COMFORTABLY FAMILIAR

Posted by Jojo Devera ,


     Decrying film clichés is easy. Replacing them with something worthwhile is much harder. Tropes become tropes because they’re often the straight-line, natural-feeling answer to common story problems. How to make a character relatable, an arc satisfying or a story tidy. While storytellers who try to dodge well-worn, familiar narratives deserve recognition for trying harder, the road to hell isn’t the only one paved with good intentions. Films like When I Met You in Tokyo (JG Productions Inc., 2023) show that avoiding safe, lazy choices isn’t enough to make a strong film. It’s necessary to make decisive and meaningful choices as well. Filmmakers Conrado Peru, Rommel Penesa and writer Suzette Doctolero have their hearts in the right place. They’ve created a film about senior citizens that acknowledges them as people, not pathos machines or wisdom dispensers. They focus on female friendships without making them catty or fickle. They avoid cheap melodrama, big life lessons and predictability. But while they’re steering clear of so many pitfalls, they don’t give the impression that they’re steering in any specific direction. The film is a parade of barely connected events, presided over by a barely connected protagonist. Even among a great ensemble of actors, Christopher de Leon stands out. Joey's no-fuss amusement and gentlemanly version of macho come closest to making the film feel distinctive, instead of droning. He sells the romance well. It’s easy to see why Azon (Vilma Santos) allows him into her life, given how he rolls up with a compliment and an insouciant smirk. The film is at its best when exploring Azon and Joey’s comfortable rapprochement, which comes with more affable curiosity than longing or passion. It’s a film that never exits its holding pattern, no matter what else happens. 

     In When I Met You in Tokyo's case, friendships between older people tend to focus more on a congenial present than digging into each other’s pasts or how inter-gender friendships become easier with age. Santos's performance can be savored for its subtlety, but even that robs the budding romance of its spark. Other than that, the film lacks any visual snap or panache to offset the tonal and narrative blandness. At best, it’s a reasonably sweet, unchallenging character piece that won’t insult older viewers by reflecting them poorly or shallowly. That feels like an accomplishment in itself. But in its relentless lack of significant affect or movement, When I Met You in Tokyo attempts to find a balance between the stimulatingly new and the comfortably familiar. Highly polished yet never quite slick, the film devolves into cartoonish cutesiness with its broadly drawn minor characters, as in a heavy-handed sequence in which Azon and her girlfriends behave like superannuated teenagers. But the main actors' emotional authenticity keeps the story from drowning in unfunny shtick or facile wish-fulfillment. It hangs on a screenplay as random as a dream. It drifts to and fro, leaning too hard on the sparkle provided by its veteran cast, never quite settling on what it wants to say or do. There is a central moment where When I Met You in Tokyo hits a tremendous peak of displayed beauty. That is when Joey steps up to the mic and belts out a rendition of the APO Hiking Society's When I Met You that will leave you speechless. Through song, you feel every ounce of the passionate balance between Joey's independence and loneliness. You see what he was and what he could still be. De Leon's solo is a dynamite moment that the rest of the film cannot match. The few good comedic elements doesn't fit the rest of the film and its weighty take on mortality and love at an advanced age detracts from the heft of what could have been a bigger, bolder dramatic statement or a fuller and more involving romance. When I Met You in Tokyo is one of those screenplays that might have been more interesting a couple of drafts ago, before the detours were closed off. And yet, when Santos’s Azon shares scenes with De Leon’s determined suitor, there’s considerable charm in the results. As When I Met You in Tokyo reminds us, Santos and De Leon are masters in the art of turning ordinary material into little bits of truth and life.


Sound: Armand de Guzman, Fatima Nerikka Salim, Immanuel Verona

Music: Jessie Lasaten

Editors: Froilan Francia, Karla Diaz

Production Designers: Buboy Tagayon, Rey Peru

Screenplay: Suzette Doctolero

Director of Photography: Shayne Sarte, LPS

Directors: Conrado Peru, Rommel Penesa


IMPROVISATORY BRILLIANCE

Posted by Jojo Devera ,


     Working Girls (Viva Films, 1984) represents Ishmael Bernal at an all-time personal peak and it came at just the right time in his career. For anyone who believed that what Filipino movies needed most, during the often-moribund cinematic eighties, was more of the old Bernal independent spirit and maverick brilliance, and more of a sense of what the country really is, rather than what it should be. The director’s sudden cinematic reemergence with Working Girls was an occasion for bravos. Like many of the other key innovative moviemakers of the seventies, notably Lino Brocka, Celso Ad Castillo and Mike de Leon, Bernal suffered through the eighties, though he managed to survive it. He came blazing back to center stage with Working Girls. It was a larger, riskier effort but it was a daring, omniscient technique and scathing take on the lives of modern women. Working Girls opened the way to Bernal’s remarkable achievements, including Hinugot sa Langit (1985) and The Graduates (1986). And in Working Girls returning to the style and strategy of his earlier seventies movies with their interweaving story lines, huge cast and open-ended narratives, Bernal actually topped his official masterpiece, Manila by Night (1980). The ensemble is large and various. Bernal, screenwriter Amado L. Lacuesta, Jr. and editor Ike Jarlego, Jr. concentrate on transitions, leaping from one track to another, making connections between clusters of characters. How? Sometimes, as in Manila by Night, one character simply shows up as back-ground in a story where he or she doesn’t belong. Sometimes, a few illicit sexual liaisons cross the borderlines, too. 

     Bernal's greatness as a director rested principally in that improvisatory brilliance, in his uncanny knack with actors. In a cast so large and uniformly superb, it seems unfair to pick any of them out even though Gina Pareño is the one who is handed a big, virtuoso, movie-stealing dialogue. It also lies in Bernal’s ability to free up an entire company to do their best work, his unique obsession with the whole process of making movies, the fact that he wouldn’t quit, no matter what. Appropriately, he won back the spotlight in the most impudent way possible, by laying bare the excesses and hypocrisies of Makati itself. Working Girls is one of those marriages of seeming opposites that works. What Bernal does by placing these people in another of his rich, boisterously populated collage films, is to show how every city (especially Makati) is, in a way, a community of the isolated. Bernal may even give us more of a sense of truth than the stories alone, because they recognize more of the absurd and terrible interconnections of life, the consequences that most of us choose to ignore. Part of the films' greatness, which is one of the triumphs of contemporary moviemaking, lies in the inclusiveness of its portrait, the way it gives such an omniscient sense of character, of milieu. And part also lies in Working Girls’ recognition that nothing in life is ever resolved, that there are no happy endings, but virtually no endings at all. Bernal likes the messiness and coincidence of real life, where you can do your best and some days it's just not good enough. Working Girls understands and knows because it is filmed from an all-seeing point of view. Its characters sometimes cross paths, but for the most part they don't know how their lives are changed by people they meet only glancingly. Some of these characters, would find the answers to their needs, yet these people have a certain nobility to them. They keep on trying and hope for better times. 


Sound Supervision: Vic Macamay

Musical Director: Willie Cruz

Production Designer: Benjie de Guzman

Film Editor: Ike Jarlego, Jr.

Director of Photography: Manolo R. Abaya, FSC

Screenplay: Amado L. Lacuesta, Jr.

Directed By: Ishmael Bernal

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