Caught Imelda today at Eastwood, the documentary directed by Ramona Diaz. The movie got tied up in court for a couple of weeks before finally being released to the public, so I figured, what the hell, it must be at least marginally controversial, right?
The whole thing was more or less “narrated” by Imelda herself, from her beach house in Leyte or the inside of her trailer, starting from her childhood all the way up to her court appearances a few years back. Most Filipinos will already be familiar with most of her story. The parts you didn’t know about (but which this documentary tries to reveal) are largely irrelevant bits of trivia, like how she sang for Irving Berlin, and how she’s written a self-improvement-type book in the style of Jonathan Livingston Seagull (although with a substantially greater number of bullet points and diagrams).
It’s a nice primer on the former first lady, but you have to wonder if every “definitive” documentary is plagued by this much tedium and mediocrity. Do I really have to see her giving out her pictures to street children, or having her pictures taken with some random pedestrians? (Certainly once or twice is acceptable, but the movie is peppered with this redundancy.) It was also a bit troubling that the director chose to end the movie with an overly-long segment on Imelda’s shoes, which is such an obvious way of doing it and is pretty shameless, imo (at least in a pandering-to-the-audience sort of way).
It’s a bit of a stretch to justify to one’s self why this documentary was made at all, because it tells you nothing of consequence about Imelda, aside from things which you could more or less surmise from simply being a Filipino citizen born within the past 2 and a half decades. It took no real sides and offered no serious conclusions; I believe it was a bit too worried about being objective to even venture a hypothesis. This wasn’t, after all, a documentary from the BBC, so there was no obligation to be unbiased (i.e., for as long as you didn’t muddle the facts, I believe it’s ok to put forth a concrete opinion with works such as these).
In short, it was a decent documentary, but given that it did little more than lay out the timeline of Imelda’s life and career, I think I’d rather have just picked up the Cliffs Notes.