Insurrecto

Starred review from September 3, 2018
Apostol (Gun Dealer’s Daughter) fearlessly probes the long shadow of forgotten American imperialism in the Philippines in her ingenious novel of competing filmmakers. Chiara Brasi, daughter of the director of The Unintended, a Vietnam War movie shot in the Philippines, comes to Manila to make her own film. She hires Magsalin, a translator, to take her to the Philippine island of Samar (near where Magsalin was born) and the town of Balangiga, site of a brutal American massacre of revolutionaries in 1901 during the Philippine-American War. Chiara and Magsalin craft two very different scripts for the film. One script focuses on Cassandra Chase, a well-connected photographer who travels to the Philippines to produce stereographs of the American military’s actions. She faces extreme hostility from the soldiers, including the inexperienced and devoutly Catholic Capt. Thomas Connell. The second script more elusively follows Caz, a Filipino school teacher, who mourns the death of an eccentric film director she had an affair with in the 1970s. This is a complex and aptly vertiginous novel that deconstructs how humans tell stories and decide which versions of events are remembered; names repeat between scripts, and directors suddenly interrupt what feels like historical narration. Apostol’s layers of narrative, pop culture references, and blurring of history and fiction make for a profound and unforgettable journey into the past and present of the Philippines.

Listeners may not have heard of the 1901 Balangiga massacre in the Philippines. That's all the more reason we need Justine Eyre's strong performance in this reimagining of the conflict between the townspeople and American soldiers. Eyre creates smooth transitions between the perspectives of American filmmaker Chiara and Filipino translator Magsalin. Each of the women writes a screenplay about this bloody historical moment, one focused on soldiers, the other about townspeople. Eyre captures both high-minded Chiara, whose ethnocentric screenplay tells only one side of the story, and tentative Magsalin, whose confidence develops over time. Listeners can be very sure whose part of the story they are in throughout. Together, the narrators bring us the full picture of this dark episode in history. M.R. � AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine