Sunday, January 01, 2017
10:00 PM |
The Ladies of Kayod and Rampa
When Babyruth Villarama’s
Sunday Beauty Queen (2016) [
trailer here] was announced Best Picture of the lot of eight at the tail-end of the 2016 Metro Manila Film Festival, I thought without hesitation: “Good for the MMFF. The film deserves the honor.”
There is something immensely satisfying in the acknowledgment of that accolade — like it was something long-time in coming — given how its inclusion in the 2016 slate created so much furor among industry people, most of whom found it being a documentary an irritating aberration that should have been grounds for exclusion.
It does mark a first in that regard: in the history of the festival, which was founded as the Metropolitan Film Festival in 1975, no documentary has ever been considered as a contender. That Sunday Beauty Queen won felt like history coming full circle all at once. That it also won considering that it was the one film in the whole festival that struggled the most in getting itself seen — only a few theaters outside of Manila dared screen it — felt like divine justice for those who had been championing it, who believed in its merits and the importance of its story.
For me, it felt like a decade-long corrective: its win comes exactly ten years after
Enteng Kabisote 3: Okay Ka Fairy Ko ... The Legend Goes On and On and On was proclaimed Best Picture in 2006, the festival’s most embarrassing low point. Its win is a mark for great change still to come; it is also a clarion call for battles still to be waged ahead. (But of course. Bad taste does take time to overhaul, and it does have its own high priests. Consider, for example, the Manny Castañeda debacle.)
But here I speak too much of the film in the context of the MMFF’s long troubled history. Does it work as a film, and is it any good? It took me a long time to write this review. I saw the film four days ago, and I felt I had to allow it to settle in my head. Not that it was too complex to understand, or even too cerebral to feel: in these two considerations,
Sunday Beauty Queen wins by being a film that is easily digestible and also easily felt. There are scenes aplenty in the film that provoke instant welling up of tears — the scene of someone talking about counting airplanes through the kitchen window, the telephone conversation about someone’s unexpected death, the scene at the halfway house.
And the structure of the story is easy enough to comprehend — Ms. Villarama’s camera simply follows several Filipina domestic helpers in Hong Kong as they struggle for six days of every week to manage the households of their “amos,” some under the scrutiny of cruel employers, and then on Sunday, on their day-off, they prepare to join an annual beauty pageant.
I think the film successfully sells itself as a very human story by allowing its cameras to linger and explore with so much intimacy the lives of the people whose stories we are following. After the film’s immediate opening at one edition of the annual beauty pageant — after the beautiful gowns have been paraded and after the crown and sash have been awarded — we are immediately plunged into the women’s every day reality. In the chaos of Hong Kong traffic, they transform to become the reverse of the Cinderella story: they trek back to the condominiums and apartment buildings of their employers, trying so hard to beat curfew, and in the next six days we see them toil with mop, broomstick, vacuum cleaner, and apron.
Often the film takes us deeper into the dirt-cleaning and babysitting by allowing its subjects to address us through talking head interviews, where they are allowed to explain, to reminisce, to ponder their place in the story of the country they have left behind.
Why am I here and why am I not home? Why am I taking care of other people’s children while I have to make myself contented by watching my own child’s graduation through Skype? Why have I allowed myself this debasement by sleeping on the kitchen floor?
Their stories become a reflection of our nation’s frailties and broken promises. We know these stories exist; and yet to be confronted with stark images of these stories in the sweep of cinematic largeness is to feel cowed, and to feel crushed by our country’s seeming indifference. The film thrusts us into an identification with these people in a way we probably have never felt before, simply because cinema is powerful that way: thus their pain becomes our pain, their joys our joys.
And yet while the film does consider the darkness that often blots many domestic helpers’ lives in foreign places (getting abused by cruel employers, getting fired in the middle of the night, feeling the rush about having to get employment within 14 days at the risk of deportation, and so on and so forth), it also becomes a celebration of the hardy lives of these OFWs, and the film rightly marvels at their capacity to stage a “carnival” even in stark circumstances. That’s the Filipino spirit, I think, illustrated so well.
Ms. Villarama chooses to frame their stories in the simple framework of its witty tagline,
“Kayod mula Lunes hanggang Sabado, at rampa ‘pag Linggo” (“Work hard from Monday to Saturday, do the catwalk on Sunday”) which I think is ingenious, considering the complexities of these real-life stories, a lot of which are left out in the name of narrative consistency.
Then again, one documentary is really not enough to contain everything, and so this is an editorial decision I can accept even if I feel it could have more in following, just enough, the hidden depths of the tangential issues it does present. For example, why is the Philippine Consulate generally unhelpful in addressing the plight of many domestic helpers in need of assistance? Why is the lesbian angle that is so tantalisingly proffered by the film not really explored? We are never given more than a promising mention of consular indifference, or a teasing shot of two women walking away.
One can explain these away by understanding that the filmmakers may not have wanted it to be too serious in weighing political and gender issues, which might distract from the simpler story of “struggle plus beauty pageants” — but I’m not so sure. One pointed way the film reminds us of a very political problem is by introducing its principals by full names, the number of years of their stay as DHs in Hong Kong, and the most damning of all, the college degrees they have earned back in the Philippines. It is saying our country has done great disservice to its people, reducing college degrees to nothing more than an aberration in a resume destined for servitude. This is never really explored as a problem, only limned at.
Some friends have also likened the film’s structure as being too much like a typical episode of
Kapuso Mo, Jessica Soho. “I’ve seen BBC documentaries that have tackled these issues better,” says one.
I don’t really agree with that — but I do think it could have borrowed a cue or two from Jennie Livingston’s
Paris is Burning, that great 1991 documentary about Harlem balls staged by gay black men in the very fringes of society’s margins. In that film, their “pageants,” their “voguing” competitions, their practice of “shading” are explained as expressions of a subcultural outrage, as aspirational efforts to counter the fact of their dreams being denied in the reality outside of these balls. Sunday Beauty Queen hints at that promise — it did ask the character of Daddy Leo why he organizes these pageants, and he merely replies with a playful, "Wala lang, feel ko lang" — but proceeds more or less to go the route of regular “poverty porn” storylines without the slums.
But I do think I am expecting a bit too much of
Sunday Beauty Queen — and I think I am because the film is so very well-made it could have stood a bit more complexity. Nonetheless, I laughed, I cried, and in the end, I wanted to hug all domestic helpers from Hong Kong coming home for Christmas.
This is a great film every Filipino needs to see.
[The film is not being screened in Dumaguete]
#MMFF2016Revolution
Labels: documentaries, film, issues, MMFF, philippine cinema, review
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Friday, December 30, 2016
10:57 AM |
Sally is a Quirky Girl
In a kinder world, you give a grade of A for effort. But the world is often exacting, and as much as I enjoyed, to a degree, Avid Liongoren’s
Saving Sally (2016) [
trailer here], it fails as a compelling piece of cinema for me. I was suitably entertained, but it never moved me.
Yes, we’ve heard the story of its 10-year inception — a story of an artistic struggle that manages to tug our hearts. Yes, the animation is stupendous and imaginative. Yes, we should marvel at the filmmakers’ ability to create magic out of a shoestring budget. But the story also bears much of what has become awkward, narrative-wise, since 2006. It’s much too twee for example in an age where “putang ina” has become presidential speech. Its sensibility is perfectly a throwback, especially to a time when the phenomenon of the “manic pixie dream girl” was a beloved cinematic trope, since then much-maligned. But I do give credit to the filmmakers for giving the type a narrative arc deeper than the usual superficial display of interesting quirks.
The girl in question is the titular Sally (played with exceeding charm by Rhian Ramos). Her best friend is the introverted comic book artist Marty (Enzo Marcos), who pines quietly for her, but has no courage whatsoever to reveal his real feelings. Excuses abound, you see, centering mostly on the fact that Sally’s adoptive parents are monstrous people who regularly abuse her and keep her in check with their rigorous rules and overbearing Christian piety. For Marty, Sally needs, well, saving … and the proper loving only he could give.
That Sally comes off as a quirky fashionista girl with a hunger for the bizarre and the unusual, and a talent for literal inventions, is one plot point that remains psychologically suspect — but I suspend my disbelief, of course. Because I want to like the movie. And I do, with some effort, and as long as I remain blind to the holes in the narrative, and a third act that seems completely unnecessary.
However, the fundamental unease that I felt over my immediate critical consideration of the film upon exiting the cinema was this: why did this have to be a mix of live action and animation? The animation didn’t feel integral to the story at all. It remained for me a filmmaking conceit that, while executed quite impressively, didn’t feel organic to the narrative. It would have been a completely different story had it been produced without any live-action. But we do follow characters who mostly remain human throughout, existing in a world that is a fantasy of illustration art — but the two planes intersect without a convincing explanation why this has to be so. In the most famous example of this technique — Robert Zemeckis’
Who Framed Roger Rabbit? — we do get a clear effort at worldling, that humans do in fact live alongside cartoon characters who mostly come from an adjacent “neighbourhood” called Toontown. The clear premise sets us to accept without question that humans and cartoons do interact in the frame of the film. I don’t believe for once Saving Sally’s “explanation” that the animated parts we see are merely constructs of Marty’s inventive imagination, his unique perspective and rendering of the much-too-real world around him. Because the animation does overwhelm the live-action in the space of the film, and no sane person could be so overwhelmingly consistent and unceasing in that rendition of the real to the cartoonish. (Unless you’re crazy, and you have a lola like Imelda.)
And also this: despite overwhelming much of the frame, the animation remains ironically “background material.” It is more or less glorified wallpaper for the live actors to play on. One could also fault the film for its use of English as the main mode for dialogue, even if particular scenes felt like they called for the use of the native language — but I feel I have nitpicked too much a product that has been made, for so long by its creatives with the best of intentions: to create an animated feature film with art that’s very impressive, given the legendary limitations the film’s publicity machine has earnestly profiled.
A for effort then. Mostly definitely a C for story. But also most definitely an A+ for the film’s brazenness to put a giant penis on screen.
[The film is not being screened in Dumaguete]
#MMFF2016Revolution
Labels: cartoons, film, MMFF, philippine cinema, review
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Thursday, December 29, 2016
4:15 PM |
The Beguilement of Evil
To understand better Erik Matti’s
Seklusyon (2016) [
trailer here], and to see what could have been, one has to go back to an earlier work, a short film he released in 2012 titled
Vesuvius. [
Watch it here.] In that fantastic film, we follow a put-upon man played with a nuanced and creepy stillness by Gio Alvarez. By day, he sells packed lunches to harried office workers, and by night, he prepares the next day’s set meals, takes care of an invalid mother, and when the darkness of the evening turns ripe, entertains vivid visions of the Virgin Mary coming to him in immense bright light — all to exhort him to commit a string of brutal murders. It’s a frightening serial killer movie with a gripping Catholic angle, beautifully shot by Matti and structured with the usual muscular dexterity of a Michiko Yamamoto screenplay.
Vesuvius devilishly plays for us the notion that the Devil has immense powers, that it can in fact take the shape of holy icons to push us further into the embrace of evil. Be careful what you believe, Matti tells us, our fervent faiths are not guarantees to safeguard us from false prophets.
Seklusyon borrows many visual elements from Vesuvius, and takes further its theme and expands it to feature-length narrative — but I am not sure it exceeds the gripping effectiveness of the older, and shorter, film, which was not only truly terrifying, it also made us question the tenets of faith we hold sacrosanct. As written by Anton C. Santamaria, Seklusyon is beautiful to look at and works for the most part, but it is ultimately unsatisfying.
What else can you say about a film you earnestly root for, but remains saddled with so much unignited potential? Can one forgive the lack of tension or the absence of burrowing terror, settling instead on the film’s obvious message about faith and deception to lift a soggy script? You can tell by the way some people have called the film a “Catholic thriller,” and others a “think piece.” They are too kind, but they are also, in a sense, right. I think they only mean to describe how less than visceral the film ultimately is, and it shouldn’t have been. It could indeed have been a devouring horror as well as a compelling thesis about certain social issues that ail us.
I want it to succeed beyond what it has ended up achieving for real, because it is a gorgeously wrought film. Its production design — for a film set in 1947 — is meticulous and rich. Its cinematography is a masterwork and captures so well the unholy atmosphere its story demands to wallow in.
And the material itself is golden: we already know that horror overloaded with Catholic imagery is a staple of the genre that can go so eerily right. One only has to consider the staying power of such classics as
The Exorcist or
The Omen or
The Exorcism of Emily Rose to note the easy transfer between sacred images to icons of dread. Matti himself proved that so well in Vesuvius.
So what happened? Is it the acting? (Could be.)
Is it the story? But the premise of the plot is already quite tantalising. In the aftermath of World War II, four young deacons of the church (played by Ronnie Alonte, Dominic Roque, John Vic De Guzman, and J.R. Versales) find themselves in a hidden retreat deep in the Philippine countrysides, there to endure seven days of seclusion in a barricaded house, where they could try to withstand the worst of demonic temptations and visions before they could finally be ordained as priests. (Apparently this used to be a common practice for those being initiated into the priesthood, long since discontinued.)
In a parallel story, another priest (played by Neil Ryan Sese) investigates the healing powers of Anghela, a young girl (played with incredible panache by Rhed Bustamante) under the protection and guidance of Sister Cecilia (played by Phoebe Walker), a nun with a mysterious and troubled past. Sese’s Father Ricardo wants to know whether the girl indeed has genuine Divine gifts enough for the church to declare her a living saint.
The two threads collide by the start of the second act, where the sins of the young would-be priests manifest themselves as terrifying visions — perhaps being exacerbated by the presence of Sister Cecilia, and perhaps needing the miraculous intercession of Angelha.
In the maelstrom of hellish visions and subsequent betrayals, especially in the third act, the film gradually falls apart: it dismisses too easily important elements of the story we have been made to invest in, and refuses to expound on others that would have shed light to the needless complexities it finds itself spouting. It is a messy screenplay. (That it won Best Screenplay is the sole enigma of the MMFF Awards Night.)
But even then, Matti is in control of his images. He is a fantastic visual director, and we have seen what beautiful cinema he could do over the years, selling us the premise of voyeurism in
Scorpio Nights 2, or lovelorn romance in
Sa Huling Paghihintay, or angsty sex work in
Prosti, or Tsinoy melodrama in
Mano Po 2, or feisty ghetto superheroes in
Gagamboy by virtue of beautiful images alone. His collaboration with Yamamoto, however, gave his beautiful images the grace of beautiful structure, resulting in such rich and resonant works as
On the Job, Tiktik: The Aswang Chronicles, Honor Thy Father, and of course
Vesuvius. I wish that collaboration continued on in
Seklusyon. It would have probably elevated the film from something we merely admire, to something that we believe slays both our minds and hearts, terrorizing us and thrilling our sensibilities at the same time.
[The film is not being screened in Dumaguete]
#MMFF2016Revolution
Labels: film, MMFF, philippine cinema, review
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Monday, December 26, 2016
5:16 PM |
Beauty Queen of Our Hearts
Jun Robles Lana’s
Die Beautiful (2016) [
trailer here], which had won the Audience Award as well as the Best Actor citation for its star Paolo Ballesteros at the 2016 Tokyo International Film Festival before joining the magnificent slate of eight for this year’s Metro Manila Film Festival, is a fractured thing of beauty — sometimes tender and sometimes raucous.
It embraces two things that it demands of us: peals of laughter and buckets of tears, and both in equal measure as we become witness to the story of a life that seeks out the beautiful in a world that’s stark full of ugliness. But my God I make it sound so dreary. It’s not. It’s a glorious film filled with many wacky moments, but it has to be said that the humor becomes even more precious given the darkness it transcends.
This is a film after all that does not make light of such things as parental abuse, rape, child abandonment, infidelity, and death — themes that understandably merited the film its R-13 rating — but it is testament to the film’s courage that it plows through these things with a certainty that at the end of it all, Mr. Ballesteros’ Trisha Echevarria and her life becomes a cause for celebration.
It doesn’t come easy, this telling of a very unique life. Rody Vera’s sure-footed screenplay chooses to tell it in fractured form, reminding us a little bit of that eclectic style Alejandro González Iñárritu once used for
Babel, and one can make the argument that the form rescues the film from the maudlin, which every dramedy is always in danger of falling into, tantalising us with scenes whose gravity comes in later revelations, each one building towards a whole that soon becomes a satisfactory finish.
As it is, our heroine — a transgendered woman with beauty queen aspirations — is dead from the start, a victim of an aneurysm that comes so soon after being crowned winner of a nationally televised beauty contest. Her best friends — a bevy of earnestly made-up queens led by Christian Bables as Barbs, in a star-turn that is nothing short of a miracle — proceed to provide her a wake that is of her wishing: seven nights in a funeral parlor, where every night she is made up to look like a different celebrity — Iza Calzado, Lady Gaga, Miley Cyrus, Angelina Jolie, Beyonce… Somebody soon takes a selfie with Trisha’s beautiful corpse, and this becomes viral, and soon the wake becomes a sensation, the unwitting mecca for all gay and trans men everywhere.
Intertwined with this thread involving her wake is Trisha’s life story, a complex assemblage of everything from childhood to adolescence to adulthood, the details of which I cannot bring myself to hint at, even with suitable spoiler warnings, because they add bit by bit to the gravity of her story, finally making her death (and the life she led before that) a singular triumph for one who dared all odds and magnificently struggled with all sorts of definitions — son, daughter, brother, sister, friend, mother, beauty queen — to truly and fully become herself in the end. It is also a perfectly rendered tale of friendship, of the families we make when our own has discarded us for being different.
But take note. You will cry. You will feel horrified. You will laugh till your sides ache. You will get uncanny insights to surviving the stupendous Q&As of “beau-cons,” you will know how to make fake boobs, you will gain expertise in making perfect eyebrows, and you will know the subtle differences in handling infidelity a la Maricel Soriano or Jaclyn Jose.
Mr. Ballesteros does a fine job off handling the full range of emotional marks his character demands, and the rest of the cast — particular Mr. Bables — is game enough to handle the intricacies of the story with a sensibility that’s to be commended (although Joel Torre’s father comes off too much of a monster).
I’m sure this was not an easy film to write or make, but Mr. Lana, Mr. Vera, and everyone else have indeed proved that something like this can be done in the name of Philippine cinema. For so many years, particularly in the MMFF, and most especially in the unfortunate films of Vice Ganda, the gay or trans persona has always been a figure to laugh at; these films’ caricatures of the ridiculous of course made money. But here is a film that is an anti-thesis to that, and I am glad to know this is the film that made it this time around.
The film is currently screening at Cinema 1 at Robinsons Movieworld Dumaguete.
#MMFF2016Revolution
Labels: film, MMFF, philippine cinema, review
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3:03 PM |
In the Spa, the Cinematic Hugot Reaches Three Levels
Marlon Rivera’s
Ang Babae sa Septic Tank 2: #ForeverIsNotEnough (2016) [
trailer here] is one of those rare films that overturn the truism that the sequel must always pale in comparison to what came before. The new film takes the conceit and many of the comedic quirks of the first one — a metanarrative that examines, with the ferocious glee of a butcher, the conditions bedevilling artistic filmmaking in the Philippines — but pushes them in a completely different direction, which proves eventually satisfying.
What results is a film that stands on its own with commanding assurance, but also manages to be complementary to the original, which took the Cinemalaya Film Festival by a “shit-storm,” pardon the expression, in 2011. I like this new film very much. It made me laugh so hard. It made me take note of Rivera’s superb artistic choices. It deepened more my own considerations of the many issues that plague Philippine cinema today — one, in particular, that mirrors so well the current battle of sensibilities that the new Metro Manila Film Festival finds itself in: are you “indie” or are you “mainstream,” and can the two ever reconcile?
That question, and the many others that lurk below that divisive argument, lies at the heart of the new story. We begin like in the previous film: we still follow three intrepid independent filmmakers (Kean Cipriano returning as Direk Rainier, Cai Cortes returning as producer Jocelyn, and Khalil Ramos joining the cast in the place of JM de Guzman, and this time taking on Ms. Cortes’ silent role in the previous film — which is such a delicious change, since Ms. Cortes can dish it out so well in dialogue, proving once and for all that she is a comedienne for our times, and one who really needs better recognition for elevating many of the thankless roles she often gets to play in films). They are on a quest to sign the movie star Eugene Domingo for another film. Ms. Domingo, playing a hard-sell version of her film persona, had won plaudits and awards from all over the world for starring in
Walang Wala, where she had “allowed” herself to be immersed in a septic tank; this time around, she might agree to take on the role of a melancholy wife ruminating on a troubled marriage, visiting Baguio with her estranged husband to see once more the sites they once enjoyed together during their honeymoon years ago. But the Baguio of their old romance is gone, replaced by traffic, trash, and too many tourists.
After reading the script, Ms. Domingo bites. She needs a comeback after some years of staying away from the spotlight — and she wants to do this film, titled
The Itinerary, to be that vehicle. And so she has invited all three filmmakers to The Farm at San Benito, a fabulous resort spa for the rich and famous, where they could talk about the story over relaxation therapy, deep-tissue massage, and full-on colon cleansing.
The film follows that conversation, as our characters — along with Ms. Domingo’s faithful Spanish butler Facundo, who absolutely steals every scene he is in — go from one treatment to the next, wrestling ever so “gently” with each other over how the film should unfold. Direk Rainier is adamant about staying true to the starkness and grimness of his vision, the film being his rumination over his own crumbling marriage. But Eugene Domingo would have none of that, preferring instead the sensibilities of escapist fluff that is sure to make good box-office — but she is careful to always end her “suggestions” to the increasingly frustrated director with what becomes the film’s long-running, passive aggressive joke of a line: “They’re just suggestions, direk. Because what do I know, I’m just an actress.”
And so Joel Torre playing her husband becomes Jericho Rosales. And so the film suddenly gets a theme song — the “Forever is Not Enough” of the subtitle [
music video here!]. And so we get further changes in the make-up of the story that involves sunset kisses, gay best friends, and romantic chases in the foggy woody areas of Camp John Hay. The film’s strength is in the comical rendering of these rapid changes in the narrative and filming style, just like in the original. In the 2011 film, we got Eugene Domingo amply demonstrating the three levels of acting. Here, we get three levels of “hugot,” and it is performed so fantastically to so much comedic effect — both in the telling and in the dramatic rendering of the film-within-the-film — that by the end of the sequence, everyone in the theater I was in hooted with so much laughter.
You would think that a movie set mostly in a spa would become too confining in terms of mise-en-scène, but no. I found the use of the spa as good metaphor for the unraveling of their conversation slash negotiation: the deeper and more invasive the treatments they have, the more sanitized the prospective script becomes. Even Ms. Domingo’s actress knows this too well: "I understand metaphors, direk,” she says at one point. She also perfectly understands the trauma she had gone through before, being buried in a sea of feces — the price of the “poverty porn” she had to make in the name of “award-winning independent filmmaking” — and so she is now adamant that this “comeback,” this next phase of her filmmaking life must be all about “cleansing” and being “antiseptic,” quite literally in fact. The spa is a perfect embodiment for all that. Besides, it is also a perfect throwback to film history: filmmakers in crises seem to head to spas in the movies — taking note of Federico Fellini’s tortured director in
8 1/2, as well as similar figures such as in Paolo Sorrentino’s
Youth and Woody Allen’s
Stardust Memories.
This is screenwriter Chris Martinez returning to form in his cinematic storytelling, and the film reminds us that he had entertained us so well in
100 and
Here Comes the Bride. This is also director Marlon Rivera’s full blossoming: every inch of the film is tightly considered — take a look, for example, at the surprise musical interlude that comes in the middle of the film, which sneaks in very organically; all this is indicative of a filmmaker in control of all his elements.
In the end, a complex post-modern narrative becomes seamless entertainment that not only satisfies the comedy fix we are looking for, but also makes us ask questions about the nature of the films we are making in the Philippines today. But where’s the septic tank of the title, you ask? Be patient, in the end it shows itself and becomes just rewards.
The film is currently screening at Cinema 3 at Robinsons Movieworld Dumaguete.
#MMFF2016Revolution
Labels: film, MMFF, philippine cinema, review
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Sunday, December 25, 2016
3:49 PM |
Hugot Quotes Forever
Theodore Boborol's
Vince & Kath & James (2016) [
trailer here], StarCinema's entry to the 2016 Metro Manila Film Festival, quotes a lot. And so it must. The film after all is an adaptation of the online romantic serial written by Jenny Ruth Almocera, which became a minor social media sensation with its love story unconventionally told through snapshots of SMS and chats between the characters.
The film does not stay faithful to its source material but stays true to much of its spirit, "quoting" it but limning a more recognizable story revolving around a troika between a scrappy tomboyish girl named Kath (Julia Barretto), a happy bunny with a secret blog named Vince (Joshua Garcia), and his varsity player/heartthrob cousin named James (Ronnie Alonte).
Of course, you have seen this film before. It virtually quotes Edmond Rostand's 1897 play
Cyrano de Bergerac with its story of a handsome but inarticulate man wooing a beautiful woman, but doing it with the words of a helpful poetic outsider who secretly longs for the same girl. (There goes another round of quoting.) But Boborol's take has more in keeping with Fred Schepisi's contemporizing of the Cyrano de Bergerac story in
Roxanne (1987), minus the gigantic nose but full of the same bright fluff and gentle unfolding.
Quotes play a huge part, too, in the burgeoning relationships between the three principals, Vince being the purveyor of "hugot" quotes he posts anonymously in a blog called "DaVinci Quotes," which Kath loves, and which James finally uses to his advantage to get to her heart.
And it quotes, too -- quite literally in fact -- Olivia Lamasan's
Got 2 Believe (2002), a StarCinema romcom that starred Claudine Barretto and Rico Yan: in a pivotal scene, the new movie's stars watches the film and plays a game of matching quotes with it, and we are suddenly made to make associations between old and new. Here is your new Claudine in her niece Julia, the film tells us, and here is the new Rico Yan in Joshua Garcia. That is the ultimate level of quoting the movie aspires to -- but it is fortunately not without merit, and the pairing eventually induces the same familiar "kilig."
In Julia Barretto's feisty Kath, we see a display of the same inner fire as her real-life aunt; she is still very much an inchoate star -- but the camera clearly loves her. Though not as much as Ronnie Alonte, whom the camera gushes over -- and he knows it. (He fills Diether Ocampo's shoes quite well.)
And finally in Joshua Garcia's Vince, we get the ultimate throwback that at first unsettles, but one which we gradually come to like: here is finally a find in the romantic lead department -- a young John Lloyd Cruz lookalike armed with Rico Yan's smile. That is, if you think about it, a formidable combination, and so Garcia expectedly steals the film with his pixie-like charm, and also carries much of its dramatic burden with an aplomb that is absolutely star-making.
Vince & Kath & James does not break new filmmaking grounds, but it is charming, and it may be the film to remember as the title where these young stars first made their definite and indelible marks in very long careers ahead.
The film is currently screening at Cinema 2 at Robinsons Movieworld Dumaguete.
#MMFF2016Revolution
Labels: film, MMFF, philippine cinema, review
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