like trial that preceded his ouster: the mistresses, the mansions, and the mamba danced by Sen. Tomas when they blocked the opening of that much-alluded-to envelope. It was a time of chaos and change, but to a youngster whose own world was already changing - the beginning of body politics and the threat of higher education - it all seemed in line with what we were battling in our internal psychosis. It also seemed a fit play-act to express our angst, and whether intentional or not, it caused us to think beyond ourselves.

News of his Boracay mansion, midnight gambling, and numerous mistresses seemed more like the titillating stuff of the tabloids than the urgent markers of a corrupt president. The immediate cries for a morally fit successor to Estrada was not lost to us. The drama took us in.

Funny enough, I can’t seem to remember what kind of shoes he wore. I bet they were Italian.

Social media users feel the same way, not about Erap’s shoes but about Edsa the first. The revolution is old hat, they say. Edsa is a ghost. We’ve lost one shoe stumbling backwards and keeping still in a vacuum where the same conditions that existed during Martial Law still exist today. We’re stuck like Lucas wearing our old pair of white sneakers.

They’re an odd fit and out of style.

“Unfortunately, like every good thing, that magical moment was fleeting and gone and all too soon slipped out in the hollows of our hands ---- the reason why we are now sadly saddled by an even worse kind of political enslavement," Yahoo! user judetri said, qoutes gmanews.tv.

An ABS-CBN article quotes net users on their opinion of Edsa spirit: “@PortiaShylock believes that the conditions that spurred the EDSA Revolution still exist in the Philippines today – namely, the abuse of power, lack of accountability, and disunity. @lyleatienza, however, was quick to note that much of the People Power generation has died or migrated overseas, and the new generation does not understand the significance of the movement.”

“@forg9587 says EDSA Dos, EDSA Tres, and other attempts to replicate the original movement 'speak volumes'," quotes the article. @iangomez similarly admonishes Filipinos for their habit of "'People Power[-ing]' them out of office," in reference to corrupt politicos.

But it’s a spectrum where the likes of netizens above share space with Yahoo user Kling who said "Forgetting Edsa is an absolute form of ingratitude."

"We could've had a more disciplined country under a dictatorship. Maybe we aren't ready for democracy. But would we be happy without our freedom?," wrote DBR, an Edsa I veteran.

She added, "Let us learn from EDSA, from the good things that happened, and learn also from its aftermath. It is not easy to build a country that suddenly has been given freedom. It is never too late. As long as the desire for change is there, as long as love for country is there, as long as love for God is present, we will overcome."

@justinecastillo tweeted "EDSA 1 was about choosing democracy."

The odd fit, the disconnection, stems partly from lack of knowledge – they don’t teach us as much about Ninoy and Cory. That’s always the problem when learning history – they tell us names and dates but not the story. It’s like a worn pair of Mary Janes. You won’t know its value until you are told its story. That’s the way people learn most, through stories and hearsay. When Cory Aquino died the people gathered, as they are only opt to do during weddings and funerals, and children learned the story from their elders. But memory is selective, and what we’re told will only be remembered by how much we feel we are a part of something. Put your foot down. Face your fears. As Chat told her son, “Move on na tayo, anak.”

Cast your own shoe in the fray, you've already lost the other one. And then, once you remove the faded, the worn, the unneeded; move on but never forget.

Graphic courtesy of Unico Entertainment and Unitel Production.