Two from Isabel Sandoval in the Philippines

I don't really understand why Apparition (2012) is called Apparition. The film is not about hauntings or spirits or apparitions of any kind – even though the poster totally makes this look like a horror film. Sandoval's movie is about a group of nuns living outside of Manila in a convent in, like, the middle of a forest during 1971 and 1972, when progressive factions were attempting to displace the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos and he eventually declared martial law.

The acting in Aparisyon is wonderful. Raquel Villavicencio, in particular, gives an intense, beautiful performance. I fell in love with her in this. And Mylene Dizon and Fides Cuyugan-Asensio are also excellent.

The movie's plot is interesting, but Sandoval is a bit too precious of a filmmaker, to my mind. She doesn't build the psychological tension that is needed for this film to work well. Her preciousness translates to a focus on minutiae that feels too closed off, too isolated and messes up the pace of her films. She takes things just a little too slowly, because the moments in the film are so precious. This makes her films feel slightly off, like they could have been told in a more economic or direct way. There are way too many lingering shots.

But I like Sandoval a lot, and I'm planning to watch her film Señorita before the end of the month. I saw Aparisyon on the Criterion Channel, where it'll be playing until September 30.

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Update. Señorita (2011) doesn't have a poster, so I'm just going to write about it here. Señorita is a political thriller that I really wish had been filmed a bit more like a film noir. As it is, it follows most of Sandoval's normal filmmaking habits, but watching this film – her first – did illuminate a few things. It's far too precious, like Aparisyon and Lingua Franca, but in Señorita it is clear that Sandoval is emulating the slow sequences from Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love, and Wong is a good model to have. Sandoval's Wong-inspired sequences, though, don't have the poetic intensity of the master's. They seem, instead, simply to be there. As if the poetry will arrive if we take our time.

There were things to like about Señorita, and about halfway through, I thought we had been moving at a really good pace – except that I had thought we had started act three and we had not. this clips along at the beginning, but it slows down considerably, and the film's second half is plodding and precious.