Miss Rita Gomez, with an angry mouth and the steeliest of gazes brings so much energy to Gamitin Mo Ako (V.H. Films, Inc., 1985) because the movie badly needs a center of gravity. As directed by Ishmael Bernal, this is perhaps the most telling, economical image of Miss Gomez the movie has to offer, followed by a montage detailing Toyang's daily regimen that is equally sharp-edged. It appears as if the movie will concentrate on Miss Gomez's overweening drive and perhaps attempt an explanation of her eccentricities. But this doesn't happen nor does the film become the story of her daughter Josie (Stella Suarez Jr.). The movie is so shapeless and unfocused that it never decides whose story to tell. It offers disconnected glimpses of Toyang's life. There is nothing to string the episodes together into a coherent drama and no insight into the characters. If the movie opted clearly for Josie's point of view, then Toyang could successfully be presented as a cipher. But Josie is neither a match for her mother nor a well-defined character in her own right, so Miss Gomez's Toyang easily steals all the thunder. And as presented here, she handles everything with a desperate, perfectly unexamined intensity. Toyang reveals her true self in fits of rage and torrents of verbal, emotional and physical abuse to Josie. Her abandon in giving herself over to such emotions is accompanied by an air of calculation that is her most astonishing trait. She can switch gears in an instant, moving from tremendous sensuality if she thinks it will do her some good, to motherly love or even terrible anger.
Toyang copes with the overwhelming feelings of powerlessness and vulnerability by angrily and violently asserting control in the realm where she wields power and fury, her household. Suarez gives Josie a sullen cast, but Miss Gomez is an even better battle-ax later on. By the time Toyang seems to have softened toward Josie makes her final scene particularly bewildering. Toyang did need more humanity than Bernal allows her in order for Gamitin Mo Ako to have any claim to coherence or continuity. Even soap opera needs soul. A performance like Gomez’s isn’t something one will ever shake off and that it would become the filter through which her entire career would forevermore be viewed. Which is one major reason why Gamitin Mo Ako registers as questionable on camp value. And why anyone who ironically loves the film should still probably admit that the guilt in guilty pleasure resides within themselves and not the filmmakers. What could possibly be more insulting than to say that a work of art is so much a failure that it even fails at providing a sensibility that celebrates failure. Toyang is a monster and Josie is a pretty, long-suffering dope who might inspire more sympathy if she were not directed to be distant and veiled. The movie doesn't even make narrative sense. Success follows crisis without any pattern. Gamitin Mo Ako also offers few insights into Toyang's relationship with other characters. There’s Sammy (Al Tantay), her lover who's an enigma. Bernal and screenwriter Rolando S. Tinio fuse this formal schizophrenia with a cruelly episodic structure sneakily turning Toyang’s plight into an endless series of character sketches in some gruesome variety revue. Gamitin Mo Ako is a painful experience that drones on endlessly as Toyang's relationship with her daughter, Josie, disintegrates from cruelty through jealousy into pathos. It is unremittingly depressing, not to any purpose of drama or entertainment, but just to depress.
Production Designer: Elmer Manapul
Sound Supervision: Rudy Baldovino
Film Editor: Amang Sanchez
Musical Director: Willy Cruz
Director of Photography: Manolo R. Abaya
Screenplay: Rolando S. Tinio
Direction: Ishmael Bernal
