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1—#WalangForever
English Translation: #NoForever
Year of Release: 2015
Director: Dan Villegas
Screenwriter: Paul Sta. Ana
Producers: Quantum Films, MJM Productions, Tuko Film Productions
Cast: Jericho Rosales, Jennylyn Mercado, Lorna Tolentino, Pepe Herrera, Kim Molina, Jerald Napoles, Myke Salomon, Sarah Pagcaliwagan, Patrick Sugui, Nico Antonio, Juan Miguel Severo, Sebastian Castro, Irma Adlawan, Rustica Carpio, Matet de Leon, Paolo O’Hara, Quark Henares, Lilit Reyes, Geraldine Villamil, Phoemala Baranda, Cai Cortez, Phi Palmos, Derek Ramsey, Maja Salvador, Yves Flores, Alyana Asistio, Jon Lucas, Michelle Vito, Julian Estrada, Jason Francisco, Melai Cantiveros, Khalil Ramos, Jane Oineza, Sid Lucero, Liza Diño, Star Orjaliza, Francis Grengia, Ebe Dancel, Miguel Faustmann, Bianca Balbuena, Mackie Galvez, Matt Daclan, Cathy Garcia-Samana, Nonoy Froilan, Edna Vida, Carlo Aquino
Mia Nolasco’s a successful scriptwriter of romantic comedy films, although her latest works were box-office disappointments. In a TV interview, she confesses that she lost her inspiration when she broke up with the man she thought she could share the rest of her life with. As proof of the accuracy of her statements, we see scenes from the films she wrote alongside the actual events she experienced. Her ex, Ethan Isaac, resented her for prioritizing her career, even refusing to travel with him to Taiwan to meet his overseas-based mother for that reason. When he returns, he accidentally meets Mia in a bookstore and realizes that his life will never be complete without her. At the same time, he seeks second opinions not about his relationship, but about his health.
2—How to Be Yours
Additional Language: Cebuano
Year of Release: 2016
Director: Dan Villegas
Screenwriters: Patrick Valencia & Hyro Aguinaldo
(Based on a story by Dan Villegas)
Producers: Star Cinema & Viva Films
Cast: Bea Alonzo, Gerald Anderson, Bernard Palanca, Janus del Prado, Alex Medina, Anna Luna, Nicco Manalo, Jerome Tan, Divine Aucina, Cheska Iñigo, Brian Sy, Teetin Villanueva, Lito Pimentel, Katya Santos, Ricardo Cepeda, Ana Roces, Chkristopher Tan, Marnie Lapus, Geraldine Villamil, Fredison Lo, Alexander Soriano, Evelyn Santos, James Christie, JC Movido
On a night out in Chinatown during Spring Festival with friends from work, Niño notices Angeline Mendoza (Anj for short) and makes her acquaintance. She also finds him attractive and invites him to spend the night at her place, but her roommates make too much noise for them to have an intimate moment. In the morning, Anj introduces Niño to her friends and they invite him to the food stall where she practices her cooking skills; she tells him that she’s the only member of her family who didn’t become a doctor so cooking’s her way of finding fulfillment in something she enjoys doing. One time, Pocholo, a famous chef, tries a dish prepared by Anj and is impressed enough to invite her to apply to his restaurant. She gets accepted but the work demands so much time from her that Niño decides to invite her to live with him so she can commute more easily to her job. She devotes herself to her job so assiduously that Pocholo appoints her his sous-chef; but since investors for a new restaurant that Anj can run are nervous because of her lack of extensive experience, he offers to send her to Paris for further training—a prospect that further strains her relationship with Niño.
The now-expended period of dominance of the romantic-comedy film genre in the Philippines might be good news for the high-brow critics who claimed concern for the mass audience’s cultural well-being yet hypocritically denounced whatever mode of presentation happened to draw their attention at any historical moment. A vital component of the trend that set it apart from its Classical Hollywood origin was that millennium-era Pinas romcom production was by and large female-dominated, with women and gay-male directors attending to the creative side of specific projects, including the occasional comedy byproduct. (One way of getting a handle on the homegrown expressions of incommensurate anti-romcom hatred is by recalling the conservative backlash in the US against disco music, for its having been essentially a synergism that brought together black producers, women singers, and gay appreciators.) Romcom had flourished so overwhelmingly that it enabled the emergence of talents who could fill any perceived lacks by resisting or even overturning some of its generic premises. The case of Dan Villegas holds special significance in this context: by providing an identifiable and credible straight-male perspective within the feminist terms of the genre, his output helps explain how romcom films could attract such a broad viewership sector. #WalangForever went about its proof of concept by resorting to an admittedly old-fashioned strategy: invest the male partner with a tragic circumstance so extreme that it inhibits him from pursuing romantic fulfillment. The film provides a reflexive device by having the more successful woman partner turning their story into public spectacles—an undeniably creepy choice if it were perpetrated by a man, but it somehow earns its druthers by ultimately enabling the doubt-ridden man to witness, as the audience did, how his lover was processing their affair. How to Be Yours can also be solidly situated in this dynamic: it allows its primarily female character to dictate the terms of her relationship (as any of her real-life counterparts would), but in finding a narrative equivalent of Pinay citizens’ overseas-labor designations, it manages to refocus some attention on the left-behind chap, contriving to reconstruct a life that had already fully burgeoned in the presence of someone who’s no longer around. The depiction of men coping with loss was one of the standard highlights of the best local action films, as was the imaging of women commanded by love—and such are the means by which genre developments address audience concerns regardless of the narrative mechanisms they specify.
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Hintayan ng Langit
English Title: Heaven’s Waiting
Year of Release: 2018
Director: Dan Villegas
Screenwriter: Juan Miguel Silverio
(Based on his one-act play)
Producers: QCinema International Film Festival, Globe Studios, Quezon City Film Development Commission
Cast: Eddie Garcia, Gina Pareño, Kat Galang, Joel Saracho, Mary Joy Apostol, Jomari Angeles, Geraldine Villamil, Dolly de Leon, Francis Mata, Karl Medina, Che Ramos, Mel Kimura, Reynald Raissel Santos, Errine Danan, Neil Guillen, Martin Lazaro, Hadaneeah Cubico, Monina Fe Meraces, Jonel Pusing, Miguel Mascareñas, Nina Ybanez, Miko Yu, Angelica Tapia, Elizabeth dela Cerna
Upon his arrival, Manolo’s informed by the halfway place’s concierge that the room allotted to him has been damaged, so he’ll have to share sleeping quarters with someone he used to know. He finds out that it’s Lisang, who used to be his girlfriend before he married someone else several decades ago. After remembering how he died, he figures out that he’s in Purgatory, awaiting a final trip to a higher realm along with the other residents. What he wonders about is why Lisang keeps delaying her own ascent, even committing an infraction in his presence.
Hintayan ng Langit would literally translate as “heaven’s waiting room,” so the idea of Purgatory, problematic even to enlightened Catholics, serves as the closest possible equivalent of the concept of a way station in the afterlife where the recently deceased could resolve their personal issues before attaining a state of eternal peace and happiness. Those with enough historical awareness might also recall that colonial-era Spanish clergy earned for the local church incalculable wealth and property based on instilling the fear of purgatorial suffering on vulnerable wealthy natives, in order to claim their inheritance right before they expired. The challenge for the filmmakers therefore lay in selling the fantasy—which the narrative unexpectedly performs by fusing classical values with a covert modern sensibility. Traditionalists will have to be inordinately picky to find fault with HnL’s visual design as well as the first-time pairing of two studio-era old-timers known for both their consummate skills and their willingness to tackle daring roles: their extended exchanges and individual monologues are reserved for the film’s climactic section, and unsurprisingly they make it worth the trouble. The modern element, in terms of Hollywood samples, requires a recollection of which American film came closest to HnL’s example. In general, US productions could not resist resending their dead characters back to the real world, so even in these terms, HnL remains distinctive; but the first American film to focus on a woman’s post-life predicament was Gerard Damiano’s The Devil in Miss Jones (1973), arguably the first undisputed masterpiece of the Golden Age of Porn.[1] It shouldn’t be too surprising that what was so unusual for Americans that it could only be initially made on the fringes of their industry became standard fare for Pinas cinema in the late twentieth century, after the collapse of the country’s authoritarian adventure.
Note
[1] The title once appeared in the decadal Sight & Sound survey of 2002; I was the respondent who entered it, along with another X-rated title, The Opening of Misty Beethoven (Radley Metzger a.k.a. Henry Paris, 1976).
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