Scaled for Success by Hayward Philip;

Author:Hayward, Philip;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Libbey & Company, Limited
Published: 2018-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 8 – Miranda (1966) (reproduced from Video 48 blogspot).

A number of other late 20th and early 21st Century films also featured sirenas in different roles. Si Baleleng at ang gintong sirena (Chito Roño, 1988) featured its golden (gintong) sirena (played by Bale Melisa Perez Rubio) in a fantasy-horror feature. The sirena acts as a guardian for an orphan in a narrative in which zombies serving Gungadina, the Queen of Darkness, menace the local community and orphan heroine before being saved by the sirena. While less original in genre terms, Halik na sirena (‘Kiss of the Sirena’) (Joven Tan, 2001), starring Isabel Granada in the title role, offers the most overtly erotic representation of the sirena in Filipino cinema to date. Beginning with a sequence of a topless sirena and human male kissing and encircling each other underwater to an up-tempo house music track, the film adapts elements of Splash to a Filipino fishing community. Assuming human form, as she is able to every ten years, the sirena comes ashore and embarks upon a passionate affair with a local Lothario who becomes enraptured by her. The romance is not without complications, however, as his dalliance with the sirena causes a series of misfortunes to befall his community, eventually separating them.

Whatever the distinguishing aspects of the films referred to above, the most original sirena-themed film produced in the Philippines to date outside of the Dyesebel cycle is Danilo Santiago’s 1975 film Lorelei. Often (mis)characterised as a simple action-comedy,22 on account of the presence of popular comedian Chiquito and Johanna Raunio, Finland’s representative in Manila’s 1974 Miss Universe pageant as a lead actor, the film offers a complex representation and discussion of sirenas that draws on Western imagery and associations to a far greater extent than previous (or subsequent) Filipino cinema. As such, the film largely operates outside of the national folkloric traditions discussed in this chapter and is the subject of discussion elsewhere (Hayward and Hill, forthcoming 2018), drawing on Western psychoanalytic theory to a greater degree than other analyses featured in this volume. While elements of Santiago’s film were reprised in the narrative of Mike Relon Makiling’s film Manolo en Michelle Hapi Together (1994), starring comic actor Ogie Alcasid and Australia’s representative in the Manila’s 1994 Miss Universe pageant, Michelle Van Eimeren, the complex discourse of the earlier film was replaced by simpler themes. Unlike the more passive and winsome sirena of Santiago’s film, Manolo en Michelle Hapi Together featured a more robust performance from Van Eimeren, whose tail colour closely resembles that of Madison, the mermaid featured in Splash. Angered by fishermen tossing dynamite into the sea, Eimeren’s character attacks the fishing boats until she is rendered unconscious by a second blast, rescued by Manolo and brought ashore. As her tail dries out she assumes fully human form, much to Manolo’s delight, wakes up and, in accented English, identifies herself as “a mermaid from Australian waters” and gives her rescuer a necklace that will guarantee him good fishing. Naming

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