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Crying Ladies
Year of Release: 2003
Director & Screenwriter: Mark Meily
Producer: Unitel Pictures
Cast: Sharon Cuneta, Hilda Koronel, Angel Aquino, Eric Quizon, Ricky Davao, Julio Pacheco, Shamaine Buencamino, Sherry Lara, Gilleth Sandico, Joan Bitagcol, Johnny Delgado, Edgar Mortiz, Raymond Bagatsing, Bella Flores, Lou Veloso, Jemalene Estrada, Randolf Stamatelaky, Winnie Cordero, Bearwin Meily, Ronaldo Bertubin, Andoy Ranay, Ermie Concepcion, Ruby Ruiz, Melvin Lee, Jojit Lorenzo, Jorg Schifferer, Ike Veneracion, Dante Nora, Mae Paner, Mark Meily
Fresh out of the women’s correctional where she was imprisoned for financial fraud, Stella Mate [ma-teh] attempts to find a stable source of income, but only foreign-recruitment agencies offer anything sufficiently feasible for her. Her separated husband informs her that he and his new wife plan to move to Mindanao and bring her child with them, since her jail record makes her an unfit parent. Through the small Chinatown workshop where she works part-time, she’s able to wangle a short-term designation as a funeral mourner for a traditional Chinese family, who believe that the presence of weeping guests will facilitate the journey to heaven of the dead person’s soul. Since she has to be part of a trio, Stella recruits two of her friends: Rhoda, a former movie extra insisting on being recognized for the bit roles she played when she was younger; and Choleng, a charity worker torn with guilt for conducting an affair with a married man. When they arrive at the funeral parlor, Stella realizes that the man in the coffin was the same person she had swindled and whose police complaint led to her stint in prison.
One of the crucial departures between Sharon Cuneta’s observance of the trajectory of Philippine superstar Nora Aunor was in her late turn to independent projects—but at nearly the point when she semi-retired from showbiz work. Crying Ladies, in fact, still bears some resemblance to the mainstream projects that Aunor would have worked on during her Second Golden Age heyday. Its primary point of departure is in its endeavor to accommodate racialized Asian Others in Philippine society, with an attempt to equalize relations by making the Chinese and Indian characters entrepreneurial entities who exercise benign influence over the lead character. The Chinese side gets a better airing because the family involved has a more intensive interaction with the title-character team, although the patriarch has died by the time the plot begins. The entire presentation does not really advance beyond depicting the pathos of the working-class woman who finds it near-impossible to rise above her station—one of the tiresome legacies of social realism compounded by the ideological impositions of Western standards of acceptability for films originating in postcolonial sources. It would be possible to argue that Cuneta’d already done characters like Stella in the rags-to-riches projects that ushered the second (Noranian) phase of her career … but Crying Ladies reveals an authority and authenticity missing from those works, and announces still another phase, more fully Noranian this time, that she was ill-advised to abandon.
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