The First Impulse
by Laurel Fantauzzo
(Philippines: Anvil Publishing, 2017), 230 pages

Laurel Fantauzzo (now publishing as Laurel Flores Fantauzzo), California-born, has a complicated relation to the Philippines. She journeys there to investigate the unsolved murders of film critics Alexis Tioseco and Nika Bohinc, respectively aged 29 and 30 – shot in Quezon City on 1 September 2009 when they walked in on the robbery of their home.

The trips stir many emotions and reflections in Fantauzzo: on the strict division of the social classes into masters and servants; on the seeming apathy of law enforcers at every level; on money, celebrity, power and influence; and on her own awkward, ill-fitting presence as an outsider.

The First Impulse (the title derives from a public letter that Alexis dedicated to Nika: “The first impulse is always one of love”) offers an account of the author’s search for truth that is reminiscent of the participant journalism of Janet Malcolm or Helen Garner. Its pages alternate between descriptions of her meetings with people connected to the case (or sometimes just random strangers), and imaginative reconstructions that depict events from inside the witnessing consciousness.

There is much that is moving and incisive in this book – especially to anyone (like myself) who knew Nika and/or Alexis even slightly.

But there is also, at times, a straining on the author’s part to milk pathos and ultra-significance from every random detail (such as the fact that Alexis referred, close to his death, to Maurice Pialat’s film We Won’t Grow Old Together [1972]). And there is also the temptation, to which Fantauzzo sometimes succumbs, to make this a racy true-crime whodunit, complete with the elaborate red herring of a celebrity suspect – a device that the book both exploits and then dismisses as an absurd, desperate reflex.

It will probably be news to many people who mourned these deaths at the time, and monitored for a while the frustrating blockage of justice that followed, to learn that the situation completely changed during 2016. I won’t spoil here what is effectively the book’s carefully structured clincher, but it is certainly the most valuable and informative part of the enterprise. Media follow-ups can easily be located online.

Beyond strict reportage, The First Impulse is an evocative book about the need to mourn the dead and testify to their legacy. Fantauzzo tries her best to identify equally with Tioseco and Bohinc, but inevitably the closer ties to Filipino culture skew her research more in the direction of the former.

Fantauzzo makes a brief trip to Slovenia and chats to a few of Bohnic’s friends and comrades, but the portrait of Nika’s involvement in her nation’s film world is fairly superficial, as is the outline of her activities as critic, editor and event instigator. And while we learn exactly which Filipino directors longed for Nika before Alexis stepped forth, we read comparatively little of Nika’s pre-couple life – including her contact with Lisandro Alonso, and the effect that the news of her death had on the script of his Jauja (2014).

By contrast, we learn possibly too much about the author’s life, even when the relevance of that thread is dubious. Much of the book resembles the all-in, confessional mode so typical of Creative Writing courses everywhere. [Postscript: Fantauzzo’s first novel, My Heart Underwater, appeared in 2020.]

Don’t expect any particularly perceptive discussion of movies, criticism or cinema culture from The First Impulse. Plot details from several Lav Diaz films are worked into the fabric, and names of a few other directors are dropped, but Fantauzzo’s interests are largely elsewhere.

Strangely, the sector of global film culture in which I and many other cinephiles encountered Nika and Alexis, the festival circuit, is what is most absent from the book.

Of the many non-Filipino tributes to Nika and Alexis that poured forth from this global, cinephile network in the months and years after their deaths, one missing reference is especially striking here: the poignant seven-minute piece made by Spanish director José Luis Guerin as part of his video-letter exchange with Jonas Mekas in 2011. It is viewable here; watch it and weep.

© Adrian Martin February 2017