Pop for All Seasons

“Balot”
Directed by Marius Talampas
Written by Greggy Gregorio & Ash Vidal

Casanova cornered in “Surprise, Surprise.”

Once in a while popular culture bestows a piece that most of us can take to heart without having to burn our wallets or spend hours to track it down and watch it. The fact that film historian and curator Paolo Cherchi Usai could include “Surprise, Surprise” (dir. Frank Budgen, 1991), a British Airways commercial, in his list of all-time ten-best entries for Sight & Sound magazine’s 2002 survey, demonstrates how canon-formation rules about budget, running time, reception, and authorial talent don’t have to limit our capacity to recognize when a rare exception, originating from nothing but intelligent and intensive cultural assimilation and processing, comes along.

11011The whole point about “Surprise, Surprise,” as those of us who might have seen it on a streaming source have realized, is that despite its “universal” predicament of a two-timer caught in the act, it could be better appreciated by those who could identify more closely with the ad’s audience and their culture, if not those who were situated in the theater where the reflexive event took place. A recent advertising short, titled “Balot” and produced by the still-youthful Gigil Agency[1] for the Philippine branch of Royal Crown Cola, requires even further preparation for those unfamiliar with Philippine culture; those whose encounters span decades will, needless to add, possess greater advantages.

11011Prior to “Balot,” RC Cola was in fact better known for absurdist Japanese-style ad products, always humorous but occasionally lacking in what Noypi pop-culture experts would term hugot (roughly, emo-content). Gigil itself attained some notoriety for a pandemic-themed beauty ad that had PC viewers in fits of (sanitized) hand-wringing, forcing its sponsor to pull out the presentation. “Balot” takes its own share of risks, but these pay off in various degrees of satisfaction, primarily because the creative team opted to wholeheartedly embrace the culture that its target audience presumably shares.

11011It opens with a mother calling her family together as she spreads on the dining table the treats she was able to take home (hence the title, since balot literally means wrapping up) from a neighbor’s birthday party. As she starts taking out increasingly impressive dishes from her bag, a faint breeze blowing on her family’s faces suggests that myth-making is about to take place. When an entire pot of rice is followed by a whole roast piglet, the strains of a fondly remembered movie theme song begin playing, with a somewhat familiar voice crooning the somewhat apt stanza that begins with “Balutin mo ako ng hiwaga ng iyong pagmamahal” (Wrap me up in the wonder of your love).[2]

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Eken Afuang Matsunaga as Sharon Cuneta in “Balot.”

11011The song continues as party balloons float up from the mother’s bag, followed by the birthday celebrator, a party clown, and finally the song’s singer, Sharon Cuneta. The cultural insight this revelation interplays with is that the act of taking home excess food from a gathering was made less potentially embarrassing by people euphemistically calling it “sharon” – as in “I’ll sharon whatever remains of that later.” When Cuneta herself found out, she good-naturedly hailed and celebrated the appropriation of her name in one of her recent social media posts, in the same teasing spirit that the advert performs. When the extra-large soft drink product is finally taken out and poured, its label descriptor states “Mega Litro,” once more an acknowledgment of Cuneta’s stature as the final multimedia star in Philippine pop culture, prior to its splintering into the several niches that typify millennial-era conditions.

11011In a social-media exchange, Cuneta specialist Jerrick Josue David (not a relation) further explained why the Sharon performance in “Balot” had that touch of the uncanny about it, beyond the narrative’s own marvelous turn. “Bituing Walang Ningning” (“Star without Sparkle,” from the eponymous 1985 film) may have been Cuneta’s most successful movie theme song, but neither singer nor voice in the ad was literally Sharon herself. Like the film as a whole, the impersonation – by drag artist Eken Afuang Matsunaga, with vocals by Leah Patricio – functions as a freestanding star tribute. This proceeds from another Sharonian quality claimed nearly exclusively by the country’s biggest star, Nora Aunor: only these two have on record the presence of drag queens drawn directly from their mass adulators, whose professional careers are premised on replicating their idols’ respective personas.[3] (Sadly, Cuneta’s most famous impersonator, Ate Shawee, passed away during the pandemic.)

11011“Balot” will be capable of sustaining a few theoretical discussions for those inclined to swing in that direction. The fusion of fantastic elements with an identifiably lower-class context could be one starting point, alongside the fearless deployment of narrative elements associated with mainstream (a.k.a. “masa”) aesthetics coupled with a reflexive thrust more audacious than what “Surprise, Surprise” attempted – all packed within a shorter running time. Those who feel guilty about immersing in the manifold pleasures the ad conveys might want to track the points where their educational training made them believe that this element was unworthy of valuation. Perhaps rewatching “Balot,” now or at a later moment, might help clarify these and a few other questions.

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Notes

First published April 24, 2023, as “Sharon Torch Song Used in Absurd Soda Ad” in The FilAm. Thanks to Grace Leyco, Gigil public relations officer, for providing prompt and comprehensive information. Below is an English-subtitled version.

[1] “Gigil” is commonly listed as one of the several foreign words that describe a universally recognizable condition but possess no singular equivalent in English (e.g. see this posted BBC short video report). It denotes a physiological response – the clenching of one’s teeth and fingers in the presence of excessive adorability or, less commonly, severe annoyance. One of the word’s implications is that the expresser has to control herself or she could wind up hurting the object of cuteness, reminiscent of the hyperbolic English expression “I could just eat you up.”

[2] The English translation of the stanza sung in “Balot” is as follows:

Wrap me up in the wonder of your love
Let it blanket this luster that won’t last
I’d rather be a star that doesn’t sparkle
If I could win your endless devotion instead.

From “Bituing Walang Ningning”
(Willy Cruz, 1985)

[3] A stardom-studies link between the far-and-away two genuine stars of the Philippines’s so-called Second Golden Age of Philippine Cinema, Sharon Cuneta and Nora Aunor, was first articulated by global film scholar Bliss Cua Lim. See “Sharon’s Noranian Turn: Stardom, Embodiment, and Language in Philippine Cinema,” Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 31.3 (Fall 2009): 318-58.
Update: The connection between Aunor and RC Cola turned out to have spanned over half a century. After Gigil Agency released its pop-culture entry for 2024, a less well-received parody of Aunor’s prestige vehicle Himala (dir. Ishmael Bernal, 1982), Mauro Feria Tumbocon Jr. posted an eyewitness account. He recollected that when the softdrink had its Philippine launch in 1971, Aunor, who was tapped to announce the product, “had to be flown in a helicopter just to be onstage on time” inasmuch as “a pandemonium of fans swarmed all parts of the national park in Manila” (Facebook, April 14, 2024). More impressively, the photographs and report that accompanied Tumbocon’s account came out in the March 20, 1971, issue of the Philippines Free Press, the country’s most prestigious periodical, where Nick Joaquin had originally published his culture-changing valuation “Golden Girl.”

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