First Light review: a luminous reckoning with darkness

The integral cinematic arts of good framing, blocking and lighting have been increasingly AWOL these days, with far too many films and TV shows being muddily dark and visually fuddled to the point of near-incomprehensibility. Thank goodness, then, for Filipino-Australian writer and director James J Robinson and his astonishing debut feature, First Light.

A former photographer, Robinson’s gifted eye – alongside that of remarkable cinematographer Amy Dellaris, shooting on luminous 35mm – is proof, in more ways than one, that the darkness need not be overwhelming.

Opening on a dusky sky dipping into the inky black of a near-moonless night, Dellaris’ camera guides us into a crumbling, Spanish missionary-built convent that’s one earthquake shy of becoming a mausoleum. Echoing with the plip-plopping leaks and shrieking bats of Stuart Harmon’s lushly enveloping sound design, these stony halls are anything but murky.

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Blushed with the warming glow of candlelight, sparked by the murmur of veiled nuns who tend this creaking edifice, the depth of field on display is richer than most Hollywood blockbusters.

Renowned Filipino star Ruby Ruiz plays the stalwart Sister Yolanda, an anchor for her fellow nuns. They include Kare Adea’s gently halting novice, Sister Arlene, a gifted guitarist who yearns for her family by the sea, wondering if she’s cut out for this difficult calling. Sister Arlene’s bothered, too, by the spirits she seems to sense prowling these shadowy passages.

Together, the nuns, officially led by Lui Manansala’s Mother Angie, make-do-and-mend as best they can, receiving negligible support from the arrogantly unbothered Father Claridad (Soliman Cruz), a man who hears a request for buckets and offers batteries instead.

Last rites

Ruiz shines brighter than any wax candle. We watch the kind-hearted Yolanda as she begins to realise that the seemingly benevolent world beyond the convent, where she is frequently showered with small gifts and effusive thanks, is swirling with murky politics.

Yolanda’s rounds see her regularly drop into the austerely palatial mansion of local businesswoman Mrs Dela Cruz (Maricel Soriano, slippery behind a sheen of propriety), where she helps tend to her bedridden mother, enduring a ghostly half-life on an insistently beeping ventilator.

It speaks volumes that Yolanda thoughtfully donates Dela Cruz a bag of ripe fruit, handed to her by a grateful stall owner, to the much richer, in one way only, woman, only for her to discover, later, that this kindness has been rejected and dumped in the kitchen bin.

For her part, Dela Cruz feigns investment in the social contract, offering Yolanda a bottle of sparkling American water, Robinson’s ever-so gentle hint at encroaching capitalist colonialism. At dinner, the nuns are overjoyed, relishing it like overenthusiastically received communion wine.

But the ageing and herself slowly sickening Yolanda’s eyes will soon be opened. Following a terrible accident at a highway construction site, she is called to the bedside of young labourer Angelo (BJ Forez) at the local hospital.

As he lays in a tiled operating studio ringed by a halo of standing screens, in one of First Light’s most striking shots, Yolanda is startled by the inaction of the doctors and nurses. They stand idly by, a Greek chorus watching on while a shadowy figure glares down from a glass ceiling, god-like.

But why was there no hope for the boy to whom she distressingly offers last rites?

Watch the trailer

The seen and unseen

It’s this incident that propels the steadfast Yolanda to adopt the stance of a budding detective. What did Dela Cruz know about the injury on-site? Why won’t Claridad bless the fallen lad’s body? And who paid for his funeral?

The police turn a blind eye, refusing to engage with his grieving father, Cesar (a magnificently stoic Emmanuel Santos). Pulling at the tendrils of corruption that snake around both church and state, Yolanda begins to wonder if her own faith is as shaky as the convent’s foundations, as all the while she offers guidance to Arlene, who also adopts an inquisitive approach – driving Yolanda from one soon-to-be-questioned source to another.

A confrontation on the matter with Dela Cruz, who promptly plays the victim card, is even more powerful because it is played whisper-quiet, with a chilling matter-of-factness by Soriano.

There’s great sadness, but also strength, in Cesar’s pragmatism, his ability to square away the awful, that’s enhanced by his time with Yolanda’s care. Her tender mercy is also bestowed upon Arlene, with First Light’s most wonderful line involving a clarification of purpose in training the younger woman, her roommate, wonderfully inhabited by Adea.

When Yolanda again stands by the bedside of a dying person, Ruiz’s deft navigation of light and shade in a greying place is the mark of a grand performance. As is her discombobulation after a haunting, dreamlike moment in which the tree she naps beneath, following a communion with her childhood memories, is revealed to no longer be there, long-since replaced by a telephone pole.

While colonial creep may pave paradise, the old animism of these islands brings the spirit world closer to the mortal realm than Christianity allows. So much of Robinson’s emotionally astute debut, rightfully scoring him Best Australian Director when it premiered at last year’s Melbourne International Film Festival, lingers in the liminal spaces between.

Both a metaphysical musing on worlds and viewpoints slowly slipping away and a very grounded reckoning with the cashed-up forces that trespass against us, it offers up a prayer for human kindness.

First Light is now screening in select Australian cinemas.

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