By Tom Charity

Movies have a way of escaping from the boxes we build for them (whether that is a cinema, a DVD case, or a TV screen) and bleeding into real life. In America, they made Ronald Reagan president, and Arnold Schwarzenegger became Governor of California. In the Philippines, too, Joseph Estrada turned stardom into the Presidency and FPJ nearly pulled it off too.

You don’t have to squint to see the ghosts of these action heroes haunting the deliriously entertaining LEONOR WILL NEVER DIE, a prize-winning debut feature by Martika Ramirez Escobar, which is playing at the Vancouver International Film Festival next week.

A comedy, essentially, although a wildly original one, LEONOR mostly plays out in the mind of its title character, a well-liked senior citizen and divorcee who once upon a time used to write Pinoy action movies for a living, and whose ex-husband - a former star - is now running for election. Her grown son is worried that Leonor (played with immense charm by stage veteran Sheila Francisco) can no longer look after herself; she seems to idle away her time watching soaps and the kind of mindless action movies she used to write. But after a freak accident lands her comatose in the hospital, the lines between reality and fantasy become hopelessly entangled - and only Leonor herself can save the day!

Escobar, a cinematographer by trade, spent eight years developing the screenplay, which has tons of fun at the expense of Pinoy shoot-em-ups of the 1980s and makes a virtue of low budget necessity by affecting a similar “run-and-gun” style. But the quirky premise allows Escobar to play with expectations, subverting the cliches of the genre and keeping us guessing about where things are going to end up (at one stage, the movie rewinds and plays out the same scene three different ways as the daydreaming screenwriter summons up the courage of her convictions). There are show-stopping song and dance numbers, cliffhangers, and some sly asides about machismo culture too.

The film, which won a Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival and recently screened to rave reviews at TIFF, is playing in VIFF’s Altered States programme, a series which showcases exactly this kind of unclassifiable material, movies which are too surreal, violent, or just too strange to fit into respectable art house conventions. LEONOR definitely qualifies on all those counts, although the violence is pretty tongue in cheek and it’s so playful, you could be forgiven for not taking it too seriously. That would be a mistake, however, because if there is one film that you could point to as a kind of spiritual sister, it would be this year’s sleeper hit Everything Everywhere All At Once, another film which takes delight in blowing up the narrow preconceptions of populist escapism to arrive at something more genuinely inclusive, diverse, and (dare we say?) transcendent.

LEONOR WILL NEVER DIE plays at the Rio Cinema Saturday Oct 1 and Thurs Oct 6. Tickets from viff.org