Rain Is Not the Enemy: A Review of Ulan (2019)

Permit us to refresh your memory: What comes from heaven is always a blessing, the enemy is not the rain. Rain is the subject of prayer, the kind gesture of saints

This is the opening line of Conchitina Cruz’s poem Dear City, which is also the opening poem of her debut poetry collection Dark Hours. Beloved by many, the poem problematizes our perception of rain (water) in the city: the puddles no longer puddles, the floods and plastic, rainwater with rats’ piss.

In our childhood, rain is often depicted in a bad light. A shower under a torrential downpour would mean sickness or cold. But to think about it, those few times when we were allowed to get drenched while it was raining curiously have never made us sick. I sometimes think that that perception rests on the precarity of our healthcare infrastructure. Nevertheless, experience with rain is, indeed, a formative childhood experience.

Beginnings

Ulan (dir. Irene Villamor_ features Maya (Nadine Lustre) a hopeless romantic girl in her 20s whose notions of love involved so much around the rain. Interspersed with childhood memories, the film oscillates between memories of rain and the present. Maya, buoyed by the romance of rain which stems from witnessing tikbalangs getting married in their backyard and told her “Nothing can stand in the way of love”, would shape her beliefs of a fabled love story under torrential rain.

Maya works in a publishing house with an unbearable pervert boss. Her life shifts into a 9-5 work, commute, and then home. The film, probably set around June, the season where the southwest monsoon brings with it rainshowers and storms. The film begins with her visiting an old flame, who in a few moments, she would come to know as a married man, in fact, already father with an old girlfriend in college.

Attending a wedding of a client of her friend, she would meet Andrew (Marco Gumabao). The dynamic, here albeit an indicator perhaps of a more satisfying partner has the impression of contrivance. Andrew, an archetypal picture-perfect boyfriend, rich, mestizo, fluent in English with typical swabe pick-up lines. Maya relishes the experience of first love. A gust of divine touches her. She resigns from her work in the publishing house to apply in a call center company. However, as quickly as this love blossomed, is as quickly as it withered. What stayed all throughout these heartbreaks is the rain.

Masterclass in acting

All throughout Nadine’s movements in the film are calculated. Whether it’s staring into the distance, imagining the beloved take on the faces of random strangers, or even staring into space on a lonely tricycle ride — Nadine fully captures the meandering state of personhood weighed down by work, age, heartbreak, or the feeling of “life not happening just yet.” One of the great hallmarks of acting is if it no longer appears like a performance that she has masterfully done.

Maya then meets Peter (Carlo Aquino) in a chance encounter. The wind blows, a torrential downpour, a classic cliché where the main character dropped her belongings and was helped by a charming partner. From then, the two cultivate a relationship built under the NGO where Peter is a volunteer helping children read and write.

There are moments in the film that are too saccharine and others where it feels like it’s too private to witness. An inconsistency that lends the film an impression that it’s overstating its intention.

Ulan as a love story

Ulan is still a love story, not a feel-good romance per se but a film worth watching. Despite the heartbreaks she encountered, Maya is still optimistic about love. She calls into question the popular idea that when loving someone, you should save some for yourself. “I know I will never run out,” she firmly says.

“Rain is not the enemy,” the poem says. It’s the circumstances that produce its ugliness: the faulty drainages, the general lack of urban planning, deforestation etc. In the end, Maya finds her childhood self in the rain. And they danced as if it meant that it was what she needs. A reason to dispel notions about the rain, inhabiting love as a vessel of it. “Rain is a blessing, the kind gesture of saints.”