SARI-SARING SINENG PINOY

     Who would have thought of Robb Guinto for the role of Brenda? I was intrigued with the casting choice. And let me tell you, what many, including myself, thought might have been a flash-in-the-pan dramatic turn in Memories of a Love Story (2022), is proven to be anything, but having seen her performance in Desperada (LDG Production, 2026), Guinto is developing some strong dramatic acting chops and more than proves herself here. As Brenda, her greatest strength and where she excels is with creating and delivering palpable anger and rage. You feel her pain. She makes Brenda’s frustration very real. You empathize. But what I truly appreciate with her performance is that Guinto never boxes herself in so as to make you pity Brenda. Somewhere inside her, all along, there is the hope of a different life, almost overshadowed by the fear that she does not deserve it. Guinto shows us Brenda’s ferocity, her vulnerability, all the ways she has been beaten down and all of the strength she has to keep coming back. The result is a story that is touching and inspiring, that really struck me while watching. When it comes to joy and happiness and any sense of ease within the character, there is always a sense of uncomfortableness that bodes well, but on the whole, a solid grounded powerful performance rooted in courage and conviction. Watching the relationship between Brenda and Mama Miriam played with careful balance of trepidation and strength by Sue Prado, shows a wonderful chemistry and watching that develop is something that I would have liked to see more. Prado has this uncanny ability to retain her uncertainty while trying to balance it with the responsibilities of adulthood within a character. While Mama Miriam is in a relationship with Sister Carol (Mercedes Cabral), around Brenda, Prado gives Miriam this new mother nervousness that makes your heart stop. 

     As Lucio, Yasser Marta is one tweaked out mess. You have no sympathy or empathy for the character and at times, it feels as if Marta takes Lucio so far out into left field that it feels disingenuous. However, to his credit, he immersed himself not only in his own physical transformation but emotional transformation as well. The result is startling to the point of unrecognizabilty. It’s been all self-denial, lack of responsibility, no self-reflection and to do so would probably break him so he just refuses. Hesus, willing to make sacrifices for Brenda is played by Mhack Morales with enormous compassion and strength. Desperada moves at a healthy pace, involving the viewer with a growing case history that gains compassion as it gathers focus. Dennis C. Evangelista scripted a compelling emotional story and director Luisito Lagdameo Ignacio immediately fills in the few options a runaway like Brenda has. Ignacio, particularly in the film’s second act pulls off something rather remarkable in terms of point-of-view; he shows women critical of the shelter that has saved them, almost as if Brenda develops a kind of skepticism. Credit is due to Prado as a woman who has opened her house and turns it into a shelter. Careful with regards to storytelling, the subtle elements work and the film does not feel as if it’s a kind of poverty porn, but unfortunately it lets Lucio off the hook too easily. Critical of the system, Ignacio tells this story interestingly, but it is the galvanizing force of Robb Guinto who catapults Desperada above the heartbreaking level of soap opera with a lancing effect. Even on the verge of mental collapse, she picks up the pieces and moves on gallantly, her face a three-act play of mortal tenderness.

Story & Screenplay: Dennis C. Evangelista

Director of Photography: TM Malones

Editing & Sound: Gilbert Obispo

Music: Mikoy Morales

Production Design: Cyrus Khan

Directed By: Luisito Lagdameo Ignacio

 

     Domestic abuse has been portrayed on film before but never with this much complexity. Usually, we are treated to a parade of brutality, bordering on stylized cartoon violence. Director Maryo J. de los Reyes' treatment is completely different. He keeps the rough stuff to a minimum, though the emotional abuse is continually evident in this tale of two lovers caught up in their own personal tragedy. Logic becomes irrelevant when Rosalie is caught in the drama. Just as Adrian learns how to guard his anger, she flees to her family to hear what a bastard Adrian is. Then some dread tidal force draws them together again. The movie is not neutral. Rosalie (Snooky Serna) has a problem, but Adrian (Christopher de Leon) has a much graver one. He is a sick man, whose insecurity and self-hatred boils up into violent outbursts against his wife. It is clear that Rosalie should leave him and never return. De Los Reyes tracks the progress of the couple's attempted reconciliation and the wedge that it drives between Rosalie and Adrian. What makes the movie fascinating is that it doesn’t settle for a soap opera resolution to this story, with Rosalie as the victim, Adrian as the villain and evil vanquished. It digs deeper and more painfully. In a sane world, the end of the story would be Rosalie grabbing a few clothes and fleeing in the night, and Adrian forever out of the picture. But he pleads to return. He promises to change. He talks sweet. Her deep feelings for the man begin to stir. In Kapag Napagod ang Puso (V.H. Films Inc., 1988), which is about middle-class people, the story is less sensational but trickier, because Adrian is a complex man. He’s gentle at first—when his romantic pleas seem as if they may seduce her—but he turns vicious when she refuses him. We see that he’s really serious about controlling his anger, we begin to feel sympathy for him. We even pity him a little as we see how, step by step, his defenses fall, his lessons are forgotten and rage once again controls him. 

     This insight deepens a scene in which Adrian seduces Rosalie with shallow romantic gestures, but it’s a stance that also positions the film perhaps too explicitly as a rumination on the female gaze and its controlling male equivalent—this obviousness spills over to other scenes as well, mostly the sophomoric and condescending pseudo-psychological insight offered by scenes that have Adrian coping with his seemingly uncontrollable and unexplainable rage. The movie doesn’t go in for elaborate set-pieces of beatings and bloodshed. He is violent toward her, yes, but what’s terrifying is not the brutality of his behavior but how it is sudden, uncontrollable, and overwhelming. The cast is utterly compelling. Serna is powerful as Rosalie, a woman who slowly, through hard lessons, is learning that she must leave this man and never see him again and not miss him or weaken to his appeals or cave in to her own ambiguity about his behavior. She may think (and some viewers might think) that she is simply a victim, but when she returns to him, she gives away that game. She knows it’s insane, and does it, anyway.  As Adrian, De Leon makes his anger absolutely convincing and that is necessary or this is merely a story. At once vulnerable, confused and yet still very scary, even when he's being nice, he brings home the anguish of a man married—perhaps irretrievably—to violence, but who is trying to escape from the cycle. The difference is that Serna's Rosalie is less confident and more implicated. That creates a complex response. We sympathize at times with both characters, but curiously enough, we are more willing to understand why Adrian explodes than why Rosalie returns to him. Surely she knows she’s making a mistake, yes she does. They both know they're spiraling toward danger. If only knowledge had more to do with how they feel and why they act. These subtle performances add a layer of subtext to the characters that gives the film a passionate cultural sensibility while also keeping it universal and identifiable. All this talk of violence may give the impression that Kapag Napagod ang Puso is downbeat when, in fact, it is not. There is much to be said for the bravery of the characters that is cathartic and yet laced with hidden truths.

Production Design: Lea Locsin

Screenplay: Jake Tordesillas

Music: Mon del Rosario

Cinematography: Ely Cruz

Editor: Edgardo (Boy) Vinarao

Direction: Maryo J. de los Reyes

     Thy Womb (Center Stage Productions Philippines, 2012) breaks new ground, pinpointing its attention to a lesser known region with sincere urgency. The woman at the center of this film is Shaleha (Nora Aunor) who, under Brillante Ma Mendoza’s skilled guidance is a mesmerizing, engrossing and beautifully realized cinematic experience. Aunor is hypnotic as Shaleha. We see the plot develop from her perspective and the story unfold from vantage points close to her face. Ensuing choices and consequences rife with tension and heartache, extreme close-ups convey Shaleha’s internal woes with an earnestness few working actors can match. In her most wrenching scenes, Aunor presents Shaleha as a woman drowning in waves of longing. Still, you feel for her because there’s no way to look into her eyes and dismiss the sorrow that has made a home there. Aunor is at the peak of her acting powers here, conveying incredible depths of emotion with a stare. Her day-to-day struggles, whilst not completely universal, encompass the role of a wife and a working woman–all things that Shaleha is expected to be. She has to be the primary earner, but also subservient to her husband, Bangas-An (Bembol Roco). Thy Womb clearly belongs to Shaleha and Aunor, who does career-best work here as the aging village midwife, whose every expression, every gesture is revealing and heartbreaking. Her body language speaks volumes. Shaleha is reserved and resilient. Her silences, her eyes and her restraint add gravitas to the character and the film. Aunor's performance is both authentic and effective. 

     Mendoza knows how to use visual and dramatic means to make a milieu palpable to an audience by providing an introduction to the complex blend of emotion that permeates the film. His incredible artistry and narrative complexities are often overlooked for the visceral quality of his cinema. His particular tone balances the onscreen expressiveness with the heightened emotional states of his characters. The conversations between Shaleha and Banagas-An are some of the best parts of the film-their talk is at once poignant, punctuated by long silences. Much of the film’s emotional impact manages to feel entirely earned. The scenes showing Shaleha's ice-cold indifference to Bangas-An is well achieved, creating a strong and disturbing degree of sympathy for the treatment of women by society. The hushed score during moments of true emotion never manages to eclipse the very real human stories that it accompanies, nor are the experiences ever trivialized. Interestingly, the film’s final scenes are set against the backdrop of Bangas-An's marriage to Mersila (Lovi Poe). In trying to understand Shaleha, who lives with willing resignation to her fate, she sets her husband free. Whether that’s a failure of imagination on Shaleha's part or a success depends on your point of view. And while a single viewing of Thy Womb may not be enough to appreciate the intricacy of these characters or the journey they take, revisiting the detailed and mesmerizing world of the film would be a rare kind of pleasure. 

Director: Brillante Ma Mendoza

Screenplay: Henry Burgos

Director of Photography: Odyssey Flores

Music: Teresa Barrozo

Editor: Kats Seraon

Production Design: Dante Mendoza

Sound Design: Albert Michael Idioma, Addiss Tabong

     How do you talk about Kaya Kong Abutin ang Langit (V.H. Films Inc.) without talking about Maricel Soriano’s face? You can’t. Because its planes and curves, its expressions and opacity are such a central piece of the movie itself. A series of close-ups brings the high beams so intensely that she nearly overwhelms the screen. It almost feels like witchcraft. Each frame of her seems to be hand-tinted, as if she had ordered it. But it's Soriano’s eyes that viewers are most likely to remember—they dominate the screen.  But even when they’re hidden from us, we feel them still. By the time we reach that fateful scene in Kaya Kong Abutin ang Langit, we are keenly aware of the potency of those eyes, which gain in totemic force as the story unfolds. The doomed romance at the center of the movie is in fact launched by the bare, shameless gaze of Clarissa Rosales Gardamonte (Soriano), whose eyes land on Darryl (William Martinez). He has already been watching her for reasons of his own: in fact he has been staring at her in a delicious moment of narcissistic pleasure. In this battle of competing gazes, she wins, as Clarissa will win everything for the first half of the movie. Quickly, however, the very elements that drew them together in their first meeting lead to their immolation: Clarissa’s will to power, her possessiveness, her too-muchness, which threaten the relationship and more largely, the prevailing notions of femininity itself. Released in 1984 to great success, Kaya Kong Abutin ang Langit was directed by Maryo J. de los Reyes. Here, he offers us one of the most perverse and remorseless females, driven by the material, even relatable motivations of most lethal women—money, security, escape—and so Clarissa becomes not just the most dangerous woman but also, ironically, one of the most defiantly sympathetic. Thanks to De Los Reyes’ nuanced direction, as well as Jake Tordesillas' screenplay and Soriano’s tense and relentless performance, we find ourselves, in sneaking moments and in subtextual ways, understanding Clarissa’s frustrations as she fails, over and over again, in her attempts to conform and more intimately, to attain acceptance. 

     We may even find ourselves quietly admiring Clarissa or at least retaining some awe of her, as she rejects and overturns the social expectations that have stifled and nearly crushed her. The first clue to Kaya Kong Abutin ang Langit’s subversive, sympathetic view of Clarissa lies in its narrative frame. The movie unfolds in flashback, as Nancy (Gina Alajar) narrates her sister’s tragic tale. She is the only one who knows the whole story and any insight into Clarissa will have to be gained through the story’s seams. But Clarissa doesn't follow rules. Her adoptive parents, Monina and Ralph Gardamonte's (Liza Lorena and Robert Campos) accident is, by all standards, an unforgivable act, but one that is so badly monstrous that it inspires a kind of horrified wonder as Clarissa lingers like an awful dream for the rest of Kaya Kong Abutin ang Langit. In a bit of narrative cunning, however, we now share a secret with Clarissa and therefore experience the same smack of irony that she does upon realizing that even homicide has not solved her problem. Even if we conceive of Clarissa as the villain, her open declarations of discomfort and entrapment feel wildly subversive. She tells Nancy that she hates being poor, a shocking declaration that underlines her narcissism. At the same time, however, the declaration—offered as the camera emphasizes Soriano’s costumed bulk and her character’s unhappiness—also serves as a sly acknowledgment of something she may have felt at one moment or another. Clarissa says the things women think but cannot say. Her unspeakable acts may have offered a cathartic relief from gender imperatives and an exorcism of their own forbidden feelings and longings. We feel her in the cruel irony of the closing moments. Such happiness is forbidden to Clarissa, who wanted too much, her arms stretched, up into the heavens.

Sound: Vic Macamay, STAMP

Production Design: Butch Garcia, PDGP

Director of Photography: Joe Batac Jr., FSC

Film Editor: Edgardo "Boy" Vinarao, FEGMP

Music: Willy Cruz, UFIMDAP

Screenplay: Jake Tordesillas, SGP

Directed By: Maryo J. de los Reyes

     Ask someone whether camp is best characterized by embarrassing, overwrought displays of joy or the schadenfreude of seeing society’s dregs either succumb to (or rise above) the constraints of their environment. You’ll find that it’s an easy question to answer: Both easily generate camp value, so long as the focus is on exaggeration. On the other hand, ask someone if it’s possible for the genre to convey a strong social message. Most will likely reason that the serious social message will be compromised by the strongly subversive antisocial camp value. Without dwelling on the question of whether camp value can be attributed to the intention of the filmmaker or a reaction by the viewer, suffice it to say that every postulation has its antithesis and for anyone who doubts that a film that’s soaked in camp can’t tackle a timely subject, here is Laruan (Falcon Pictures, 1983). Though suffused with guilty pleasures, director Emmanuel H. Borlaza’s film is also a devastating look at society’s unfair tendencies to make clear divisions between Madonna and whore labels. Carmi Martin is Joy, a beauty pageant aspirant who suffers a rape attack from photographer, William (played by Mark Gil, in another mannered performance). While there’s no shortage of similar tongue-in-cheek minstrelesqueries (Chanda Romero's Chelo chews some serious scenery as Joy's best friend), it’s also crystal clear that Borlaza buys wholesale into screenwriter Jose Javier Reyes' dissection of the fine line between image and reality. The message of Laruan, if I read it right, is less about the physical vulnerability of women than about the sexual hang-ups of eccentric young men. 

     Borlaza treats Martin very gingerly. There are times he seems to be protecting her by cutting away to other actors, when one would expect the camera to stay on her. Gil does as well as can be younger expected with the role of the rapist. The revelation of Laruan is Angela Perez who plays Flor, Martin's younger sister in the film. She has some difficult scenes and handles them like a veteran, she’s unaffected and convincing on camera and whether she knows it or not, she can act. Perez is interesting to watch. Poised to thoughtfully address the dual victimization women face in cases of sexual assault—the crime itself and later, the victim blaming —Laruan hoped to provoke the kind of cultural controversy and heated social conversations, but the only dialogue prompted was widespread criticism of what many saw as a tasteless attempt to exploit a serious issue by using social relevance as a smokescreen for a routine rape-and-revenge flick. By the time the melodrama has come to its conclusion, not even Joy herself is confident that her image as a sexual object doesn’t trump her emotional wreckage. In fact, Borlaza only seems to drive that point home by concentrating less on Joy’s inner torment and more on oblique angles of the mise-en-scène that mirrors the ’80s Philippine pageant world. But a last-act twist changes the whole tone of the movie, turning the enterprise into a popular (at the time) revenge flick at the cost of coherency. It's then that Laruan implodes. By the time Borlaza fastidiously ties up the loose threads other films in that vague decade would’ve left dangling. It’s clear that he doesn’t want the audience to dwell much on the specifics of the plot but, rather, translate the fundamental critiques of judgmental dependence on image tropes into their own experiences. That Borlaza hides this bitter message in camp—a genre that depends on its viewer acting on their image-reading, cynical impulses—is ballsy genius. 

Sound Engineer: Vic Macamay

Production Designer: Ben Payumo

Cinematography By: Rosendo (Baby) Buenaseda

Film Editor: Ike Jarlego, Jr.

Music By: George Canseco

Screenplay: Jose Javier Reyes

Directed By: Emmanuel H. Borlaza