Today I watched the film Heneral Luna for the second time since it came out, and I must admit I appreciate it better now than when I first saw it back in undergrad. I wasn’t so big on historical films at that time and I had honestly only watched it because my history professor required it for the class. Anyway, now that I have taken a good look at the details (or at least taken a better look than when I first watched it,) I am particularly interested in Joven’s character.
Since Heneral Luna was based off on real events, most of the main characters were real people, except Joven. Joven was a fictional one. He was a writer and he was a metaphor. In an article I found on Google, he was described as a representation of the new generation, but I believe—although I don’t fully disagree with the article either—that his character was a metaphor for truth, or perhaps the journey of truth.
In the beginning of the film, we see Joven interviewing Antonio Luna and taking notes with his right hand: a detail I find relevant, if I’m not just reading too much into it. At that moment, he was documenting a would-be history; he was writing truth, and there must be a reason why it’s him we see in the first few frames of the film. Halfway through the movie, however, when the Americans were attacking the camp at Bagbag where Luna left Joven for the night, Joven was forced into a tight spot and had gotten himself shot in the right hand (after picking up a gun in desperation and aiming a single shot at the enemy.) The hand he uses for writing.
I believe this was a representation of an attempt at keeping truth from being rightly documented; of the truth being held hostage. It’s like saying, “Don’t tell, or else…”—very much like the modern-day censorship.
Near the end of the film, when Luna was heading to his demise, he went ahead of Joven and the rest of his men after encountering a minor problem at the river. Joven, the writer, being left behind when his very purpose was to write about the life of Luna, a man who was about to be dead in just a few scenes, represents a truth kept so well no one else knew about it. The kind of truth one would bring to his grave, the kind of truth so unknown another truth would replace it instead. Who would write about Luna’s death then if Joven couldn’t be there to document it? No one would know.
But it’s worth noting that before going off to Cabanatuan, Luna told his men, “Kayo nang bahala sa binata (referring to Joven),”—the only time he ever formally entrusted Joven to anyone else in the whole duration of the movie. He was entrusting truth to those whom he will be leaving behind after his death.
I think it is especially interesting that out of all the fictional characters they could add in the storyline, they decided on a writer. Joven’s character was probably created to let us know that even back then, there were attempts to manipulate the story, to revise history. But at the end of the film, we see Joven echoing the principles of Antonio Luna, an indication that no matter what, the truth will let itself known and it will let itself known to all.
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