Canon Decampment: Joey Gosiengfiao

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La Paloma

Alternate Title: La Paloma: Ang Kalapating Ligaw
English Translation of Alternate Title: Paloma: The Wild Dove
Additional Languages: English, Spanish
Year of Release: 1974 / B&W
Director: Joey Gosiengfiao
Screenwriter: Wilfrido Nolledo
Producer: Juan de la Cruz Productions

Cast: Celia Rodriguez, Orestes Ojeda, Vina Cansino, Mona Lisa, Tommy Abuel, Michael Murray, Angelina Ocampo, Ruel Vernal, Juanito Romulo, Ricky Belmonte, Ruel Vernal, Angge

Following instructions sent her in a letter from her aristocratic lover, Paloma, a famous actress, sets out for his distant manor with her loyal servant. Upon arrival, she discovers that Don Lorenzo de Leon has died; moreover, he was married, and his widow Anida understandably resents her presence. Lorenzo’s mother however insists that she stay on. Joel, an itinerant musician, offers to teach Paloma guitar-playing, but Anida asks him to tend to her garden. The dysfunction between Lorenzo’s mother and wife, with Paloma drawn in, leads to a court case over the disposal of his wealth, that invites the attention of the residents of the town.

The critical consensus on La Paloma upon its release was that it was a noble attempt that somehow fell short. One could more readily see today how the harshness was unfounded. As the closest to an art-film project of the youthful and irreverent Juan de la Cruz Productions, it dared to regurgitate several elements of First Golden Age journeyperson Gerardo de Leon’s Lilet (1971), even appropriating the monochromatic properties of his earlier achievements; notably, that film’s star, Celia Rodriguez (playing La Paloma’s title character), was involved in a long-running press war with Rita Gomez, whom the cognoscenti favored for the same year’s Pagdating sa Dulo (Reaching the Top), Ishmael Bernal’s official debut. La Paloma’s superiority to Lilet would be easier to maintain today, primarily because the campy approach honed by the Juan de la Cruz team trumps the self-conscious seriousness that plagued Manong Gerry since his emergence from the 1950s as a respectable figure. The screenplay furnished by novelist Wilfrido Nolledo revels in the comic-gothic possibilities of the material, imbuing his female characters with wit, cattiness, and a readiness to discard their façades of modesty when hot and hungry hunks wander into view. The older maestro himself was aware that a new generation was emergent and capable of work that experts of his generation could only dream of accomplishing; if only our film critics had been just as prepared.

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Underage

Year of Release: 1980
Director: Joey Gosiengfiao
Screenwriter: Toto Belano
Producer: Regal Films

Cast: Dina Bonnevie, Maricel Soriano, Snooky Serna, Jimi Melendez, Mark Gil, Gabby Concepcion, Bella Flores, Celia Rodriguez, Domingo Sabado, Lucita Soriano, Lily Miraflor, Mila Ocampo

After their mother’s death, teenage sisters Celina, Cecilia, and Corazon are taken by their aunt out of their rural home and into a boarding house in the city. Once there, Celina catches the eye of the school heartthrob, Cecilia bonds with her much older teacher, and Corazon develops feelings for one of the male boarders. But a grave incident will test the girls’ maturity despite their young age.

At his peak, roughly during the late 1970s through the early ’80s, Joey Gosiengfiao was considered the primary purveyor of Pinoy film camp. But “camp” then was popularly misunderstood, since in its original sense, it has to be performed in earnest then read against the grain by its audience in order to attain authenticity. Similarly, Gosiengfiao’s significance had been too eagerly preempted. The fact that his films were usually profitable signaled to left-leaning culturati that he’d been implicated by his own drive for box-office success and the enthusiastic patronage of producers. More than the strangely celebrated Temptation Island, which came out during the same year, and 1978’s accomplished though still misogyny-mongering Bomba Star, Underage proves he was capable of reflexive satire, gleefully skewering as it does the conventions of the poor-little-rich-girl formula. It tinkers with enough of the elements—three nymphets rather than the usual overgrown naïf, plus genuinely menacing villains—to also make it an admirable sample of how a genre can be upheld yet transformed by infusing it with elements from seemingly incompatible sources: comedy, the musical, and the sex film, in this instance.

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