Accents
Dinner and Imelda
Oakland, California - April 14, Friday, was supposed to be the solemnest day of the Lenten week, but instead Rudy and I found ourselves savoring the most lavishly served dinner yet at the COPIA, the American Center for Wine, Food & the Arts in Califoria's wine country, Napa.
Barring traffic gridlock, Napa is about an hour and a half ride from Oakland where our daughter's family resides. Timothy Yee, Rose's husband was driving and with us was grandson James Raphael brimming with the start of Spring break and our host, Katharine Flynn, Rose's mother-in-law who is a COPIA member. We passed Napa wineries lording over wide swaths of newly planted grapes.
The COPIA edifice is a massive complex of museum, auditorium, shop, bar and restaurant, and "Julia's Kitchen" named after the legendary chef Julia Child. There was much to tour about before the sit-down dinner. Outside are the gardens that would take one full leisurely day to learn and appreciate: the Beneficial Insect Habitat, the Wine Garden, Vegetable Trial Garden, Edible Presentation Garden, and the COPIA Orchard.
COPIA has a list of its weekly cultural presentations, and on this particular Friday, its offering was billed "Dinner and a Movie" and the movie happened to be Imelda. Small wonder several Filipinos were in the audience, each with his/her own reaction to "one of the world's most reviled and revered women." The flyer has more: "Told through exceptionally rare and original interviews with Imelda Marcos herself, the filmmakers were given unprecedented access, following her throughout the Philippines and even living in her home for a period of time. Marcos is both vivaciously charming as she addresses the camera and perplexing as she expounds upon her personal cosmology and addresses the question: What about all the shoes?"
Director Ramona S. Diaz answers the question in her aptly titled documentary Imelda Beyond the Shoes. Recall how the former First Lady has shamelessly contributed in placing the Philippines on the world map with her 3,000 or so pairs of shoes. When Malacanang was opened to the public as a museum of sorts right after the People Power at EDSA, we were in the beeline viewing the fabulous gowns and the huge collection of signature shoes coming from all over the world. I thought then how I could never be in Imelda's shoes. (Funny, because hers is size 7 whereas mine is a 4, ha! ha!) The fetish, the craziness, the extravagance of it all baffle the imagination.
Unnecessary and what I consider a flaw in the film is Imelda's niece saying that she herself owns 400 pairs of shoes, a weak try to justify one aunt's insatiable whim. Amply portrayed was the Film Palace tragedy -- workers buried alive in cement and steel in the rush to finish the venue for a film show to foreign celebrities. A stark contrast to the profligate and opulent Malacanang high life were the hovels of the poor shown in all their Third World deprivations. I would have wanted the documentary to mention how Imelda could be so smug in sweeping the ugly under the rug. One such case was her putting up an instant wall to cover the squalor of the slums along the pathway of the visiting dignitaries.
Film clips of Imelda's wine-and-roses crowd dancing the night away were adequately included. Downplayed were the sufferings of the torture victims, and I'm almost sure to hear grumblings from the quarters of the victimized when they view this documentary. We got little from the accounts of journalists Pete Lacaba and Jo-Ann Maglipon. More than being made to lie down between two chairs as some kind of bridge with one's stomach being whacked with a club, I expected Lacaba to recount other atrocities of the Marcos regime. Women stripped naked and forced to sit on a block of ice was only one of them. And many more cruelties too painful for words -- inflicted to extort confessions. Did I hear someone say the gruesomeness of the torture will draw the audience away from Imelda of the shoes, making the documentary lose its focus? I say, balance the revered with the reviled because there really was a lot more of Imelda beyond the shoes. Let it be known -- never ever to be forgotten -- that Imelda Romualdez-Marcos was the other half of the conjugal dictatorship and just as responsible for the crimes committed against human rights during the Martial Law years.
Imelda has enriched the English language with the adjective Imeldefic to mean unconscionable self-indulgence verging on depravity and degeneracy. Nevertheless, I would have the word expunged from the dictionary, no Imeldefic monstrosities please, but only People Power -- as the Filipinos meant it in EDSA I -- to be forever enshrined in the pages of history.
(Comments to lagoc@hargray.com)