Tuhog (2013)

Tuhog (Veronica Velasco, 2013)

English Translation: Skewered

Veronica Velasco has always found humor in the cruelty of fate. Her films have always been grounded on premises where an act of fate results in absurd and sometimes torturous scenarios that test the limits of humanity.

In I Do (2010), the dream wedding of two teens is constantly delayed by occurrences beyond their control, pitting their youthful love against youthful impatience. In Last Supper No. 3 (2009), a props-man turns into the butt of an overextended joke when he misplaces a wall décor he borrowed from an opportunistic family for an ad campaign, forcing him to experience the frustrating inanities of the Philippine judicial system. In Maling Akala (2007), which Velasco co-directed with Pablo Biglangawa, a chance meeting between two strangers results in a set-up that would hint of a budding romance that turns out to be nothing but an erroneous assumption. Velsaco and Biglangawa’s first feature, Inang Yaya (Mother Nanny, 2006), an emergency forces a nanny to choose between being a mother to her estranged daughter and a nanny to her ward.

Tuhog is spawned from that same obsession with fate’s cruelty. This time, the cruelty approaches the macabre, with three random strangers getting impaled by a steel pole when their passenger bus figures in a freak accident. The absurd situation the three find themselves in is that they are now faced with an even crueller responsibility of choosing who among them would have to perish to save the lives of the other two. The rationale for the need to choose is borne out of writer’s conceit: there are only two operating rooms in the hospital, leaving the unlucky unattended victim to simply bleed and suffer to death.

Velasco and co-writer Laurel quickly abandon the morbid image of skewered strangers in an ill-equipped emergency room to explore the three lives that through a twist of fate have become the subjects of a debate of life’s worth. Tonio (Leo Martinez) is a recent retiree who now finds himself either arguing endlessly with his adult children or reminiscing youth with his best friends over games of cards. His only hope from what seems to be a deadened existence is his sudden dream to put up a bakery. Fiesta (Eugene Domingo) is the toughened conductor of a passenger bus. Her hardened front, a result of having live with her alcoholic and suicidal father, is softened when Nato (Jake Cuenca), her replacement driver who has just recovered from a recent break-up, expresses his love for her. Caloy (Enchong Dee), a student who is far too concerned with his hormones to take his studies seriously, is in a long distance relationship his girlfriend. Having contented himself with the passing pleasures of daydreaming and online flirting in an effort to preserve his virginity for their upcoming anniversary, he now has to face the possibility that his girlfriend has already been sleeping around behind his back.

Beyond the mostly clever writing that rarely feels false or forced, there is also something humorously brutal in the way Velasco and Laurel fashion the three stories with linings of hope and forgiveness only to have them be abruptly suspended with the impalement. There is always that threat that death or some sort of sudden conclusion is just looming around, waiting to foil a life plan, to block a resolution, or to douse a passion.

Unfortunately and perhaps because there are limitations as to what is tolerable in commercial filmmaking, Tuhog never really embraces the darkness that could have complemented its gruesome center-piece. There is very little interaction among the suddenly conjoined victims, considering that their dilemma is one that would naturally excite the demons of self-preservation. Instead, it settles for obvious life lessons, as bluntly mouthed in the film's hurried end by its unnecessary mascot, a destitute drummer boy who every now and then appears in the film to vengefully predict death.

Still, Tuhog is something to behold within the context of a mainstream cinema that shuns experimentation and adventurism. Through convictions and compromises, Velasco and Laurel have come up with a film that successfully bridges the gap between smart and sentimental, eccentric and emotional, quirky and conventional.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

I Do (2010)

I Do (Veronica Velasco, 2010)

Sometimes a kiss is just not enough. After the redundancy and tedium of romancing, fighting, and forgiving that has been the standard storyline of most if not all recent romantic comedies, the pay-off of seeing the onscreen lovers lock lips in slow motion has been quite unrewarding. Tradition demands that the only acceptable conclusion to any romance is a wedding. Veronica Velasco’s I Do endeavors to innovate on traditions by telling the tale, which according to her and co-writer Jinky Laurel is based on a true story, of a couple whose attempts at being wed are often foiled.

Yumi (Erich Gonzalez) is a hopeless romantic whose mission in life is to find the one to tie the knot with in the dream wedding that she has been obsessing over since her younger years. Lance (Enchong Dee), her Chinese boyfriend, is suddenly faced with the decision of marrying her to the chagrin of her strictly traditional Chinese family, when she discovers that their seemingly innocent romance has produced for them an offspring. Amidst cultural differences, financial un-readiness, overbearing families, and the incoherent advices of close friends, they struggle, stumble, and carelessly rush to the finish line, the dream wedding Yumi has been longing for.

Gonzalez and Dee do make a charming couple. It helps that their performances here are grounded on romantic naiveté and youthful cluelessness, making their fated scenario and their sometimes incredulous reactions to that scenario more believable. The supports, on the other hand, are a mixed bag. The performances of veteran comedians Dennis Padilla and Pokwang infuse Yumi’s humble but earnest parents an amiable sheen. The tacked-on friends, with the exception of Janus del Prado’s pathetically enamored best friend who spurts pessimistic love quotes to hide his feelings for Yumi, are more annoying than alluring, adding more to the unnecessary clunk of the film.

Velasco acknowledges the comedy in the obsession with weddings. As the apt conclusion to any love story, the ceremony represents a collective desire of any lover to cap the uncertainties of pre-marital romantic relationships with something that resembles a fairy tale ending. I Do both flourishes and wallows in its overt comedic intent. Although very careful not to tread past the boundaries of what formula dictates, the writing is mostly witty. However, there seems to be an overabundance of wit and a redundancy of some of the comedic efforts, to the point that the dramatic parts, the portions that feel like the soul of the film, are pushed to the margins. It’s not that the film is not funny. With Dennis Padilla and Pokwang lending their comedic mettle to the already absurd situations conjured by Velasco and Laurel, it’s impossible not to be swayed to at least chuckle at some of the gags. Yet the comedy or perhaps the brand of humor utilized that hinders the film from being anything more than a joyous although momentary diversion.

I Do ends not with a kiss, not with a wedding, but in a heartfelt portrait of familial acceptance. It’s the romantic comedy graduating from the romance and the comedy, bursting the bubble that the lovers created for themselves and realizing that the world is not all about them and the exploits they have encountered in the name of their infallible romance. It is also about other people: the parents that can only long to see their daughter happy, the parents that believe they solely know what’s best for their child, the friends, and the dejected lover. Romances should never end with a kiss, or a wedding, or the promise of love for the rest of their now united lives. I Do, for all its faults and indulgences, invested in an ending that feels like a truly happily ever after.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Last Supper No. 3 (2009)

Last Supper No. 3 (Veronica Velasco, 2009)

Schadenfreude is the pleasure one derives out of the misfortune of others. Schadenfreude is probably the reason why Veronica Velasco's Last Supper No. 3, written by Velasco and Jinky Laurel from the actual court records and experiences of Wilson Acuyong who spent two and a half years and thousands of pesos to rid himself of two nuisance suits, is such a pleasurable experience. The film explores, with an adroit grasp of comedy, the suffering of Winston Nañawa (wonderfully played by charismatic Joey Paras), Mr. Acuyong's film persona, under a bizarrely inefficient, absurdly impertinent, grossly corrupt, and atrociously dawdling justice system in the Philippines.

Wilson is an assistant production designer who was tasked to locate a specific prop for a commercial shoot. The prop, an image of Jesus Christ's last supper (a token ornament in any Filipino dining room), was to be chosen out of the many residents of his lower class neighborhood who auditioned their last suppers (the residents lining up, clutching their last suppers, different in make, size, and quality, is a hilarious sight) for the chance of earning a thousand pesos. Three of the dozens of last suppers became finalists. One was chosen and its owner was paid the promised amount. Last supper no. 3, an unremarkable rug with tassels along its edges, owned by Gareth (Jojit Lorenzo) and his mother (Beverly Salviejo), suddenly disappears. Because of that, Wilson, along with his assistant Andoy (JM de Guzman), is charged with estafa (swindling) and serious physical injuries (an offshoot of the main case that resulted from an incident after an unsuccessful attempt at reconciling, where Gareth tries to hit Wilson and Andoy with his belt, and Andoy hitting Gareth in revenge, breaking his nose and leading him to come back with and threaten to kill with a replica samurai). Thus begins Wilson's calvary.

Velasco, one half of the directing team (the other half is Pablo Biglangawa) behind Inang Yaya (Mother Nanny, 2007), a lovingly crafted tale about a nanny who divides her time between her daughter and her ward, and Maling Akala (Mistaken Assumption, 2008), a subtle comedy between a pregnant woman and a mysterious man-on-the-run who serendipitously meet in a bus, conceives a movie that out-humors everything she has done. Despite Velasco piling absurdities upon absurdities, made brazen by a conscious insistence on extending Wilson's suffering for comedic effect (schadenfreude: when Wilson takes the public transportation from a shoot in the province to the court in Manila, he is splashed with mud, marathons to follow a cab, gets his shirt stuck to the cab door as he alights thus dragging him along, and all this, holding an oversized pink headdress, only to discover that the hearing was suspended because of the judge's untimely death, we are thoroughly amused), the film does not remain within the realm of comedy and slapstick.

Subtly, it matures. Despite the unfairness of the system and his fate, Wilson still pushes through his case with diligence and a bizarre belief that justice might prevail (or maybe he has just developed a callousness to the exploitation of the system characterized by impersonal lawyers, rabid litigants, and dilapidated courtrooms). At this point of the film, Wilson graduates from being an object of amusement into a tragic figure, everyman's martyr. He has known the system enough to empathize with his opponents, knowing very well that the months and years spent being immersed in the legal stand-off (which he himself experienced, envisioning the legal battle as an acting competition, rehearsing his direct examination script not as if his freedom depended on it, but as if an acting award depended on it), would lead you to believe that what you're fighting for, no matter how petty or skewed, is right and moral. He has come to acknowledge the bamboozlement inflicted by the unapologetically unjust justice system to him, both to him and his opponents. At this point, the amusement dealt by his misfortune transforms into respect. He has survived the journey, with battle scars, eyebags, and a mug mellowed by trials and tribulations.

This is Velasco's outstanding feat. She decides to expose a rotten system through humor yet instead of completely fabricating the story, she allows the case to speak for itself, making the absurdity several notches more alarming. In an inspired decision, she made use (surprisingly with the permission of the Supreme Court) of Manila's Hall of Justice, a building ripe for condemnation that houses the fiscal's offices and trial courts that service an ever-expanding population. The architecture of the building, several floors (connected by stairs because the elevator is usually out of service) of spaces that encircle a useless and unkempt courtyard, further emphasize the system that has been rendered inutile by red tape and bureaucratic complications. Thus, Last Supper No. 3 is funny not only because it centers on a man who was showered with a downpour of misfortune but also because we know it is very real, and the only plausible thing we can do about it is laugh.

Maling Akala (2007)

Maling Akala (Pablo Biglangawa & Veronica Velasco, 2007)
English Title: Mistaken Assumption

A man tries to balance himself in the middle of a rickety wooden bridge. He does the same inside a boat. He also loses grip of a glass which falls and breaks into several shards. An abandoned hut sits in the middle of a picturesquely constructed frame, and on the window sill of the hut is a bowl uncomfortably maintaining its balance against the humping movements of the hut's occupants. Pablo Biglangawa and Veronica Velasco's Maling Akala (Mistaken Assumption) has an almost obsessive interest on balance, whether it be on a bridge, a boat, a window sill, or the camera's frame. It somehow matches the film's inherent theme of the discomfort in living in the middle when one is assured that he sways further on the side, as what JP (a frustratingly flat Victor Basa, ) tries but fails to do in the movie (which is also the theme of Biglangawa and Veronica Velasco's first feature film Inang Yaya (Mother Nanny, 2006), where Maricel Soriano's character struggles to maintain a balance between being a loving mother to her lone daughter and affectionate nanny to her ward).

Like JP, Maling Akala is a film that continuously morphs. It starts out with a chance encounter between the two lead characters, JP and Teta (Jodi Santamaria), aboard a passenger bus to the province. JP, we are hinted by the recurring hazy flashbacks and the little details that Biglangawa and Velasco provide like the tiny blood stain in his branded shirt, his shady get-up that somewhat provides anonymity, and his aversion for the police, is on the run while Teta, as obviously evidenced by the rotundness of her belly, is on the brink of labor. While in the rest stop, Teta goes into labor and caught in an unexpected scenario, JP lends a hand by bringing her to the hospital and paying for her hospital bills. The doctor and the hospital staff mistakenly refer to JP as Teta's husband, and the two adopt the erroneous belief, introducing themselves as a married couple to Teta's parents (for different reasons: JP, to acquire a suitable hiding place in the parents' provincial house; and Teta, to give her childbirth a semblance of propriety in the eyes of her parents, which would later on evolve into a desire to turn the temporary ruse into reality).

It's the prime set-up for a timeless love story, at least in the eyes of Teta and the rest of us who, like her, still believe that love makes the world go round. The fortuitousness of their meeting, the gentleness and non-obligatory kindness of JP, and the seeming perfectness of it all would cloud any hopeless romantic's senses of what is real and not, what is possible and not. On the other hand, the set-up can also be perceived as the beginnings of a crime thriller, a daring mystery, a Filipino noir. In JP's mind, the present world revolves around the crime he has committed and is seeking absolution from to the point that his connivance with Teta becomes nothing more than a procedure for him to buy more time from justice, any attribution of emotion is utterly impossible.

Sadly, the film seems to be less deliberate and subtle than I would have wanted (Biglangawa and Velasco have a tendency for trite sentimentality, and mawkish visual and musical cues, as with Inang Yaya; that is something they probably learned while working in advertising, where every second paid by a client for must be loaded with emotions and information, thus the tendency to overexpand gestures and abandon subtlety). The film would often indulge in prolonged moments of solitary bliss (as when JP first wakes up in the provincial house, enjoying the surrounding, his body frame one with the beautiful surroundings, enough to be understood as commercial for tourism), cheesy dialogue, and a visual style that is not well-suited for the type of film they are intending to make. I prefer more somber visuals (like the ones Tsai Ming-liang or Apichatpong Weerasethakul use in their thinking-men's comedies), indicative of an unapparent yet slowly surfacing humorous core instead of Maling Akala's candy-colored commercial hues and overly-scenic framing, that pay too much attention to itself.

What Biglangawa and Velasco try to achieve in Maling Akala is a risky feat, contemplating the differing motivations of the two characters within the movie without necessarily harmonizing them. The film is not a romantic thriller, or any other mixed genre critics love throwing around. Maling Akala is essentially a comedy of errors that transforms, if necessary, into romance or mystery, but never both at the same time. It seems that the film is structured in a way that would allude to the main conflict of JP: a person cannot have two jarring personalities, two different roles, have two conflicting attractions at the same time.

Inang Yaya (2006)

Inang Yaya (Pablo Biglangawa & Veronica Velasco, 2006)
English Title: Mother Nanny

Snow globes, cute young faces, bubbles, kids' voices struggling to match a sugary melodic song: the initial scenes of Inang Yaya (Mother Nanny) warned me that this is not a film for the cynical and realist in me. I usually cringe at the sight and sound of kids trying to look cute, but miraculously I was quite tolerant of the first few minutes. Even more miraculous is that I was very tolerant throughout the film. I have never utilized such tolerance for cinematic tearjerkers that use kids and their plights since Maryo J. delos Reyes' Magnifico (2003), but there I was: sitting, munching and swallowing every bit of emotionally manipulative scene with a fanciful glee and memory-dusting gaze.

Inang Yaya starts with Norma vacationing in her province for a few days. We are introduced to her daughter, a very curious and energetic Ruby (Tala Santos) and her mother (Marita Zobel). The mother complains of the very short vacation that is afforded her, and begins to warn her of the possibility that she might not always be there to take care of Ruby while she's in Manila taking care of another person's daughter. The vacation ends with a heartbreaking farewell between the family members. Norma returns to her employers' home. There, she also takes care of the young couple's daughter Louise (Erika Oreta) with a careful combination of sincere affection and professional duty. An emergency forces Norma to bring Ruby to her employers' household. The couple is nice enough to accept their nanny's daughter and even enrolls her in the private school where Louise is enrolled.

I've never been a fan of Maricel Soriano. While I acknowledge her skill, she has ticks and quips I dislike. Consider me a convert after seeing her change within a year from upper-class haunted romantic in Bobi Bonifacio's Numbalikdiwa (2006) to Inang Yaya's kind hearted nanny of humble roots. She is one of the few Filipino actresses who can convincingly play characters of different social dimensions, from films of different genres, with scenes that change from one mood to its opposite end.

However, Soriano doesn't single-handedly carry the film. The two young actresses (Santos and Oreta) manage to be adorable without being generic. The scene where Santos slowly nears Oreta who is playing with her dolls have that innate quality that carries that scene from being seriously overplayed to breezily charming. Also, the film is technically impressive: the musical score (by Nonong Buencamino), the glossy cinematography (by Gary Gardoce), and the relaxed editing (by Randy Gabriel), all contribute to the film's consistent quality.

The cynic and realist in me kept on asking questions: Why is the couple so nice to Norma? Oh, that's utterly impossible unless Norma has tremendous luck to land in such wonderful household when the rest of the Philippines' one million maids are tortured or treated with inhumanity by their employers. But then, those questions and observations are just me begging for something dramatic to happen or at least a tinge of real conflict to arise. Inang Yaya's light plot involves a string of well-placed situations that either push for tears or delight you with a well-earned chuckle. The lack of a real conflict is a sign of weakness for the filmmakers who are either too respectful of their topic (I thought the film is basically a tribute film, and thus, any conflict might make a ripple that could destroy the point of tribute) or just afraid to commit an imperfection that might arise from a cinematic dilemma. The situations, the environment, the characters are all too unrealistically perfect that the point of making a film about them seems questionable.

But the film has been made, and I'm sure the film was based from the very best of the collective Filipino's experience with their yayas or stay-in nannies, which are probably endemic to Filipino culture since these nannies literally become part of the family and have become an indelible part of the childhoods of those privileged enough to have them. I can have no grudge with the film's good-naturedness and I can only commend the filmmakers' acknowledgment of these unsung heroes' sacrifice of being dual mothers (more often than not, feeding a bigger portion of their maternal pie to children of other people) to their natural children and their children out of employment. The plot may be merely a string of heart pounding situations and scenarios that dwell on slight conflicts and the film may not have a dramatic turning point or a climax of epic proportions, but the emotional wallop that is derived from those vignettes of joyous ordinary life is just undeniable.