Canon Decampment: Dolly Dulu

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The Boy Foretold by the Stars

Additional Language: English
Year of Release: 2020
Director & Screenwriter: Dolly Dulu
Producers: Clever Minds, The Dolly Collection, & Brainstormers Lab

Cast: Adrian Lindayag, Keann Johnson, Iyah Mina, Rissey Reyes, John Leinard Ramos, Jan Rey Escaño, Victor Robinson III, Jemuel Satumba, Renshi de Guzman, Kalil Almonte, Jethro Tenorio

Dominic, an out gay student in a boys’ high school, asks a fortune-teller, Baby R, about his still-nonexistent love life. Baby R tells him to watch out for three signs in a forthcoming relationship. Dominic then makes the acquaintance of Luke, a basketball player who feels dejected because he just broke up with his girlfriend. He invites Luke to participate in the school retreat and conducts himself properly as a religious counselor. That includes providing Luke with the necessary emotional support that his newfound friend needs.

A beacon of hope and grace amid calamitous devastation, The Boy Foretold by the Stars arrived at the end of the year when the Covid-19 global pandemic succeeded in stalling development projects and personal pursuits alike, and forced film audiences to watch all kinds of material on their mobile devices. One of the unexpected novelties was the proliferation of so-called Boys Love series, originating in Japan and arriving in Pinas via Thai versions uploaded to streaming websites including YouTube. Originally a subversive innovation in manga culture, BL addressed itself to women consumers who would have otherwise been alienated by the overtly normalized (and occasionally violent) sexism in Japanese comics. TBFBTS (an abbreviation sanctioned by the film’s gender-fluid director-writer[1]) recuperates the butch-femme and woman-positive terms of Japanese yaoi, providing its own resistance to the queer-cinema standardized exclusion of femininity via mutually conventional masculinities (as exemplified in works like Ang Lee’s 2005 film Brokeback Mountain). In fact, as pointed out by BL scholar Jerrick Josue David, TBFBTS hews closer to the romantic-comedy genre. Dolly Dulu also provides certain further departures, one in which their narrative’s religious-retreat setting is reconfigured as nurturing rather than oppressive, and in which their characters’ final kiss is not really their first one. The cast members also display a facility for switching between English and Filipino that harks back to the glory days of the Second Golden Age, affirming that the film, with all its intimate awareness and seemingly casual handling of craft, is essentially an autobiographical recollection of intently observed and intensely cherished private-school experience. It may be an unrealistically rose-colored way of moving on from the trauma of Covid-19, but since the world that TBFBTS represents is rooted in a past, then all that we may need to do, as the film proposes, is look back at the best that we all once used to be. For their part, Dulu announced that their film will be extended in the format that gave rise to it: a BL series, not exactly foretold by the stars, but still a way of living through their unusual, insistent, and newly resistive vision of a better future.

Note

[1] Dolly Dulu’s pronoun preference is for the singular they.

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