Asog’s ambitions are endless and anxious. The movie, crafted by Filipino-Canadian comedian and director Sean Devlin, is a gutsy dyad of narrative and documentary work that rests its sights on the survivors of Super Typhoon Yolanda. Known internationally as Typhoon Haiyan, the storm is one of the deadliest tropical cyclones on record, killing over 6,300 in the Philippines alone and landing significant blows to the homes, tillable land, and infrastructure of the nation’s island life. Asog’s gaze is broad, but its primary concern is Rey “Jaya” Aclao, a non-binary, transfeminine comedian who co-wrote the movie and joins a cast composed exclusively of fellow Yolanda survivors as they navigate the reconstruction of their identities and communities. That accordioned scope — between the personal and the universal, local and global, levity and tragedy — keeps the movie as surefire as it is scattered, one eye trained with menace on the power structures that have failed their people, the other drifting toward storm clouds pulling closer with the tide.
If any of that sounds dreary, Asog is instead decidedly buoyant. Jaya serves not only as the movie’s star and co-writer, but also its id, and they power through its scenes with the timing of an episode of 30 Rock. Lest one fret too long about a ruined home or capitalist occupation, be assured that a fart joke or non sequitur waits giddily around the corner. In Asog and in real life, Jaya had worked the Philippines comedy circuit well enough to land their own talk show. That is, until Typhoon Yolanda took out the attending studio, forcing Jaya to take a job as a schoolteacher and work at drag clubs at night with their partner, Cyrus (Ricky Gaucho Jr.), smiling from a nearly empty audience. Eventually, Jaya catches enough shit at their day and night jobs to throw in both towels and try their luck at “Ms. Gay Sicogon,” a high-profile pageant at a neighboring island. Jaya runs into Arnel (Arnel Pablo), a now-former student, along the way, and folds him into their ascent back to stardom, twisting Asog into something of a high-camp road comedy.
Arnel, who shares an additional writing credit for the film, offers a welcome emotional center to balance Jaya’s Bugs Bunny sensibilities. Arnel had lost his mother to Yolanda and is returning home to collect money for her commemoration. He’s a quiet kid, but a lost parent yields grief too unwieldy to hide behind a polite smile, and his mourning surfaces a tenderness in Jaya otherwise obscured by snarky one-offs and clapbacks. In the role of makeshift parent, Jaya is loving and even occasionally profound; a monologue about centralized power — political and spiritual, atmospheric and alchemical — is a nearly staggering break from their usual preference for punchlines. Which, it must be said, is a relief. For all of Jaya’s charm, Asog’s pedal-to-floor tendencies stuff its 101-minute runtime to the brim, and the clip at which Jaya’s jokes join sight gags, quickfire concepts, editorial experiments, genre pivots, and dream sequences can border on tiresome. Asog’s imagination is delightful, but it can sometimes feel like too much time spent around the dessert bar.
Director Devlin gained early recognition for Shit Harper Did, a tactical media campaign that took aim at Canada’s conservative administration through high-profile stunts and pranks — think, for example, blockading a cabinet minister’s office with canned food or crashing a press conference armed with debris from an oil spill off the Vancouver coast. That penchant for mission-oriented comedy informed Devlin’s pivot to feature filmmaking. His debut, When the Storm Fades, crafts docufiction from Arnel Pablo’s family in Leyte, the island in the Philippines on which Devlin’s mother was born. Asog, too, is intensely personal and duly angry. When Jaya and Arnel finally make it to Sicogon, they’re struck less by Ms. Gay Sicogon’s flair than the economic colonialization that Ayala Land, Inc., the real estate company that owns the resort hosting the pageant, took against the island’s local community.
Asog’s investigations into Ayala’s opportunism in the wake of Yolonda find the movie’s balance of nonfiction and narrative work at its most precise. And, as its closing call to action reinforces, it’s most impactful: Asog’s production puts enough pressure on Ayala to generate reparations to construct nearly 500 new homes. Too often, though, the movie’s halves are billed to each other’s expense. Sweeping drone shots and lush 4k cinematography competently detail Yolanda’s continued devastation to Filipino homes and farmland, but, as a backdrop to Jaya’s campy one-liners, can sometimes feel like Apple TV screensavers. Jokes and plot points place a similar anchor on Asog’s salient political agenda, which sees its time cut short like a club comic bumped by a buzzier act. The result is a movie at odds with itself, forcing its myriad ideas through a narrow threshold with little more than a shrug as to which one should step forward first.
It’s frustrating, but those dreams that rise above Asog’s clutter are remarkable. It’s rare to see a trans love story like that of Jaya and Cyrus presented so free of trauma-laden baggage. That’s not to say Jaya doesn’t catch aggression over their identity, but their relationship with Cyrus is pried from a traditional oppression framework to exist breezily and operate with the agency of a Western rom-com. Arnel is presented with similar nuance. He is as watchful and reserved as any teenager who’d rather be in front of a TV than a group of kids his own age, and by the time he pulls on a dress and wig to serve as Jaya’s sidekick, the movie knows better than to decide whether it’s a step toward coming out of the closet or his own shell. Beyond Asog’s attention deficits, that’s what lingers: a film that knows identity is not a byproduct of individualism, but a precious lens through which to construct a life.
DIRECTOR: Sean Devlin; CAST: Ray Aciao, Amelia De La Cruz, Ricky Gacho Jr., Arnel Pablo; DISTRIBUTOR: Film Movement; STREAMING: April 11; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 39 min.
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