Nothing in director Lawrence Fajardo's features approaches the power and skill of The Hearing (Cinemalaya, Pelikulaw, Center Stage Productions, 2024) which represents a major leap forward in all departments. Proving himself an astonishingly accomplished director as well as a measured storyteller. While this is unquestionably an issue film, it tackles its subject with intelligence and heart. Fajardo uses a trial to structure the film, though this isn’t a courtroom drama and those scenes are wisely kept to a minimum. He does a superb job through a mixture of shrewd editing and a multitude of sounds, generally keeping the camera just below or above twelve-year-old Lucas' (Enzo Osorio) head. In following his young protagonist and his mother Madonna (Mylene Dizon), Fajardo articulates the impossibility of the lives bestowed upon them. It’s a deeply assured piece of direction and though it only plays a few emotional notes, they are ones that won’t soon leave your memory. The Hearing gives us course after course of heart-wrenching scenarios tied to the POV of its child protagonist that it’s hard to get a sense of any course of action than the one chosen. This is not an easy movie by any stretch of the imagination. Lucas' situation goes from dire to almost unwatchable. The director allows us to enter into the boy’s mind. We watch this movie not as concerned adults but as complicit secret-sharers and that makes all the difference. But the polemical is never as powerful as the personal and Fr. Mejor's (Rom Factolerin) part of the story illuminates the whole with nauseating clarity. They welcomed him because he was their conduit to the church on which they counted for solace and support. By the time it's told, his unnerving air of detachment has been shown to be emblematic of an indifference endemic in the church itself. Fajardo isn’t interested in giving the audience the kind of relief so absent from the children Lucas represents.
The most abiding image is the face of Lucas himself. He has lost the ability to smile and has effectively bottled up his tears, except when at the point of despair or suffused by the memory of his abuse. This cut uses POV to present the young boy's journey, evoking his limited hearing frequently via unflashy manipulations of the film’s soundtrack and careful placement of the camera. Thankfully, Fajardo provides moments of tenderness and finds ways to inject small bits of humor when he can. Most of all, it helps that the film is built around an incredible, singular performance from Osorio as Lucas. In scenes of quiet desperation, Fajardo’s camera focuses on Osorio’s eyes and his defeated body posture to get a sense of the internal fight going on in his head. There’s a melancholy tone throughout the film, even in its most innocent moments. The young actor is an unforgettable, charismatic presence. His is a performance I can easily see coming up in future discussions about all-time great work by child actors. There is a naturalistic quality to the movie on the fact that Osorio acted spontaneously. He brought an undeniable truth to every moment used in the film, which was cut down to a running time of 1 hour and 35 minutes. Fajardo set about rebuilding the film allowing him to completely redefine the feature. During this process, he was able to paste over the cracks, build upon the film’s core concepts to create the kind of narrative and thematic tension the original version had been sorely missing. In a handful of drone shots, Fajardo extends his lens beyond the suffering of his characters. There’s no doubt that he is a filmmaker of extreme empathy, with real intuition on how to capture the dynamic between parents and their children in particular. There is passion and compassion here and Fajardo's film brings home the meaning of desperation and, conversely what love and humanity mean.
Screenplay: Lawrence Fajardo, Honeylyn Joy Alipio
Director of Photography: Roberto "Boy" Yñiguez
Editors: Lawrence Fajardo, Ysabelle Denoga
Production Designers: Ian Traifalgar, Endi "Hai" Balbuena
Musical Scorer: Peter Legaste, Joaquin Santos
Sound Design: Jannina Mikaela Minglanilla, Michaela Docena
Directed By: Lawrence Fajardo
