SARI-SARING SINENG PINOY

     There are so many good things in Halikan Mo at Magpaalam sa Kahapon (Luis Enriquez Films, 1977), but they’re side by side instead of one after the other. They exist in the same film, but the result don't add up. Actually, it has no result–just an ending, leaving us with all of those fine pieces, still waiting to come together. If this were a screenplay and not the final product, you could see how with one more rewrite, it might all fall into place. There are subplots in the movie, but the emotional themes are more intriguing. Maybe the fundamental problem is the point of view. The interesting characters here are the women, but the star is Eddie Rodriguez and so the film is told from his point of view. Watching Halikan Mo at Magpaalam sa Kahapon, it’s easy to linger on issues since the movie itself sputters and sprawls, breathtakingly unaware of how ponderous it is. It’s about the enigma of adultery, which is that people — normal, decent people do it for no reason at all, except that they crave something. Romance. Renewal. A second chance at love. Rodriguez succeeds, but I’m not sure that this is an acting triumph viewers will respond to. In his gloomy, introspective mode, Rodriguez steamrolls every scene with the heaviness of his emotions. He becomes a thick-witted, broodingly stylized hero. The thing is, we’re supposed to be watching Rafael fall in love. Sometimes the movie takes its time and feels real and at other times it makes huge leaps, leaving behind emotional realism and logic. 

     Pilar Pilapil has no trouble showing the emotional range needed in a challenging role. She is a wonderful actress, her elegant femininity contrasts perfectly with Rodriguez. Natalie and Rafael make an intriguing romantic couple. It should be no surprise that Pilapil teams well with Rodriguez. Hilda Koronel plays a stronger character who considers her options and maintains control of the situation. Marina painfully begins to uncover her husband’s affair, she concludes that she must find out everything about his secret life. Marina is not about to let it go and pursues the matter with quiet determination. As tension begins to increase, perhaps more in anticipation than by the inevitable romance. At first, Natalie decides to tell Rafael the truth about her daughter Nanette (Virnadeth). Then the two of them are drawn together in ways not even the movie can explain. Here is a good story sadly marred by undisciplined dramatic direction, heavy footed staging and lack of attention to detail. Although betrayal is filled with dramatic potential, the filmmakers haven't mined the subject of its many riches. But Halikan Mo at Magpaalam sa Kahapon is the kind of movie that won't fit into a nutshell. Director Luis C. Enriquez's films have always refused to work that way. They have managed to be linear while also drifting thoughtfully through the nuances of their characters' behavior with stylistic polish. To be sure, the liability of a certain sogginess accompanies Enriquez's brand of thinking-man's romanticism. Halikan Mo at Magpaalam sa Kahapon incorporates a full reserve of hard-won wisdom about the perils that can befall a marriage.

Supervising Film Editor: Albert Joseph Sr.

Director of Photography: Hermo U. Santos

Story By: Beybs Pizarro-Gulfin

Screenplay: Toto Belano & Ric M. Torres

Musical Director: Rudy Arevalo

Directed By: Luis C. Emriquez

     Nominally, Filipino cinema’s most psychologically fascinating love triangle, Ishmael Bernal's landmark is a hard film to resurrect in a contemporary era that favors logic and emotional literalness over the director’s dreamy sense of the inevitability of disappointment and the invisibility of personal morality. Dalawang Pugad... Isang Ibon (LEA Productions, 1977) stands alongside Ikaw ay Akin (1978) as one of the definitive films of the 1970s, its impact on countless scores of subsequent films is impossible to gauge. If its guilelessness seems a bit dated, a viewing today reads like a well-observed lesson that countless filmmakers incorporated into their work over the following two decades, leaving it not just cogent but an essential piece of cinema history. With an almost insurmountable liberty in his use of the cinematic form, Bernal embraces contradiction to create meaning—Dalawang Pugad... Isang Ibon is sad yet humorous, breathless yet contemplative, universal yet hermetic. It knows of life’s folly so intimately that it is impossibly naïve and its selfless love of the cinema borders on narcissistic. What confirms Dalawang Pugad... Isang Ibon to the status of a flawed gem is Bernal’s inability to reconcile his core of almost surreal melancholy with a more psychologically acute perception of character, something perfected throughout his later efforts like Relasyon (1982) that bears more than a few similarities to this film. The timeline of his plot is impenetrable and his sense of incident is suitably hazy (it only fails him at the hastily staged denouement), but he too easily lets Roy (Romeo Vasquez) and Mel (Mat Ranillo III) as characters, coast by on vague descriptions and archetypes rather than example. Mel is too easily reduced to his lack of action and is occasionally forgotten, while there is repeated discussion of his proclivities as a ladies’ man without discernment as to what drives his appetites or makes him so appealing to the opposite sex. Roy and Mel instinctively intellectualize themselves to the point where it is possible they exist only within the reality of their own minds and thus neither actor is able to give a performance that captures the imagination. 

     Terry (Vilma Santos) whose own frivolity may be her way of dealing with an underlying and serious sense of dissatisfaction. She is easy to fall in love with — the character is beautiful, charming and intelligent. The very things that mark her as a mesmerizing woman – her daring and self-determination, her refusal to play by patriarchal rules – also, in some ways, stoke her discontent. It’s inevitable, then, that her attention will eventually turn to Roy. Dalawang Pugad... Isang Ibon is really Terry’s film. This is Vilma Santos’s first great performance, all the greater because of the art with which she presents Terry’s resentment. A lesser actress might have made Terry mad or hysterical, but although madness and hysteria are uncoiling beneath the surface, Terry depends mostly on unpredictability — on a fundamental unwillingness to behave as expected. She shocks her parents as a way of testing them. Dalawang Pugad... Isang Ibon is about love in its many faces and disguises. It isn't just about the love of Roy and Mel for Terry or about the variations of her feelings for the two of them, separately and together. In spite of his understanding and images of tenderness, joy, fun, cosiness, idyllic feelings of all kinds in Dalawamg Pugad... Isang Ibon, Bernal keeps himself, to just the right degree, out of it. He never makes the mistake of confounding himself, as creator, so that you never get his own attitude towards Terry, or any comment on her spirit and behavior. Bernal is inarguably the star of the film and his presence alone justifies Dalawang Pugad... Isang Ibon’s almost immediate introduction into the canon of greatness as well as its enduring appeal. His generosity in creating fleeting throwaway moments that teem with detail and emotional resonance is unparalleled and the autonomy of his camerawork is galvanizing. Dalawang Pugad... Isang Ibon, as a whole, is as singular as its director. The berth of his sensitivity is so wide that the film seems less a creation of artifice than a pipeline straight into his emotional being. If the finale feels a bit sudden, perhaps that’s because we’re only viewing it within the context of a romantic triangle. Widened out, it’s the story of love – in all sorts of forms.

Art Director: Bobby Bautista

Director of Cinematography: Nonong Rasca

Sound Supervisor: Luis S. Reyes

Film Editor: Nonoy Santillan

Music: The Vanishing Tribe

Screenplay: Ishmael Bernal

Direction: Ishmael Bernal

      While movies such as Paluwagan (Vivamax, Pelikula Indiopendent, 2024) don't exactly depend upon a wealth of logic, such an obvious gap is all too common in a film that survives solely upon the strength of its talented cast. Director Roman Perez Jr. has chosen his actors well. A trio of performers each at the top of their game playing shrewdly on their respective strengths to create three compelling characters. Victor Relosa, in a role he can sink his teeth into really nails the vulnerability caused by Hector’s predicament. There are moments when I was watching his eyes and body language thinking to myself that this is as impactful as Relosa’s devastating performance in Jerry Lopez Sineneng's Rita (2024). Micaella Raz has become quite adept in roles that suggest a certain physical frailty and vulnerability, especially when it can be stoked into wounded fury and ferocity. She evokes the viewer’s total sympathies as Julia. Perez uses Shiena Yu to excellent effect. Even at her most centered, Yu grants Marites a perpetual internal desperation. It is entirely possible that you will find yourself surprised by exactly what unfolds in Paluwagan, while Perez does his best to keep us guessing, he hits a home run by casting Relosa, Raz and Yu, actors able to portray parts with the same steady presence. The result is that even as you've decided exactly what's going on, the three principals convincingly plant continued doubts. 

     Julia's narrative voice has Perez keeping the plot brisk, taut and focused. It’s a work of wonderful manipulation because the story remains firmly about Hector. Perez effectively ratchets up the tension with cinematic devices such as closeups and noisy startles from, say, a helicopter crash overhead. It's a tried-and-true device, but one that's justifiable here as a reflection of the characters’ state of mind. To say more would spoil the surprises. Perez steers the story toward its inevitable revelations with an old-fashioned sense of tension. The viewer, meanwhile, is a little more patient. Thanks to the director's steady pacing and unsettling atmosphere. Every gesture makes sense and is consistent with the truth as revealed. Relosa, in particular, takes honors for his smart, unshowy work. Perez does a good job at giving his actors a playground that adheres strongly to genre conventions, but with a bit more mature leeway. Amnesia has driven plots throughout a broad spread of genres. The biggest difference is, however, that Hector isn't pursuing his own past so much as he’s having it thrust upon him. Perez has a nicely tuned eye, and the careful look of the film (shot by Albert Banzon of Adan and Salakab) may be its best attribute. Paluwagan is small-scale, but it succeeds in telling a story. 

Musical Scorer: Dek Margaja

Sound Designer: Alex Tomboc, Lamberto Casas Jr.

Editor: Aaron Alegre

Production Designer: JC Catiggay

Director of Photography: Albert Banzon

Screenplay: Ronald Perez

A Film By: Roman Perez Jr.

     For filmmaker Lawrence Fajardo, social interaction with the audience is far more important than sexual interaction on the screen. Some of the men solicit attention, others determined to avoid it. But all are in search of human connection however short or sordid. Cinema Parausan, one of Erotica Manila’s (Vivamax, 2023) four episodes functions best in its voyeuristic, sociological mode, offering fragmentary glimpses of complicated lives and the complicated social rituals that shape them. Lorna (Azi Acosta) and Gab (Alex Medina) are acting out an elaborate choreography of desire and denial. There is no need for secondhand moralizing in the presence of such rich and varied human material. Girl 11 is predicated on the power of loneliness and longing, an inarticulate desire to connect to life and this desire delivers the dramatic thrust. Each emotional misfire provides a new layer of meaning. Girl 11 is governed by a narrator, in this case Manila Daily journalist Steven (Joseph Elizalde) whose world folds into and out of itself. Fajardo demonstrates with the execution of the last line of dialogue, one of devastating, succinct finality and all that leads up to it, a mastery of dialogue as sound and sound as delivered through the cinema-specific device of voiceover narration. The MILF and the OJT, mixes an existential study in anomie with comedy in the person of haughty actress Beatrice (Mercedes Cabral). Her attitude gives a predatory (even proto-cougar) quality. Less interested in the fluidic facts that dominate teen sex comedies, The MILF and the OJT examines varieties of discomfort. Fajardo specializes in extruding just enough of the vulnerability underlying Beatrice’s facade, never better than in the scene where she lays out her expectations.