Ivan Andrew Payawal's Table for Three (Vivamax, The IdeaFirst Company, 2024) follows successful couple Marlon (Topper Fabregas) and Paul (Arkin del Rosario) as they explore being a throuple with Jeremy (Jesse Guinto). There's little doubt that Table for Three bears few similarities to Payawal's Two and One (2022), as the film unfolds in a deliberate and surprisingly conventional manner that effectively prevents it from becoming anything more than a well-acted (and well-made) domestic drama. Payawal even seems to be going out of his way to prevent viewers from wholeheartedly embracing the spare narrative, as the director offers up a trio of underdeveloped protagonists that remain completely uninteresting virtually from start to finish. Not helping matters is Payawal's sporadic emphasis on oddball elements, as the film's tenuously authentic atmosphere is undoubtedly diminished significantly each and every time the filmmaker indulges his notorious sensibilities. Table for Three feigns interest in its characters as three-dimensional beings layering them with dilemmas and hang-ups, but rarely gets deep enough under their skin to make them seem like more than devices in a socio-political thesis. That’s especially true of Jeremy, who receives the least attention and thus comes across as the most paper-thin of the film’s three protagonists and his featurelessness ultimately sabotages the increasingly tense threesome dynamic at play, since none of these people’s attractions to each other are ever fleshed-out or potently felt.
Simplistic as its core may be, though, Payawal manages the not-inconsiderable feat of habitually distracting attention away from his material’s underlying didacticism through aesthetic dexterity providing the material with far more urgency than does its let’s-all-get-together plotting. Give credit to Payawal for trying to dissect a relationship and then build it up again. But despite its fascinating moments, one can't help but be frustrated when at times it switches away to pretentiousness. All the aesthetic tangents the director throws at us play as just that, tangents. To what is actually a slightly enervated drama of not-so-complicated romantic geometry, the the film is frequently ravishing in its visual construction making the drama go down easy. For all its complicating intrusions, Table of Three can’t help but register as somewhat less than the sum of its disparate parts. As Payawal frames them threading the waves in symmetrical compositions, he captures all the mystery and romance of a new relationship that isn’t necessarily communicated in the film’s less stylized sequences. For a while, Payawal gets by on his talent for conjuring up interesting exchanges. But no matter how hard he tries to make his characters distinctive, no matter how much he attempts to flesh them out through elucidating their interests, the drama they enact ultimately feels flat, the hermetic actions of hermetic conceptions of character. In a few tender moments, Payawal conjures up the feeling of necessity, but for most of the rest, it’s just eye-filling, soul-starving emptiness that no amount of intermittent assaults on the sensorium can paper over.
Directed By: Ivan Andrew Payawal
Written By: Ash M. Malanum
Cinematographer: Juan Miguel Marasigan
Production Designer: Jaylo Conanan
Editor: Kristian Marc Palma
Music: Emerzon Texon
Sound Designer: Nicole Rosacay
