SARI-SARING SINENG PINOY

     I must confess to a special fondness for comedies in which the rules of time, space and logic are suspended so that misguided people can straighten themselves out. Here Comes the Groom's (Quantum Films, Cineko Productions, Brightlight Productions, 2023) measure of integrity is that it moves smoothly, convincingly and with minimal self-consciousness from farce to earnest sentiment, earning your tears at the climactic rapprochement because it has treated you so generously to laughter on the way. Loud but never coarse, candid without being prurient, Here Comes the Groom is a quick-witted, perfectly modulated farce with a pair of beautifully matched performances from Keempee de Leon and especially Enchong Dee, who does some of his best work ever. Both tears and laughter arise from writer-director Chris Martinez's canny and unforced understanding of what makes his characters tick. Rodrigo (De Leon) and Junior (Dee) are recognizable types but also solid individuals, something that becomes clear only after their identity swap. In De Leon, we see the wistfulness and uncertainty beside his facade of brisk confidence. Similarly, it is only when Junior (Dee) is thrown into Wilhelmina's (KaladKaren) person that his strong, passionate ardor comes into full view. 

     Dee's performance is a marvel. He bounds beyond mimicry and gimmickry. He’s nothing short of dazzling as he enjoys one of his relatively rare opportunities to showcase his splendid comic timing and graceful physicality. De Leon always had an undercurrent of playfulness, his masterful interpretation of Wanda’s (Xilhouete) persona from voice inflection to simple hand gestures is frighteningly accurate yet funny. Sheer perfection! With a natural and nuanced ease, he just gets better with every role. Early scenes are a tad too over-emphatic, almost strident, really as Martinez errs on the side of obviousness while setting up familiar premise. Once he completes his expository duties, Martinez lightens his touch to allow for a freer, friskier sort of comedic interplay. Here Comes the Groom comes complete with maxims about seeing life through someone else’s eyes and appreciating the pressures brought to bear on loved ones. To his credit, Martinez sugar-coats the bite-sized life lessons with humor and verve. A strong supporting cast including Tony Labrusca, whose character Hans reveals surprising depth and decency in a key scene. Gladys Reyes on the other hand is a comic delight as Rodrigo's sprightly wife, Salve. A winning combination of acting, writing and direction, Here Comes the Groom will have you wondering what freak of nature occurred to bring us this delightfully refreshing comedy.

Sound Design: Janinna Minglanilla, Emilio Bien Sparks

Music: Emerzon Texon

Editor: Dennis Austria Salgado

Production Design: Angel Diesta

Director of Photography: Moises M.M. Zee, LPS

Written and Directed By; Chris Martinez

     The luminescent tryst between Baby (Vilma Santos) and Roy (Phillip Salvador) in Baby Tsina (Viva Films, 1984) remains to be Marilou Diaz-Abaya’s most complex and revelatory examination of unfulfilled love. She doesn’t solely rely on the flashier aspects of her patented style to convey a character’s fated desires or failures. She positions individuals as pieces of a larger mosaic, one populated by burgeoning and disintegrating relationships that reach beyond the frame. This construct produces subtext-heavy conversations containing real conflict and tension at their core. As Baby Tsina turns into a masterful dissection of loyalty, Ricardo Lee's dialogue expresses the characters’ way of maneuvering around emotional responsibility, of circumventing the betrayals that are lingering in plain sight. This conflict builds for long sequences before erupting in stunning moments of physical violence. In this very banal-looking world, unfulfilled desire turns sour from all the repression and guilt. Baby and Roy's conversations grow shorter and more kinetic, jumping past the traditional banter. The unique ways emotional expression shifts mid-moment really distinguishes the film as an organic work, a morphing cinematic experience that changes with the years to fit our individual perspective of unrequited love. Unlike the showy emotional relationships in Abaya’s other films, the connection between Baby and Roy feels bonded in actual human emotion. Baby Tsina centers around the title character - played with gusto by an always illuminating Santos. Her tremendous poise, visible at once in the opening credit sequence introducing the tone and protagonist of this very different film. The precisely-edited sequence serves Santos exceedingly well. 

     Presented in its original aspect ratio of 1.85:1 and granted a 1080p transfer, Baby Tsina is sourced from an older master with some obvious limitations. As a result, the technical presentation is somewhat inconsistent. While most close-ups convey fairly decent depth the larger shots tend to look rather flat. During nighttime footage or elsewhere where light is intentionally restricted shadow definition also isn't as good as it should be; select segments are too dark and some detail is lost. Generally speaking colors are stable, but in two different scenes I noticed very light but short color pulsations. There are no traces of sharpening adjustments, but grain should be better exposed and resolved. During a couple of darker segments some light halo effects can be spotted as well. Overall image stability is good. Lastly, a few minor flecks pop up here and there, but there are no large cuts, damage marks, or torn frames. The film has what I consider to be a soundtrack that breathes much easier here than it does on previous video release. Generally speaking, dynamic intensity is more pronounced, but even during the more casual footage there are obvious improvements in terms of depth (these are very easy to hear during the action scenes). However, there is still room for improvement as some nuances in the mid- register appear a bit flat. Baby Tsina is perhaps one of the most successful protagonist Ricardo Lee has crafted. Her desires and motivations are clear, and her thought process is shown in full. And best of all, she feels real.

Screenplay: Ricardo Lee

Musical Director: Willie Cruz

Sound Supervision: Vic Macamay

Production Design: Fiel Zabat

Film Editor: Ike Jarlego, Jr.

Director of Photography: Manolo R. Abaya

Directed By: Marilou Diaz-Abaya

     The self-destructive nature of searching for meaning, for a partner has long fascinated Elwood Perez. In Lupe A Seaman's Wife (Viva Films, 2003), he strips bare that hopeless pursuit. In those diurnal moments, the unexceptional motions that make up a relationship, Perez disinters the pleasures (however brief) and pain of love. Lupe (Andrea del Rosario) is longing for love. Hers is a Sisyphean desperation. Lupe is a woman with a powerful erotic drive and an indefatigable penchant for verbalizing her emotions. We first find Lupe having energetic sex with her husband Manolo (Leandro Muñoz) humping away and one may wonder if this is a portrait of a liberated woman or a glimpse from the male gaze. Del Rosario is relaxed, nervy, alert and overtly sexy as I can remember seeing her. Perez finds the inexorable beauty (and sadness) in the most corrosive and fugacious of feelings. For Lupe, love is a toxic need. Perez isn’t known for letting his characters have traditionally happy endings and the tragedy here is how normal that feels, how futile love can be for the unlovable. 

     Directed by Ma-an L. Asuncion-Dagñalan, Home Service (Viva Films, 3:16 Media Network, 2023) follows nursing student/massage therapist Happy (Hershie de Leon) as she goes about her business over the course of a few ordinary days–with the film primarily detailing Happy's encounters with clients and friends alike. In cinematic terms, the stunt fails dismally. Once the novelty wears off, there's nothing to hold onto, no meaningful insight into either the character or De Leon herself. There are layers upon layers here-but it’s unclear whether De Leon is a face in search of an expression. That may be the point, or it may be just that De Leon doesn't know how to modulate her performance. Either way, she's a plank, which is not much to build a movie on. Whatever the film has to say is obscured by De Leon's uncommunicative performance. Her persona simply becomes redundant with her role leading to an echo chamber of empty referents. Dagñalan has, as anticipated, infused Home Service with a consistent visual sensibility that initially compensates for the film’s uneventful atmosphere, and there’s little doubt that the almost total lack of context or exposition is, for a little while, not quite as problematic as one might have feared. It does reach a point, however, at which the relentlessly meandering narrative becomes impossible to overlook, with the progressively less-than-enthralling vibe exacerbated by the central character’s underdeveloped nature–as screenwriter Michael Angelo Dagñalan is simply unable (or unwilling) to get inside Happy’s head to a satisfactory degree (i.e. what makes this girl tick? why does she do the things she does? etc). It’s subsequently rather difficult to work up any interest in Happy’s mundane exploits, and although the movie does boast an admittedly authentic feel, Home Service‘s few positive elements are inevitably rendered moot by its ongoing emphasis on small-talk-type conversations. It’s impossible not to wish that the director would pay as much attention to the story as she does to visuals and atmosphere.

     Home Service is ultimately timid and evasive. It relies far too much on its self-consciously oblique approach, which tends to take center stage, and far too little on genuine insight into the world it represents. The filmmaker’s mistake seems to be supposing that the awfulness of most of these people means there is no high drama to be extracted from their lives. Home Service's narrative merely distracts from its dead-end cynicism. Dagñalan's title refers to the services of working students which include whatever a client desires. It's no surprise, the physical contact comes off as cold, clammy, and mechanical. The topics of conversation invariably revolve around money or the ways in which Happy balances her professional life and personal desires, though Dagñalan investigates these subjects with hastiness, routinely linking every character’s behavior and emotion to cash concerns, but going no further. Although there’s hardly a plot to speak of, the tale eventually hinges on Happy’s decision to break her own rules. She finally lets her guard down and is punished accordingly, learning a lesson both she and we, at this point in the proceedings, already know: that there’s no such thing as real passion, only mutual satisfaction.Yet during this signature moment, when her protagonist actually dares to feel something, Dagñalan finds no way to make us invested in her gambit, she has kept everything at arm’s length. 

Screenplay: Michael Angelo Dagñalan

Director of Photography: T.M. Malones

Editor: Gilbert Obispo

Production Design: Jay Custodio

Music: Dek Margaja

Sound Design: Fatima Nerikka Salim

Directed by Ma-an L. Asuncion-Dagñalan

 

     

     Lawrence Fajardo's Raket ni Nanay (Creative Programs, Inc., Indiopendence, National Commission for Culture and the Arts, 2006) is the best film I have seen about the physical creation of art, and the painful bond between an artist and his muse. Mimosa (Sarsi Emmanuelle) arrives at Badong's studio where unpleasantries give way to a sense of nervous social obligation. The reminder of his artistic stasis makes Badong prickly toward Mimosa. He scraps a piece of paper before his drawing takes shape, even the pages look so abstract and nondescript that one wonders what exactly makes Mimosa so special to him. Badong also takes interest in Joy (Tess Jamias) though not in a particularly lustful way. Badong is played by Mark Gil whose eyes can bore through other actors. With his high forehead and sculpted profile, he looks intelligent but is a formidable, threatening intelligence. He never plays the fall-guy. He always knows the story. Sarsi Emmanuel is Mimosa, the woman who inspires him. Startingly beautiful with sensuous lips and deep eyes under arched brows. The artist will attempt to seduce her but he wants more than that. Badong wants to possess her. And he wants to draw from Mimosa's irritating willfulness the inspiration for his rebirth. He must have an abrasive to create. The great central passage of the film involves creation. Fajardo uses a static camera and long takes, he rarely cuts away. We see a blank sheet of paper and the drawing taking shape, his fingers and thumb smearing the washes into rough shapes. 

     Of the performances, there is nothing to be said about Mark Gil except that he communicates exactly what Badong needs from his art and doesn't need many words to do it. Sarsi Emmanuel has an ethereal beauty, but it is her talent that has made her a leading actress of her generation. We quickly feel, without any dialog or behavior to spell it out, Mimosa's nuisance quality. Tess Jamias finds the perfect and difficult note for Joy. Fajardo's use of long takes gives his actors the freedom to modulate their interactions, capturing the incremental steps by which people become more familiar with each other and give themselves over to more bold actions. Close-ups show Mimosa trembling from a combination of embarrassment and exhaustion. Yet it’s in her resistance, not compliance that Badong seems to get the most inspiration as he builds toward his intended masterpiece. Mimosa's willingness to confront the painter has the effect of gradually eroding the distinction between the creation of the painting and what it represents and the studio scenes correspondingly progress from the naturalistic to the impressionistic with Mimosa lit luminously against backgrounds that collapse the distance between the real woman and Badong’s sketches. That fusion of subject and form eventually expands to include the artist himself, most visibly in a scene where both Badong and Mimosa break down undermining the tacit power of artists over their models by placing them on even ground. It’s a direct, cathartic illustration of the film’s deconstruction of accepted artist and muse roles.

Directed By; Lawrence Fajardo

Screenplay: Jim Flores

Cinematography: Julius Salazar

Production Design: Alf Alacapa

Editors: Lawrence Fajardo, Jobin Ballesteros

Original Music: Rachelle Tesoro

Sound Engineer Tad Ermitaño