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The Untold Story of Melanie Marquez
Year of Release: 1987
Director: Artemio Marquez
Screenwriter: Ricky Lee
From a story by Melanie Marquez
Producer: Miracle Boy Films International
Cast: Melanie Marquez, Caridad Sanchez, Tony Santos Sr., Rosemarie Gil, Totoy Marquez, Rene Salud, Maya dela Cuesta, Renee Salud, Lawrence Pineda, Romy Diaz, Tony Bernal, Karla Kalua, Desiree Verdadero, Sonny Pinga, Odette Khan, Virginia Angeles, Ma. Cecilia Magmayo, Julie Ann Cortez, Daryl Tupaz, Mark “John” Marquez, Cherry Ong, Rodolfo Manlangit, Ricardo de los Remedios, Ma. Luisa Laurel MacCutcheon
While enduring persecution at a young age from her wealthier and fairer classmates, Melanie helps out her mother by working as a domestic helper at a bordello, where the women admire her height and beauty. Exasperated by her mother’s rage over their economic difficulties, she follows her mother’s suggestion to seek assistance from her estranged father Artemio, who has attained some success as a movie director in faraway Manila. Artemio’s mistress resents the appearance of her partner’s legitimate child and banishes Melanie from their home and office. She tells her mother about the other woman badmouthing them, upon which the mother confronts the mistress. Melanie decides to train on her own as a model, and attracts the attention of fashion designer Renee Salud, who grooms her for local and eventually global beauty contests. Melanie fulfills her dream of winning the Miss International crown, but she also realizes that heartaches will remain an essential part of her life, regardless of whatever station she attains.
No better proof of how well the Philippine film industry used to thrive lies in such a sample as this. Artemio Marquez was virtually an ancient relic by this time, having lived and worked through two Golden Ages of productivity, his primary distinction lying in how his production house made a breakout star out of Nora Aunor via a series of musical quickies. When his daughter Melanie became the second globally renowned figure that he was associated with, his film-mogul acuity kicked in and, doubtlessly inspired by Aunor’s transformation into the country’s major performer, impelled him to create the kind of personal project that only an openly eccentric yet highly professional showbiz longtimer could pull off. Melanie Marquez, who was also just as invested in the undertaking, affirms her seriousness by allowing herself to be slapped multiple times, sometimes in slow motion, by every major character who happens along.[1] Despite The Untold Story of Melanie Marquez’s otherwise dismissible premise and handling, the film presents a useful record of Melanie’s catwalk prowess. Even more significantly, it prevails as a rare contemporary incarnation of authentic camp, according to the paradigm stipulated by Susan Sontag in her 1964 article “Notes on ‘Camp’”: inadvertent in affect, premised on artifice, funny despite its serious intent, open to multiple readings by insiders, utterly embraceable given the proper perspective and preparation, with Melanie’s undeniably androgynous appeal overlooking the proceedings.
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Sa Puso Ko Hahalik ang Mundo
English Translation: The World Will Kiss My Heart
Year of Release: 1988
Director & Screenwriter: Artemio Marquez
Producer: Regal Films
Cast: Snooky Serna, Gabby Concepcion, Pops Fernandez, Martin Nievera, Lotlot de Leon, Ramon Christopher, Caridad Sanchez, Daria Ramirez, Rez Cortez, Tita Muñoz, Subas Herrero, Lucita Soriano, Ester Chavez, Mario Escudero, Charlon Davao, Judy Anne Santos, Jane Zaleta, Ryan Fortich, Luis Benedicto, Egay Gonzalez, Jay Cuyuca, Nemits Rivero, Ceso Yusi, Brigham Manalastas, Ernesto delos Reyes, Ric Mercado, Chito Ilagan, Butch Miraflor, Mark Lopez, Mercie de Vera, Marlene Vegasca
Growing up in rural poverty, Aurora and Amalia have to cope with the sudden death of their mother by agreeing to having their sister Claudia adopted by a wealthy couple, who rename the child Betty and bring her with them to the US. When they grow up, only Aurora remembers the separation; she permits her boyfriend Benjie to seek his fortune in Manila but fails to hear from him after a while. This is because the owner of the nightclub where he works, a wealthy widow, entraps him so she can possess him as her new hubby. Short of cash for continuing her studies in the city, Amalia decides to find work as well. Albert is smitten by her and gets her hired at the same workplace where Benjie landed, since the owner (now Benjie’s wife) happens to be his elder sister. Betty visits the Philippines with her husband Renato, a struggling musician, so they can stage a concert where Betty will be singing Renato’s compositions. Aurora, who’s searching for Benjie, is distracted while walking and gets hit by Renato’s car. The guilt-ridden Renato takes his victim to his home so she can recover and gives her a job as domestic helper, but Betty resents her presence and keeps quarreling with her husband and still-unrecognized sister.
The triumph of The Untold Story of Melanie Marquez signaled that Artemio Marquez still had some squall in his sails at an age when most people would be enjoying their retirement. Regal Films’ Lily Monteverde, an even more voracious talent-hunter than he’d ever been, contracted him and made sure to corner all the crowd-pleasing material that his impressively extended film practice enabled him to churn out. For better or worse, Marquez embodied the quintessence of the Pinoy filmmaker-as-journeyperson. The lore that he’d managed to store up, however, held him in good stead, and could best be sampled in his first project for Regal. Sa Puso Ko Hahalik ang Mundo had none of the personal signature (such as it is) that he’d endowed in his daughter’s luridly luminous biofilm, and it bore the stamp of “Mother” Lily’s insistence on casting young real-life celebrity couplings that generated audience titillation all their own. But it also had all the hallmarks of his most financially successful period as owner of Tower Productions, where the types of aspirants that the First Golden Age studios resisted for not being Euro-pretty enough were launched so stratospherically that the more old-school movie stars could only survive by retreating into hard-core sex-film projects. Nearly all of those teen-idol and bomba films are lamentably lost, but in SPKHM we can still see how Temyong Marquez’s wholesome-youngster formulas could weave their spell on enthralled movie fans: fateful coincidences, dramatic outbursts, pregnant secrets, a yearning for connection—so drenched in openly manipulative music-infused schmaltz that the final-act benevolent intervention of an affluent matron can be welcomed only in so far as it could help draw the proceedings to a close.
Note
[1] The other Artemio Marquez stamp would be a breakdown scene where the (usually female) character would hysterically sweep away all the contents atop a table. In Melanie Marquez’s next project with her father, the Regal Films production Nasaan Ka Inay? (Where Are You, Mother?, 1988), she apologizes to the partner of a sister she had wronged by literally wallowing in and gobbling down mud—the closest we have ever gotten to subconsciously approximating Divine in John Waters’s Pink Flamingos (1972), although Melanie might have to be grateful that apparently neither she nor her father witnessed what Divine actually scarfed down. A detailed recollection-cum-appreciation of this moment (in Filipino) was provided by Jerrick Josue David in his Linyang Pinoy, Hugot Pinoy feature on Facebook. For Susan Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp’” book source, see her anthology Against Interpretation (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1966).
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