Writer-director Martika Ramirez Escobar’s debut feature 'Leonor Will Never Die' celebrates the universal ridiculousness of 1970s and '80s exploitation films.
There’s also the matter of her unfinished mourning over the long-ago death of another son, Ronwaldo, who is a watchful presence as an adult ghost , and the name of the action hero in an unfinished script Leonor starts working on again in the hopes of ending her retirement.
That dream hits a snag, however, when an upstairs neighbor’s dropped television puts Leonor in a coma. But inside her subconscious, she’s given entry into her own movie, crossing paths with her invented Ronwaldo , a sweaty, strapping laborer seeking to avenge his brother’s murder while on the run with a sadistic gangster’s escaped girlfriend . And now with a housedress-wearingtagging along, strangely familiar with everything happening, including what anybody’s going to say at any given moment.
When it comes to Escobar’s film within a film, one need not be conversant in the particulars of ‘70s and ‘80s Filipino exploitation movies to appreciate her amusingly specific pastiche, because certain details are universally culty: the lurid colors of grainy film stock, zoom-ins, overwrought menace, a chugging bass-and-synthesizer score , and fight scenes of unfussy blockiness that occasionally require a slow-motion stunt being shown two times in a row.
Eventually, Escobar finds a way for Rudie to come to his own epiphany about why his mother mysteriously disappeared from her hospital bed, and what it might take to bring her back. And yet even when reality shifts again, the frisky “Leonor Will Never Die” refuses to adhere to what we might expect from a story about people trying to write the perfect conclusion to their dilemmas.
That “Leonor Will Never Die” doesn’t exactly know how to end isn’t even all that disconcerting, because the whole mood — from the performances to the pacing — suggests something being devised as it goes along, inspired by what’s heartfelt one moment, drolly silly the next. When you sense things coming to a close, it’s as if last call has been announced and there’s a need to sober up with a smile: there’s a little meta-narrative, a poignantly beatific touch, even some singing and dancing.
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