Leonor Will Never Die: this pulpy homage to B-movie pleasures is a pure delight

The directorial ambition to ‘blur boundaries’ in cinema – between fiction and reality, film and meta-film – can risk becoming an end in itself: a whirlwind display of self-reflexive cleverness that runs itself into increasingly empty circles. Martika Ramirez Escobar’s feature debut Leonor Will Never Die is a zany postmodern comedy-drama that unpacks its multiple realities with robust self-assurance, but never forgets to put the heart back into its metatextual trickery. Even if some of its provocations are, in the final analysis, less challenging than they might have been, this is Matryoshka-doll filmmaking in which each new layer is still suffused with tenderness.

Let’s start with layer one. Leonor (Sheila Francisco) is a late-middle-aged, washed-up screenwriter in Manila. She’s well past the glory days of her illustrious action-film career, and now too compulsively glued to the TV to pay her electricity bill – or much attention to her exasperated adult son, Rudie (Bong Cabrera). When, in a moment of gloriously unsubtle symbolism, a falling TV set crashes onto Leonor’s head, she’s plunged into a coma. The film’s aspect ratio compresses, and a muted grain emerges onto the screen: Leonor’s unconscious has entered one of her unfinished screenplays, a 1980s Filipino action movie full of muscular heroes and damsels in distress. And, stylistically, Escobar has taken us there with her.

There are plenty of B-movie pleasures to enjoy in this set-up, as the film cuts between the ‘real world’ and Leonor’s fantasy: actors wide-eyed with stagy, artificial expressivity; fast-paced gang fights shot and reshot from all manner of different angles; pulpy whacks and thuds occupying the muffled timbre of the soundscape. Even if the narrative of this film-within-a-film runs like gangster-movie clockwork, the style is all pure delight. Escobar’s affection for a certain brand of cinematic kitsch never slips into reckless caricature; she’s at once playful and assiduous in her homage, neither cowering before nor looking down at the kind of flicks she’s deftly repurposing.

Yet the homage would have been elevated if it had just a bit more bite, or a stronger critical dimension. The script wants Leonor to represent a disruption in the action genre – a grandmotherly woman dodging showers of bullets – but she ends up largely scooting around the main events. It means that watching Escobar’s tribute doesn’t necessarily expose the limits of the genre and its mechanisms any more than watching the originals might do. There are some intelligent, whimsical flourishes in which characters falter, realising that Leonor’s script is unfinished and stalling to find a sense of an ending – moments that reminded me of one of 2022’s bigger postmodern film events, Noah Baumbach’s White Nosie, and its protagonist’s futile resistance to the plots he inexplicably finds himself in. But even excellently executed homage needs to amount to more than its stylistic pleasures. Escobar’s script sometimes forgets to put the bitter in with the sweet.

Much of the film’s tenderness comes from Francisco’s endearing central performance. Wrapped in a frumpy, ankle-length floral dress and muddling through fight sequences, Francisco’s Leonor is an understated anchor of the film’s madcap premise. It’s revealed that Leonor can’t let go of filmmaking, precisely because the medium allows her to take control of her story – to revise the arbitrary and accidental mistakes of her life. Her deceased son, Ronwaldo, who appears in the ‘real world’ as a surprisingly down-to-earth ghost, is rewritten in Leonor’s film as Ronwaldo the macho movie star. This therapeutic idea of authorship, in which film is an emotional corrective to life, seems like more predictable territory in this otherwise idiosyncratic film (and like a contradiction: why, if film lets Leonor organise her own reality, would she subscribe to a genre as trope-heavy and predetermined as pulpy action?). But, as the self-reflexivity grows more frenzied in the final act, a dose of gentle familiarity feels like no bad thing.

There’s another similarity between Leonor Will Never Die and White Noise: after spending their runtimes composing a medley of plots and styles, both films close on an unexpected song-and-dance number. These ragtag razzle-dazzle finales are shorthand for a kind of postmodern anxiety of ending: what better way to resist conventional cinematic closure than to enter a new genre of film entirely? And it’s here that the title of the film finally makes sense. Leonor will never die – as long as Escobar’s assertive brand of filmmaking keeps up its particular mode of pastiche.

► Leonor Will Never Die is in UK cinemas from Friday April 7.