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Hubad na Pangarap
English Translation: Naked Ambition
Year of Release: 1987
Director: Abbo Q. dela Cruz
Screenwriter: Armando Lao
Producer: Golden Pearl Production
Cast: Michael de Mesa, Julio Diaz, Anna Marie Gutierrez, Lola, Vangie Labalan, Archi Adamos, Dante Castro, Chris Daluz, Tony Angeles, Tony Martinez, Stella Strada II, Jesse dela Paz, Lina Anota, Dick Morados
Miguel arrives at his rural rest house with several of his swinger friends, including a good-time girl with whom he hooks up. When his volatile girlfriend Cindy arrives, she throws a fit and drives all the visitors away, allowing Miguel to appease her by making out with her. All by themselves, they turn their attention to the place’s caretakers, Nelia and Ador, a poor but attractive couple engaged to each other. Miguel and Ador are childhood chums, but Miguel’s interest in Nelia starts to strain their friendship. Cindy’s exploitative regard toward Ador meanwhile leads to a bloody resolution in which the police are forced to intervene.
Abbo Q. dela Cruz’s debut film, Misteryo sa Tuwa (Joyful Mystery, 1984), was a film maudit that will always be worth at least one viewing, but that will probably be defensible as strictly a late-era Cold War masterpiece—patriarchal, myopic, and desperate. It was so overblown that it came close to shutting down the film production division of the Experimental Cinema of the Philippines, which nevertheless came up with one last debut piece, Pio de Castro III’s Soltero (Bachelor, 1984), a film that replicated its shortcomings, albeit on a decidedly more intimate scale. Dela Cruz had better timing with his sophomore project, written by one of the winners of the next batch’s scriptwriting contest (which were never produced because of the preceding year’s follies). The Misteryo sa Tuwa connection provides the first step in comprehending the offbeat properties of Hubad na Pangarap: its misanthropy is unmistakeable, but this time more carefully skewed against its privileged characters, so that its ineluctable misogyny is favorably contrasted with its masculine characters’ meanness or feeble-mindedness. The libertarian spell occasioned by ECP-screened entries also fostered the busting of the final Catholic taboo against displaying the male form, so Hubad na Pangarap enables a more-than-game Julio Diaz to cocktease not just his onscreen female master but an unsuspecting general audience as well. More productively, the film can be regarded as the middle entry in a trilogy scripted by Armando Lao, bookended by William Pascual’s Takaw Tukso (Constant Craving, 1986) and Chito S. Roño’s Itanong Mo sa Buwan (Moon Child, 1987), depicting increasing narrative complexity where working-class masculinities are confronted with and confounded by the well-laid schemes of the femme fatale.
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