She's the One (2013)

Mae Cruz's She's the One: Just One of Too Many

It’s all been done before. Jolina Magdangal, in fact, has made a very lucrative career in the 90’s by playing exaggeratedly chirpy women who harbor secret longings for unassuming best friends, usually played by erstwhile onscreen partner Marvin Agustin.

Then there is Rory B. Quintos’ Mangarap Ka (1995) had Claudine Barretto and Mark Anthony Fernandez play best friends-turned-lovers in a story set amidst competitions and ambitions that only the University of the Philippines can offer. More recent is Ruel S. Bayani’s Paano na Kaya? (2010), based on a hit song that sums up the dilemmas of being consumed by hidden affections for a best friend, where Kim Chiu quietly suffers while Gerald Andersson falls desperately out of his valued relationships. Perhaps the most impressive of the lot is Jose Javier Reyes’ Kung Ako na Lang Sana (2003), where Aga Muhlach and Sharon Cuneta play best friends who only discover they were meant for each other after living through their lives, too busy with careers or failed love stories to acknowledge the fact that they like and love each other.

There is simply something about romances blossoming out of mere friendship that is so attractive to Filipinos. It is perhaps because these love stories represent the most realistic of escapist romances, since there are no requirements of fated romantics facing glaring odds that their truest love will have to withstand. It only requires what most of us might already have: a best friend who we may have fancied as our one true love.

Thus, any expectation for innovation from Mae Cruz’s She’s the One can only lead to disappointment. It briefly delights only because it tells a story that is all too familiar and all too comforting. The film does not have any ambitions of reinventing the wheel. In fact, it is stubbornly precise in following its formula. This stubbornness, relieved only by a few attempts at placing the tired love story into the present day world that is dominated by social media, can only lead to a film with very meager charms, reliant mostly on whatever charisma its leads can muster out of playing boilerplate characters.

Cat (Bea Alonzo) has always loved Wacky (Dingdong Dantes). However, because she knows Wacky is too busy playing playboy with his many women, he relegates herself as his best friend. Little does she know, Wacky actually also has feelings for her. When David (Enrique Gil), a college student who happens to capture a video of Cat changing the tires of her car in the rain, starts expressing his inexplicable love for Cat through social media, things start to fall in place. The three become entangled in a romance that can only be set right by Cat and Wacky admitting the feelings for each other that they have hidden for so long.

Cruz does attempt to excite with only details that allow the story to stray a bit from its all-too-familiar path. Along the way, Cruz details the difficulties of maintaining a relationship that is gapped by a very wide age difference. Also, she situates the love story in a world proliferated by shallow expressions via the ease and convenience of communicating through social media, she touches the surface of how impulsive, and perhaps trivial, relationships, romantic or otherwise, have become.

Predictability, however, is still a given in these kinds of romances. Despite the attempts to color their fictional world, Cat and Wacky will end up together, leaving David, surprisingly selfless all of a sudden, giving up for the sake of a clean resolution. Absent any realistic struggle for love, the film’s easy resolution seems a tad too insincere and manufactures. It seems to be more a result of the impulsive feelings this generation represents than real yearning. Given that, Cat and Wacky may actually deserve the very hollow happy ending they get: cold and drenched in beautiful but fake rain.

(First published in Rappler.)

Every Breath U Take (2012)

Every Breath U Take (Mae Czarina Cruz, 2012)

One fateful Valentine’s night, virginal Majoy (Angelica Panganiban), whose time-bound ovaries are severely in need of a suitable sperm donor lest they never be used again, meets Leo (Piolo Pascual), a bigshot real estate broker whose skill in wooing women can only be matched by his aversion to serious relationships, in the restaurant where she was supposed to meet her Valentine’s date. Majoy’s absentee date is Ji-soon (Ryan Bang), a hopelessly romantic Korean man whose long-awaited and probably well-deserved opportunity to prove his love to Majoy was foiled when on the night of their first date, his car crashes into another car, which just so happens to be driven by the eldest brother (Smokey Manoloto) of Leo’s latest scorned sexual conquest (Wendy Valdez), who, in a streak of post-break-up insanity, contracts the rest of his male siblings (Joross Gamboa and Carlos Agassi) to do everything they can to force Leo back so that they can be wed.

Every Breath U Take is more a carefree screwball than a careless rom-com. Since Star Cinema has cornered the Philippine market with its generic romances that offer a dash of humor and a sliver of drama, it has always been careful in maintaining the formula of unbelievably pretty protagonists, played by actors and actresses who are marketed as love teams, with particular backstories suddenly confronted with the utmost dilemma of falling in love with each other. Thankfully, the film courageously skips key elements of the formula to inject an internal logic of well-timed guffaws and out-of-this world coincidences that are not only unbelievable and farfetched but also fittingly entertaining.

In the film, the characters do fall in love, yet that brand of love they profess is hardly the noble and idealistic type that the mainstream studio repeatedly espouses in its products. The film’s brand of love is not befuddled by weepy needs for fulfilment, whether it comes from the self, parents, or society, but is simply more straightforward, or if we are to be blunt about it, more shallow. Majoy simply wants to find her fated prince charming before her ovaries stop producing eggs. Leo simply wants that diversion where his land-selling skills can also be applied. The other characters are similarly situated. Yet despite the unabashed lack of motivation for their respective romantic endeavors, Mae Czarina Cruz was successful to maintain the same swooning sheen that it shares with Star Cinema’s other romances.

Even the casting of Panganiban and Pascual seems to be unburdened with the ulterior motive of establishing a love duo that would hopefully earn for themselves a few more films together and for the studio several more millions of pesos worth of sold tickets. It feels like Panganiban and Pascual were casted not because their pairing can sell the most tickets and can usher in another lucrative pairing involving very bankable celebrities but simply because they fit their roles. The lack of chemistry between the leads is made up mostly by their willingness to take part in the experimentation.

Panganiban, for example, becomes the antithesis of the Star Cinema heroine, which is simply a character that is so written to be played by any actress because that character is simply a vessel of whatever trait that is forwarded by the usually thin narratives of the typical Star Cinema rom-com. The character of Majoy seems to be precisely a Panganiban vehicle. Although not in the same vein as the ones that are usually lauded by critics and the press in their yearly acting ceremonies, Majoy’s character is an acting piece that requires Panganiban’s fascinating ability to mix the unassuming naiveté of a sexual first-timer and the desperation of a libidinous nympho to great comedic effect. Pascual, on the other hand, gamely allows himself to be objectified.

In reality, Every Breath U Take is nothing to be excited for. It is also nothing to be ashamed of. It is what it is, a well-produced, amply directed, and satisfactorily acted romp. In a climate where the well-fed and patronized mainstream producers have gotten used to the comfort of using less and less imagination and more and more reliance on the elementary parts of a sure-fire hit, a film like this, with all its exaggerations and unforgivably apparent lapses in reality in exchange for laughs and wonderment is as invaluable as a breath of fresh air.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Babe, I Love You (2010)

Babe, I Love You (Mae Czarina Cruz, 2010)

With its lay of claim on the corniest of the many corny verses in the 1979 Styx hit Babe to christen its latest film, Star Cinema kills any existing expectation for anything else than unabashed mushiness from this film. Babe, I Love You, helmed by T.V. soap director Mae Czarina Cruz, tells the story of Nico Veneracion (Sam Milby), an architecture professor from an affluent family who unwittingly at first, but after a series of perspective-changing experiences, freely falls for Sasa Sanchez (Anne Curtis), a boisterous yet charming promo-girl. This derivative rich boy-poor girl romance gets the job of providing slight and momentary pleasures done without even trying, especially since the film has in its disposal the ingenious pairing of two impossibly good-looking real life ex-lovers who are currently two of the most bankable entertainers in the country.

It is therefore inevitable that much of the film is spent in exploiting its leads (the numerous scenes where Curtis is in a skimpy but still family-friendly bikinis; that scene inside the beach cabin where Milby gets to show-off his chiseled body) and their manufactured chemistry (the lovey-dovey line readings; and the scenarios that are ingeniously written in to result in bubbles of romantic fantasy). The first part of the film follows the two leads in their budding romantic relationship that redundantly seesaws back and forth from hate to love. As soon as Sasa sees Nico from across the bar, and everything starts to move slower and familiar intro of the Styx ballad starts to play to cinematically portray that funny feeling of love at first sight, the film sashays forward, gradually putting the pieces together for the expected happy ending.

So as Nico attempts to go about his life to the pleasure of his stubbornly stern mother (Laurice Guillen, who improves on the largely underwritten role with her satisfyingly subtle performance), Sasa's bombastic swagger and oftentimes unreasonable demands push him to stray from the path he had worked so hard on. These sufficiently cutesy episodes where their worlds abruptly meet resulting in various comedic situations make up for most of the film’s light charms. However, when the film attempts to evolve these invested charms into actual romance or tinges of serious drama, it fails. The blame, I believe, cannot be directed towards the actors or any of the creative team who have managed to concoct a bubbly tale out of a rote idea. The blame falls on the policy decision of Star Cinema to keep things light, which is commercially logical (their films nowadays are made for entertainment and relaxation, not for art), but narratively faulty. Allow me to explain further.

Sasa’s world, which comes alive at night when thirsty men go out to prowl for a quick fix from their day-to-day routine, is as colorful as the personality Curtis grants her character. Her mother (a delightful Tetchie Agbayani in an unfortunately very limited role) has spawned four children from four different fathers of different races. What results is a peculiar family of different hair, skin and faces. Yet despite that peculiarity, the family is as Filipino as they come, with mornings spent cacophonously with all of them lining up for the single bathroom as they one by one leave the house for their individual trips, and evenings are spent with all of them together, crowding in the small dining area and just enjoying what little there is to enjoy in their humbles lives. This is distinctly strange for Nico, whose life in his mansion-like has always been structured, predictable and dictated not by spontaneity but my rules and mores. These varying details, generously sprinkled throughout to film to maximize the drama, and enunciate the odds that the two would-be lovers would have to face.

It gets more complicated. Sasa’s world is more than just her poverty and her job. It also involves the repercussions of her poverty and her decision to augment that poverty by peddling her good looks, which inevitably includes having slept with some of her customers (in the film, she slept with one of Nico’s family friends). The film, at the very least, recognizes this reality, belatedly molding Sasa from innocent victim of third-world economic injustice to a self-aware participant in her own corruption. She is tainted, yet in true-to-fairy-tale fashion, she is granted a fantabulous hope that the newly-discovered pure (in cinematic terms) love would cure her, or at least motivate her to live to be worthy of that love. This will assuredly excite viewers who favor moralistic themes that connote an innate goodness that is easily redeemable if inadvertently lost.

The gravity of Sasa’s infractions may be argued to be capable of being forgiven or forgotten (as against Nico’s own impassioned query in the film’s lone serious dramatic moment, “You think it’s that easy, just because it happened in the past?”), yet, even if such is forgiven or forgotten, it is simply ludicrous, at least in a world that is governed by real life logic, that a clean-enough slate, even with the weight of a well-earned university diploma, can possibly be achieved, and if so achieved, can result in the perfect fairy tale ending that the film would have its audience believe. Quite simply, the film lazily focused too much on bridging the classes and personalities of its lovers when it could and should have focused on bridging a man of personal and familial strict moral convictions and a woman whose morality has been compromised by a mixture of fate and choice.

But as I have said, the film’s title says it all and to expect more is nothing more than a foolish endeavor (something I endeavored to do because these quixotic attempts to lay some sense to these capitalist film studios can be fun). In summary, it seems that in the film’s critic-proof world, a world that exists within Star Cinema’s own laws of physics and relationships, “love is a many-splendored thing,” “love will keep us alive” and “all you need is love.” Forgive me. I am just so overwhelmed with the power of love, I can't help but sing.

(Cross-published on Twitch)