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1—Private Show
Year of Release: 1984
Director: Chito S. Roño (as Sixto Kayko)
Screenwriter: Ricky Lee
Producer: Clock Work Films International
Cast: Jaclyn Jose, Gino Antonio, Leopoldo Salcedo, Lucita Soriano, Yvonne, Aurora Boulevard, Vicky Varga, Johnny Vicar, Bella Flores, Ella Luansing, Angie Ferro
Myrna is a young but worldly-wise lass who shows up at Ador’s live-sex den to apply as a performer. She falls in love with Jimmy, her regular partner. However, her drug habit and his kidney problems strain their relationship. After breaking up with him, he decides to return to his hometown. She grows increasingly dependent on drugs and becomes indifferent to the worsening decadence in her environment and the degradations being done to her.
2—Curacha: Ang Babaeng Walang Pahinga
English Title: Curacha: A Woman Without Rest
Year of Release: 1998
Director: Chito S. Roño
Screenwriter: Ricky Lee
Producer: Regal Films
Cast: Rosanna Roces, Jaclyn Jose, Ara Mina, Ruby Moreno, Lucita Soriano, Maureen Mauricio, Mike Magat, Dick Israel, Tito Arevalo, Lito Legaspi, Richard Bonnin, Roy Alvarez, Tony Mabesa, Alex Cortez, Tom Olivar
Curacha, a friend of Myrna’s and a live-sex performer herself, witnesses an apparition of the Virgin Mary while praying in church: the lady walks down the altar toward her, slaps her, and she awakens to the announcement of another ongoing coup d’état. Since security forces blockaded the street where she exited, she has to find her way out, only to discover that the rest of the city has also lost its bearing.
Live-sex performers function as an index of the country’s destitution, restoring pornographic spectacle to its voyeuristic theatrical origin. The act of capturing their lives in film raises a paradox—How can a society with a media industry still need live-sex performances?—that, depending on how well the question is answered, can lead to several possible conclusions. In the instance of the martial-law era’s Private Show and the post-martial law period’s Curacha, the viewer is provided with a chronicle of the country’s continuing descent into an abyss of social and moral depravity, notwithstanding an undeniable step-up in the affluence of the elite. A perceptible maturation is also suggested by the casting of the best “bold” performers of their respective periods—the heartbreakingly waifish Jaclyn Jose of the 1980s and the boundlessly voluptuous Rosanna Roces of the ’90s. Both play characters who lose all claims to dignity yet refuse to surrender to unmitigated debauchery by foregrounding the fierce and unyielding combination of talent, warmth, humor, and sensual presence that mark the Filipina as the world has come to know her.
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1—Itanong Mo sa Buwan
English Translation: Go Ask the Moon
English Title: Moon Child
Additional Languages: English & Chabacano de Cavite
Year of Release: 1988
Director: Chito S. Roño
Screenwriter: Armando Lao
Producer: Double M Films
Cast: Mark Gil, Anjo Yllana, Jaclyn Jose, Anita Linda, Tita Muñoz, Susan Africa, Mia Gutierrez, Lucita Soriano, Fernando Morato, Cris Vertido, Resty Vergara, Gamaliel Viray, Alan Glinoga, Jing Jing Manaloto, Aljon Jimenez, Jojo Reyes, Bodjie Pascua, Archi Adamos, PETA Kalinangan Ensemble
In the course of a botched bank robbery, a teller, Josie, is taken hostage by Angel, when his partner is killed. He takes her to the isolated rural home of Juana, an elderly lady. After Josie is rescued and Angel is seriously wounded, her husband, Sammy, has difficulty coming to terms with her version of events, especially since his mother is intent on maligning the woman he married. Conflicting statements made by Juana as well as the hospitalized Angel cast further doubt not just on Josie’s narrative but on her character as well.
2—La Vida Rosa
English Title: The Life of Rosa
Additional Languages: English & Chabacano de Cavite
Year of Release: 2001
Director: Chito S. Roño
Screenwriter: Armando Lao
Producer: Star Cinema
Cast: Rosanna Roces, Diether Ocampo, Liza Lorena, Jiro Manio, Angel Aquino, Pen Medina, Jhong Hilario, Nonie Buencamino, Vic Diaz, Albert Martinez, Aurora Yumul, Olga Natividad, Katrina Nazario, Ihman Esturco, Rey Behar, Angie Ferro, Dodie Acuña, Joe Gruta, Cris Vertido, Krystle Zamora, Jackie Castillejos, Cris Michelena, Irma Adlawan, Tom Olivar, Connie Chua, Aurora Uding
After swiping a car from a mark charmed by Rosa, Dado decides he wants to transform the vehicle into a taxicab. Their decision incenses Tiyong, their gangleader, who sets in motion a series of events that leads to Dado whacking him. Lupo, Tiyong’s right-hand person, accepts the assassination since it allows him to take over the criminal organization. Rosa and Dado, however, dream of their own racket, one that will allow them to resettle Rosa’s son and blind mother and enable them to live in peace abroad.
Recognizing when a team effort provides productive dividends over time, Chito S. Roño reattempted the same approach that had worked for him with the twin triumphs of Private Show and Curacha: get a gifted scenarist to write material for the most talented sex symbol of the era. The formula didn’t pan out the same way it did for Ricky Lee’s scripts, since La Vida Rosa falters in comparison with Itanong Mo sa Buwan, despite an undeniable upgrade in Roño’s directorial skills. Then again, Itanong Mo surpasses most unruly-woman films anywhere, its novel structure and use of flashback enabling the narrative to raise issues not just about the reality of events but also the insidious effects of media celebrity, decades before the internet made this debilitating property of modern existence commonplace. For most of its running time until its main character capitulates to the dictates of her partner’s personal interests, La Vida Rosa similarly relishes its opportunity to function as an objective correlative of its lead performer’s remarkable autobiography.
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Bakit Kay Tagal ng Sandali?
English Translation: Why Does a Moment Take So Long?
English Title: A Moment Too Long
Year of Release: 1990
Director: Chito S. Roño
Screenwriters: Orlando Nadres
With additional dialogue by Emmanuel H. Borlaza
Producer: Viva Films
Cast: Dina Bonnevie, Julio Diaz, Eddie Garcia, Janice de Belen, Charito Solis, Ai-Ai de las Alas, Eva Ramos, Vangie Labalan, Elsa de Venecia, Gamy Viray, Koko Trinidad, Pocholo Montes, Jess Ramos
In his bid to get rich, Ted convinces his girlfriend Niña to marry his ailing and widowed boss, Edmundo. Ted believes that once Edmundo dies, his wealth will be inherited by Niña, which she can then share with her lover. But when Ted’s plan fails, he marries his boss’s daughter after she takes over Edmundo’s company. Soon, Ted and Niña realize how their ambitions extract a price they may each be unprepared to pay.
By its capacity for depicting the plight of women under a patriarchal system, melodrama has always had the potential to cross over into horror, and nowhere in Philippine cinema has that potential been realized than in the constant discharge of blood, sweat, and copious tears manifested in this film. Along the way a curious development takes place: the characters seem to have been aware that the country’s masculinist authoritarian experiment had recently failed, so the women wind up wresting control of the narrative, and wage war, and negotiate peace, with one another. For their part, the ultimately excluded males display some strength, and never of a constructive nature, only when they’re older—which means that eventually, they die off. The director’s benign bemusement with this lurid and giddy state of affairs provides the darkly comic distance that turns the presentation into a display of what literary and cultural critics call the carnivalesque (from Soviet-era scholar Mikhail Bakhtin’s marvelous dissertation), a seriocomic mode that enables its authors to combine contradictory effects such as tears, fears, and pained laughter.
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Alyas Stella Magtanggol
English Translation: Alias Stella Magtanggol
Alternate Title: Stella Magtanggol
Additional Languages: English, Japanese
Year of Release: 1992
Director: Chito S. Roño
Screenwriter: Ricky Lee
Producer: Seiko Films
Cast: Rita Avila, Romnick Sarmenta, Maritoni Fernandez, Gardo Verzosa, Lito Legaspi, Sylvia Sanchez, Vanessa Escaño, Allan Paule, Karen Timbol, Alicia Alonzo, Tony Mabesa, Ray Ventura, Lolie Mara, Dexter Doria, Shirley Tesoro, Evelyn Vargas, Edmund Cupcupin, Turko Cervantes, Dante Javier, Lora Luna
Adopted by a devout rural couple after she was abandoned by her birth mother, Stella grows up alienated from the values of her small town. In high school, the only friendship she maintains is with Wendy, who never runs out of pocket money but has to endure the sadistic treatment of the mayor. Frustrated by the sexual abstinence of her wholesome boyfriend, Stella turns to the family driver for stud service. The latter’s wife stabs him out of jealousy and he falls off a rooftop, where he and Stella were trysting, exposing their affair to the rest of the townspeople. After her father suffers a fatal heart attack because of her scandal, her mother banishes her from home. She adopts her mother’s family name, Magtanggol, and lives with Wendy, but they have to flee after the mayor’s heavy-handedness traumatizes her friend, nearly killing her. Both women wind up in Manila’s red-light district, where Stella finds gainful employment as a nightclub singer while manipulating the blandishments of a rich suitor and fooling around with a younger lover. Her strokes of good fortune, however, are compromised by her discovery that her boyfriend turns out to have a violently jealous streak.
A rare instance in Philippine cinema where an unruly-woman tale resolves in the main character’s favor without subjecting her to death, disability, or religious conversion, Alyas Stella Magtanggol even more surprisingly claims to have been based on a real-life story. The narrative facilitates this arrangement by devising a parallel scenario where Stella’s BFF is the character who pays the price of faithfully observing patriarchal and familial demands, thus making understandable Stella’s insistence on personal independence and readiness to rebel when her autonomy is challenged. A number of other ethical dictates are upended as well, starting with the configuration of homespun rusticity as an ideal to be upheld over productive female labor, even if the only available option happens to be sex work. The expected dangers of underworld involvement make their appearance even with a supposedly benign and cowardly potentate, but the film also provides a reversal in the historically specific disaster caused by the pyroclastic mudflows of Mount Pinatubo’s 1991 eruption: the now-abandoned structures half-buried in lahar, made to represent their former occupants’ defeated aspirations, serve as useful hiding places for people on the run in ASM. When the surviving characters find themselves in the same territory during the film’s climax, we find ourselves grasping for hope among the ruins, as they do as well.
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Bata Bata Paano Ka Ginawa?
English Translation: Little Child, How Were You Created?
English Title: Lea’s Story
Year of Release: 1998
Director: Chito S. Roño
Screenwriter: Lualhati Bautista
Based on her novel
Producer: Star Cinema Productions
Cast: Vilma Santos, Carlo Aquino, Serena Dalrymple, Albert Martinez, Ariel Rivera, Raymond Bagatsing, Cherry Pie Picache, Angel Aquino, Rosemarie Gil, Dexter Doria, Cita Astals, Andrea del Rosario, Lucy Quinto, Menggie Cobarrubias
For years, Lea has juggled both social work and single motherhood, for the sake of her children Ojie and Maya. But things get complicated when Raffy, Ojie’s father, returns with plans to bring along his son when he migrates to the US with his new wife. Worse, Maya’s father Ding often lashes out to mask his shortcomings as Lea’s live-in partner. As tensions rise, Lea learns what surviving in a patriarchal system really entails.
All the usual reservations about middle-class feminism get tempered by a necessary qualification when situated in a Third-World context. Lea, the central character of Bata Bata Paano Ka Ginawa?, is sufficiently gender-enlightened to know that she cannot expect any treatment equal to the men she opts to live with and live like. Hence in contrast with them, she winds up having to juggle egotistic partners, nosy neighbors, judgmental colleagues (in an educational institution, at that), and freaked-out offspring, all the while scrambling to earn just enough to maintain her independence. An overlay of irony stems from the fact that the film’s setting, like the source novel’s, was more or less after a people’s movement succeeded in ousting a fascist dictatorship, though not the oligarchic, clerical, and foreign-imperialist dominions that gave rise to it. After a few decades playing catch-up with Nora Aunor despite prematurely matching her in terms of local recognition, Vilma Santos manages to come into her own like never before or since. In BBPKG? she dexterously calibrates her trademark mix of charm, vulnerability, calculation, stubbornness, and restrained lust and rage into an unambiguously intoxicating cocktail, reminiscent of Aunor at her best. As a consequence, the movie’s thematic complexities and more-bitter-than-sweet conclusions can be gulped down without much resentment.
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Caregiver
Year of Release: 2008
Director: Chito S. Roño
Screenwriter: Chris Martinez
Based on a story by Jewel C. Castro, Chris Martinez, Chito S. Roño
Producers: ABS-CBN Film Productions & Star Cinema
Cast: Sharon Cuneta, John Estrada, Rica Peralejo, John Manalo, Makisig Morales, Jhong Hilario, Mickey Ferriols, Lotlot de Leon, Saul Reichlin, Matthew Rutherford, Claire Jeater, Marita Zobel, Anita Linda, Monique Wilson, Ima Castro, Boots Anson-Roa, Dexter Doria, Neil Ryan Sese, Gary Granada
Sarah Gonzales has to bid farewell to her colleagues, students, and family members when her husband, Teddy, asks her to join him abroad. She will be giving up a bright career as an English teacher to work as a caregiver, in exchange for far better pay. In London, she worries about Teddy’s profligacy and discovers he has not yet been certified as a nurse. In the meanwhile, a grumpy elderly patient, Mr. Morgan, finds in Sarah’s charm and honesty the kind of attention that his family failed to provide him with.
Released during the period when local critics considered mainstream releases unworthy of their attention, Caregiver stands as proof that blind willingness to mimic Western-sourced aesthetic evaluation standards leads down nonsensical and sometimes harmful pathways. Otherwise, the type of attention lavished on artsy “politicized” exercises that regular audiences would resolutely ignore could have been directed toward a standard-issue product that could finally serve as a useful starter text in comprehending the multilevelled complexities of the country’s labor-export policy. The narrative befittingly focuses on a young mother’s travails (apropos of the statistical reality of Overseas Filipino Worker demographics comprising mostly women), from giving up her expertise in a psychically fulfilling local career in exchange for better-paying menial work abroad, ensuring that the family members who’ll be left behind will continue functioning in her absence, and contending with the several domestic and professional challenges that beset migrants Othered by their race, class, and gender. Sharon Cuneta embodied the character at a perfect juncture in her career trajectory as a mature performer capable of acknowledging all manner of predicaments, complemented by perfectly cast players including foreign actors. The film portrays its OFW characters’ triumph in bittersweet terms—a final observational truth that ultimately reflects on a system of governance that cares less for its citizens’ capacity to thrive within their country’s borders, among their own people, than for their placement in a global slave economy so as not to stanch the flow of remittances.
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Signal Rock
Additional Languages: English, German, Waray
Year of Release: 2018
Director: Chito S. Roño
Screenwriter: Rody Vera
Producers: Available Light Productions & Regal Films
Cast: Christian Bables, Daria Ramirez, Nanding Josef, Mon Confiado, Elora Españo, Keanna Reeves, Francis Magundayao, Archie Adamos, Sue Prado, Jomari Umpa, Ces Quesada, Kokoy de Santos, Mara Lopez, Ruby Ruiz, Dido de la Paz, Judy Ann Santos (voice)
Intoy serves as go-between of his Finland-based sister Vicky (whom he contacts via the stable reception provided by the Magasang Rock Formation, colloquially called signal rock) and his family. He also helps out various townsfolk in his capacity as jack of all trades, proud member of his community, and occasional delinquent indulged by everyone, including the police chief. When he falls in love with Rachel, however, he realizes that like his sister and the other young women of the town, she might eventually leave him to work elsewhere and marry a rich foreigner for convenience. At this point, his sister informs him that she might lose custody of her daughter to her abusive ex-boyfriend unless Intoy helps her prove that she has the means to support the child. Intoy realizes he has no choice except to call on people to return the favors he had extended them.
Intended as the middle installment in a trilogy on Biri Island in Samar province, Signal Rock distinguishes itself from its predecessor, Badil (Dynamite Fishing, 2013) by being less overtly political yet more impactful via its more extensively developed thematic discourse. Once more, the narrative is focalized via the crisis situations confronted by a young man, who this time needs to solicit the support of his tight-knit community in order to prevent his sister, a migrant wife, from being deported through the machinations of the abusive foreigner that she married. Intoy, the central character, realizes that the same forces that swept up his sister and his best friend’s girlfriend will soon deprive him of his own shot at small-town happiness, and that all he could do is ensure that the women who left maintain enough stature and equanimity so that their role as their respective families’ providers does not get compromised. Yet Signal Rock works out a persuasive critique of the Philippines’s continuing reliance on labor export, by counterposing the benefits (and excesses) of globalization with the manifold pleasures and satisfactions of homespun values and practices. The strategy may seem conventional, but the film turns out to be anything but. The emphasis on male characters, for example, proceeds from the outflow of women from the town into the world of effective overseas slave labor; the remaining citizens’ insistence on indulging in tradition locks them in a cycle of perpetual reliance on foreign-currency remittances; the perjurious claim that the entire town conspires in making is intended to save one of their own, but it also suggests where the tendency of elected officials to engage in plundering the national treasury comes from. Signal Rock is a throwback as well as a tribute to the achievement of the artists of the Marcos dictatorship, who were able to package essential and painful analyses of then-existing conditions in seemingly fun-filled, devil-may-care celebrations of the quotidian. Above all, as much as it casts a distrustful eye on the system that afflicts the most helpless among us, it also invites us to share in extolling the life force and survival instinct of these same people. It would not be such a stretch to realize that the movie embodies not just Filipino characters (literally), but the Filipino spirit itself.
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