Nominally, Filipino cinema’s most psychologically fascinating love triangle, Ishmael Bernal's landmark is a hard film to resurrect in a contemporary era that favors logic and emotional literalness over the director’s dreamy sense of the inevitability of disappointment and the invisibility of personal morality. Dalawang Pugad... Isang Ibon (LEA Productions, 1977) stands alongside Ikaw ay Akin (1978) as one of the definitive films of the 1970s, its impact on countless scores of subsequent films is impossible to gauge. If its guilelessness seems a bit dated, a viewing today reads like a well-observed lesson that countless filmmakers incorporated into their work over the following two decades, leaving it not just cogent but an essential piece of cinema history. With an almost insurmountable liberty in his use of the cinematic form, Bernal embraces contradiction to create meaning—Dalawang Pugad... Isang Ibon is sad yet humorous, breathless yet contemplative, universal yet hermetic. It knows of life’s folly so intimately that it is impossibly naïve and its selfless love of the cinema borders on narcissistic. What confirms Dalawang Pugad... Isang Ibon to the status of a flawed gem is Bernal’s inability to reconcile his core of almost surreal melancholy with a more psychologically acute perception of character, something perfected throughout his later efforts like Relasyon (1982) that bears more than a few similarities to this film. The timeline of his plot is impenetrable and his sense of incident is suitably hazy (it only fails him at the hastily staged denouement), but he too easily lets Roy (Romeo Vasquez) and Mel (Mat Ranillo III) as characters, coast by on vague descriptions and archetypes rather than example. Mel is too easily reduced to his lack of action and is occasionally forgotten, while there is repeated discussion of his proclivities as a ladies’ man without discernment as to what drives his appetites or makes him so appealing to the opposite sex. Roy and Mel instinctively intellectualize themselves to the point where it is possible they exist only within the reality of their own minds and thus neither actor is able to give a performance that captures the imagination.
Terry (Vilma Santos) whose own frivolity may be her way of dealing with an underlying and serious sense of dissatisfaction. She is easy to fall in love with — the character is beautiful, charming and intelligent. The very things that mark her as a mesmerizing woman – her daring and self-determination, her refusal to play by patriarchal rules – also, in some ways, stoke her discontent. It’s inevitable, then, that her attention will eventually turn to Roy. Dalawang Pugad... Isang Ibon is really Terry’s film. This is Vilma Santos’s first great performance, all the greater because of the art with which she presents Terry’s resentment. A lesser actress might have made Terry mad or hysterical, but although madness and hysteria are uncoiling beneath the surface, Terry depends mostly on unpredictability — on a fundamental unwillingness to behave as expected. She shocks her parents as a way of testing them. Dalawang Pugad... Isang Ibon is about love in its many faces and disguises. It isn't just about the love of Roy and Mel for Terry or about the variations of her feelings for the two of them, separately and together. In spite of his understanding and images of tenderness, joy, fun, cosiness, idyllic feelings of all kinds in Dalawamg Pugad... Isang Ibon, Bernal keeps himself, to just the right degree, out of it. He never makes the mistake of confounding himself, as creator, so that you never get his own attitude towards Terry, or any comment on her spirit and behavior. Bernal is inarguably the star of the film and his presence alone justifies Dalawang Pugad... Isang Ibon’s almost immediate introduction into the canon of greatness as well as its enduring appeal. His generosity in creating fleeting throwaway moments that teem with detail and emotional resonance is unparalleled and the autonomy of his camerawork is galvanizing. Dalawang Pugad... Isang Ibon, as a whole, is as singular as its director. The berth of his sensitivity is so wide that the film seems less a creation of artifice than a pipeline straight into his emotional being. If the finale feels a bit sudden, perhaps that’s because we’re only viewing it within the context of a romantic triangle. Widened out, it’s the story of love – in all sorts of forms.
Art Director: Bobby Bautista
Director of Cinematography: Nonong Rasca
Sound Supervisor: Luis S. Reyes
Film Editor: Nonoy Santillan
Music: The Vanishing Tribe
Screenplay: Ishmael Bernal
Direction: Ishmael Bernal
