When the movie opens, Heneral Antonio Luna is dead, and the republic is hunting down his loyalists. That task been handed down to Goyo – General Gregorio Del Pilar – the young and boastful general who has become the favorite of President Emilio Aguinaldo. The casting is brilliant: Paulo Avelino carries the young general’s uniform well, not only because of his baby-boy looks, but also of his natural, proud swagger – the swagger of men who know they look good. Goyo spends half his time carrying out this Luna purge, and the other half trying to woo Remedios, played by Gwen Zamora, daughter to a rich merchant whose house he and his men raid at the beginning of the film. My estimates say that about a quarter of his lines are pick-up lines.
Anyone walking into the cinema expecting a standard war-hero fare is bound to be caught off-guard. The movie wastes no time in destroying Goyo’s image as the admirable hero. The film goes straight to the point: this is no hero film. Goyo is not romanticized into the Christ figure typical of these films. Within the film’s first half-hour alone, Goyo oversees the torture and eventual assassination of a soldier loyal to Luna; and berates, while on horseback, a lieutenant for meddling with his troops’ formation in the presence of the president himself, declaring “‘pag utos ni Del Pilar, wala kang pakialam! (If Del Pilar orders it, it’s none of your business!)” Even his intentions towards Remedios are cast into doubt when his photographer looks into his bag and reads the letters from his many lovers. (At the beginning, when Del Pilar first meets Remedios, his men joke that he has a girlfriend in every household.)
Through Tarog’s lenses, we see Goyo as not only brash, but also immature and full of himself. But he is not altogether irredeemable. As the film progresses, we come to understand that he is really no more than a child forced to fulfill the greatness to which he’s been thrust. At a feast held by the townspeople in Pangasinan to celebrate his life, Goyo has a panic attack after he runs into a senile old man whom he suspects is part of a secret alliance that’s plotting to kill him. These panic attacks repeat themselves throughout the film, matched by trippy Lynchian sequences that hint at Del Pilar’s anguish. These moments are then followed by sobering scenes of his brother coaxing him back to his senses by making him chant his hero nickname.
“Who are you?” his brother asks. “Agila.” “Who are you?” “Agila!” “Don’t forget who you are,” he is reminded time and again throughout the film.
Tarog has obviously seen David Lynch. And it’s pretty obvious that after the confident success of Heneral Luna, Tarog and company have gotten braver (we know for a fact that Goyo was granted a budget three times that of Luna), are ready to stray from the standard war epic mode that the previous film more or less took on, and have produced a film that’s emboldened, and that’s more ambitious than any mainstream film in recent memory. Goyo presents to audiences its idealization of a hero – then immediately proceeds to destroy it. This is the movie’s resounding question: what, exactly, makes a hero, and what use do we have of him?
“There are no heroes here,” says the young general to his troops at Tirad Pass, and true enough, we watch Goyo’s epic journey from hero to human. Take note how the film begins: Gregorio Del Pilar is uniformed, fully decorated, and having a photoshoot. But towards the film’s end, we see him naked, stripped off his uniform and decorations by looting American soldiers, his once handsome head now a gory mess. He doesn’t get a hero’s death, no soaring symphony to match his fall. Instead, he is shot out of nowhere, out of knowing, like any solider. This is the structure that guides the entire film: a child, forced to be a hero, goes on a journey to become, instead, a man.