Canon Decampment: Joyce Bernal

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1—Booba

Year of Release: 2001
Director: Joyce Bernal [as Binibining Joyce Bernal]
Screenwriter: Mel Mendoza-del Rosario
From a story by Joyce Bernal & Mel Mendoza-del Rosario
Producer: Viva Films & RS Productions

Cast: Rufa Mae Quinto, Gary Estrada, AiAi delas Alas, Gina Pareño, Roldan Aquino, Archie Ventosa, Denver Razon, Ava Avila, Rico Miguel, Rad Dominguez, Polly Casawan, Felindo Obach, Rudy Meyer, Josie Galvez, George Lim, Angie Reyes, Peter Lim

Booba is resented by her homely and quarrelsome twin sister Gretchen, for being her diametrical opposite: sweet, pretty, popular, shapely, and vacuous. Lola Belle, their grandmother, keeps attempting to mollify Gretchen, but the latter gets fed up and leaves their rural shack for the city. Lola Belle dies not long after, but before doing so, she tells Booba to look for Gretchen and assures her that she will always be by her side. Booba then ventures alone in Manila, trying to earn a living while occasionally spotting her sister, who keeps evading her in a huff while engaging in a range of criminal activities as a mob boss. Her attractiveness draws the attention of the wrong kind of men, although fortunately Lola Belle’s spirit shows up to warn her of trouble. While doing her job as a nightclub dancer, her workplace is raided by the vice squad, whose kindly police leader takes pity on Booba and does what he can to assist her.

2—Masikip sa Dibdib: The Boobita Rose Story

Alternate Title: Masikip sa Dibdib: Ang Tunay na Buhay ni Boobita Rose
English Translation: Tight in the Chest: The Boobita Rose Story
English Translation of Alternate Title: Tight in the Chest: The Actual Life of Boobita Rose
Year of Release: 2004
Director: Joyce Bernal [as Binibining Joyce Bernal]
Screenwriter: Mel Mendoza-del Rosario
Producer: Viva Films

Cast: Rufa Mae Quinto, Antonio Aquitania, Gina Pareño, John Lapus, Sunshine Dizon, Phytos Ramirez, Tita Swarding, Rudy Hatfield, Raquel Pareño, Kier Legaspi, Bernard Bonnin, Charlie Davao, Chinggoy Alonzo, Raquel Monteza, Ralion Alonzo, Earl Ignacio, Lui Manansala

As a young child, Boobita is driven out of home with her mother and siblings after her father takes in a mistress and passes on his out-of-wedlock daughter to them. The now grown-up Boobita has to earn a living in order to maintain her homebound mother, womanizing brother, and rebellious stepsister who, like their grandfather, has become an alcoholic. Although determined to find success by snagging a well-off eligible bachelor, Boobita’s lack of education proves to be a liability. The series of misfortunes that she encounters occasionally induces her to burst into song.

Two releases featuring Rufa Mae Quinto in the persona that made her a star trade on the bawdy drollery of a well-endowed woman too vacuous to realize her hotness. Sex-focused comediennes are a rarity in Philippine cinema, a condition referenced in the film via its casting of Gina Pareño, the only sexy comic star from any First Golden Age studio. In consonance with Marilyn Monroe’s irrefragable demonstration, sly intelligence distinguishes the best aspirants from all other pretenders. The establishing text, Booba, uses a name derived from the Spanish word for dimwit (further extended in English slang to mean “breast”), with the political incorrectness setting the terms for director Joyce Bernal’s irreverent approach to humor. Inasmuch as sex-focused comediennes are a rarity in Philippine cinema, both films, though unrelated to each other, foreground this condition in their casting of Gina Pareño, the only full-figured comic star from any First Golden Age studio, described as a “sex-starved lola (granny)” in Booba’s jokey opening credits. As inevitable with the cultural specificities of humor, Booba finds its parodic intentions occasionally dulled by overfamiliarity, with only its talents’ sense of conviction lifting the project through these rough spots. Quinto, however, never betrays any cognizance of superiority to her material—always a welcome perk in comic performance. The rewards of such inconspicuous discipline carried through in her next Bernal project, Super-B (2002), but it was in the one after where director and actor were able to scale heights that only Mike de Leon (replicating his home studio’s lost Manuel Conde masterpieces) was able to pull off beforehand. Included by Asian Movie Pulse contributor Epoy Deyto in “10 Gritty Asian Films That Defined a Generation’s Struggle,” Masakit sa Dibdib performs the difficult stunt of delineating a tearjerker narrative while maintaining a straight face, figuratively as well as literally, within the pop equivalent of Viennese operetta. The fact that Quinto manages to convey the naïveté essential for her character to be swiped by the casual cruelty of her social betters as well as by the sudden eruption of musical numbers (restoring the “melos” in melodrama—make sure to source the full version rather than the producer’s severely truncated remastering) provides a clue into how our compatriots managed to survive wars, dictatorships, and overseas traumas. Among several minor touches, for example, the film wittily commemorates the early-millennium Pinoy-slang reinscription of “nosebleed” to indicate the use of difficult words or expressions in English. The film as a whole might also imply another long wait before the next knockabout bombshell comes along, but that would be all up to how fast Pinas pop culture can respond to the challenge.

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Kimmy Dora: Kambal sa Kiyeme

English Translation of Subordinate Title: Twins in Silliness
Additional Language: English
Year of Release: 2009
Director: Joyce Bernal [as Binibining Joyce Bernal]
Screenwriter: Chris Martinez
Producers: Spring Films & MJM Productions

Cast: Eugene Domingo, Dingdong Dantes, Zanjoe Marudo, Ariel Ureta, Miriam Quiambao, Baron Geisler, Gabby Eigenmann, Archie Alemania, Zeppi Borromeo, Leo Rialp, Phillip Nolasco, Tyrone Rabago, Christian Bautista, Marvin Agustin, Mark Bautista, Paolo Ballesteros, Jinggoy Estrada, Vhong Navarro, Rufa Mae Quinto, Erik Santos, Aiza Seguerra, Regine Velasquez

Smart yet moody Kimmy and sweet but airheaded Dora are identical twins who always seem to be at odds with each other. Both are also heirs to the Go Dong Hae business empire. A misunderstanding leads Kimmy’s lawyer Harry to hatch a plan to eliminate Dora. But when the plan hits a major obstacle, each of the sisters faces a slew of problems that can endanger their business and their family.

The doppelgänger situation has been the stuff of fantasy and horror, and occasionally of metaphysically minded authors and auteurs. Film enables what theater has difficulty pulling off, but Kimmy Dora banks on the performance-driven fireworks of Eugene Domingo, replicating theater veteran Roderick Paulate’s multiple (because popular) accomplishments[1] and enhancing it with a pared-down version of the class conflicts portrayed in Jim Abrahams’s Big Business (1988). Despite these references, Kimmy Dora retains the progressive orientation that made its predecessors worthy of double takes, and literalizes Christian Metz’s appreciation of mirror construction, where film enables its audience to witness a hall-of-mirrors effect of the medium portraying and commenting on itself. At one point, when Domingo is challenged to depict evil-sister Dora mimicking the angelic Kimmy in order to mislead their overindulgent father, the multiple bravura impersonations that Domingo performs provoke a rare instance of laughter in local comedy that is presented as slapstick but is premised on conceptual sophistication. Director Joyce Bernal provides the humanist and romantic resolutions that characterize the earlier texts, yet insists on the primacy of feminist independence and cathartic humor, hand in hand (in hand) with Domingo’s game sensibility.

Note

[1] The films invariably exploit Roderick Paulate’s “Rhoda” or flaming-queen persona by contrasting him with a straight-acting twin. These include Ako si Kiko, Ako si Kikay (I Am Kiko, I am Kikay) and Kumander Gringa (Commander Gringa), both directed by Mike Relon Makiling and released in 1987, with the first proceeding from a sci-fi premise where each of the brothers drinks a potion, transforming into a princess and a prince charming but unaware of each other’s existence. Kumander Gringa, as well as Maryo J. de los Reyes’s Bala at Lipistik (Bullet and Lipstick, 1994), turns on the more realistic Kimmy Dora formula of twins with differing orientations and placed in life-threatening situations—the Philippine rebel insurgency in the former and gangland conflict in the latter—where the interloping femme brother has to mimic his butch counterpart in order to survive. An attempt to update the formula, possibly intended for Vice Ganda, the contemporary counterpart of Paulate, was Wenn Deramas’s Bromance: My Brother’s Romance (2013), where the professionally successful gay brother suffers a concussion and lapses into a coma, and his homophobic ne’er-do-well sibling (both played by Zanjoe Marudo) has to enact a queer charade while exploiting his gay bro’s closeness to the woman he desires.

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