Everybody hustles, but in Monti Puno Parungao's The Escort (Lexuality Entertainment, Treemount Pictures, 2011) hustling (in the hard core sense of selling your body for sex) is a way of life. For all its depiction of lurid subject matter, The Escort also balances its heavy drama with a strong dose of romance. It's a precarious and potentially disastrous juggling act and one that The Escort pulls off with genuine flair. There was a time when most people didn't know men sold sex and didn't want to know. The Escort dramatizes the lifestyle at the same time it tells a cautionary tale. The viewer gets to meet the escorts while keeping a safe distance. The world of The Escort seems terribly real, it even smells that way. Parungao does a good job of capturing the unsprung rhythm of the street. The characters form a loose-knit community at the mercy of strangers. They may spend hours together and not see one another for a week. Parungao shows Karlo’s encounters, one is an old man with peculiar tastes. Miko Pasamonte finds the right note for Karlo. He has plans and dreams, but vague ones and he's often sort of detached, maybe because his life is on hold in between tricks. Karlo has fallen into a lifestyle that offers him up during every waking moment for any stranger. He does it for money, but it pays so badly, he can't save up enough to pay his rent.
The basic thing that happens to Karlo is that he meets Yuri (Danniel Derramyo), a person entirely outside his experience. Yuri has a measure of humanity, so does Karlo. They come together because there is no other way to turn. Karlo and Yuri are castaways. The two young men have obvious affinities, but their banter also establishes some important differences. They go their own way, live their own lives, become two of the permanent inhabitants of our imagination. They exist apart from the movie, outside of it. The Escort is about their mutual self-discovery, about the process that took place as they learned to know each other. Karlo's journey toward actual love—tenderness, encouragement—gives the film its wrenching climax. Parungao's work with his cast is matched by an assured visual sense benefiting enormously from the richly textured images achieved on a low-budget, location-heavy shoot. The Escort largely builds from its personality and atmosphere to effectively establish characters through the portrayal of emotion and the human condition, which are physically reflected in their settings. Colliding hope with despair as the intersecting crossroads of Karlo and Yuri coexist in a contemporary world of excess and absurdity normalized amidst the chaos of it all while dismantling social boundaries. Luring the viewer with its seductive mixture of ambiguity, realism and gritty subtext while rendering a deeply sympathetic view of wayward lives, the film delivers a lingering perspective on the impact of meaningful relationships in the ever-alienating experience of human existence.
Production Designer: Vicente Mendoza
Cinematography: Ruel Galero, Moni Puno Parungao
Edited By: Monti Puno Parungao
Musical Scoring: Monti Puno Parungao
Screenplay: Lex Bonife
Directed By: Monti Puno Parungao
