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Here Comes the Bride
Additional Languages: Spanish, Hiligaynon
Year of Release: 2010
Director & Screenwriter: Chris Martinez
Producers: Star Cinema, OctoArts Films, Quantum Films
Cast: Eugene Domingo, John Lapus, Tuesday Vargas, Angelica Panganiban, Cherry Pie Picache, Tom Rodriguez, Kim Atienza, Cai Cortez, Johnny Revilla, Bart Guingona, Ricky Rivero, Ricci Chan, Neil Ryan Sese, Ayen Munji-Laurel, Madeleine Nicolas, Timothy Chan, Nico Antonio, Cecil Paz, Ernie Forte, Malou Crisologo, Tess Antonio, Raul Vasquez, Eric Espiritu, Anthony de Guzman, Peaches Beleno, Raquel Donila, Tess de Guman, Mitch Dantes, Sammer Concepcion, Kim Buranday, Kevin Zaldariaga, John Carl Daluz, Arianna Jarmel P. Panganiban, Jeio Navel Suarez, Mark Anthony Saycon, The Bien Rivera Group
A wedding couple and the members of their party proceed to a beach resort in Rizal Province, where the ceremony will be held. People in five cars, alone or with their companions, are confronting crises of varying degrees. When they pass over Magnetic Hill, a solar eclipse takes place and their vehicles are involved in a chain collision. After the accident, a person in each of the cars notices unusual behavior, duly affecting everyone around them. A lawyer behaves like the prudish bride, eager to get to “her” wedding and worrying her best friend, the bride’s mother; a gay hairdresser turns into an elderly Spanish-speaking casanova, messing up a bridesmaid’s makeup but compensating by providing her with hot sex; a rustic nanny bamboozled by the family who employs her turns dominative and argues for her legal rights as well as those of others; a retired tycoon starts speaking like a naïve bumpkin and is delighted by the discovery of easy access to money; the prudish bride-to-be suddenly revels in her youth and beauty, changes into provocative clothes so she can flirt with hunks on the beach, and insists on a premarital romp with her flabbergasted fiance. The bride-in-the-lawyer’s body, who’s prevented from attending her own wedding, figures out that the five of them have exchanged personalities; they approach a paranormal expert, who informs them that the convergence of the accident along with the solar eclipse on Magnetic Hill might have been responsible for their alterations, but that if they have to replicate the incident in order to restore their original personalities, they will have to await the next solar eclipse two years from the present.
The high-concept comedy is such a rarity in Philippine pop culture that the qualified achievement of such an undertaking would be preferable to its total absence. Here Comes the Bride takes the further risk of elevating the attempt to a grand scale, premised on the entertainment skills promised by a larger-than-usual cast proceeding from various distinctive types, each one moving to personas far different from the one they started out with. All the actors have had sufficient training in the roles they embody, plus additional experience in one or more of the performing-arts venues of theater, TV, and/or film, honing their HCB role-playing further through preproduction exercises. The one exception is the semi-central role of the bride: as portrayed by Angelica Panganiban, she starts out opposed to her real-life identity of a bubbly, adventurous, occasionally outrageous lass, but transitions to an even more extreme version of her public personality, thus inadvertently though momentarily upstaging the rest of the cast. The measure of the self-awareness of HCB’s creatives lies in their figuring out how the narrative’s dynamic should play out. Since the setup’s complication lies first in tracking the transformation of each character before they figure out the underlying cause of the phenomenon, the process of awaiting the next paranormal opportunity and setting themselves up in order to replicate the opening multivehicular pileup takes on a technical (actually technological) aura. An attempt at a last-minute mixup, with the dislodged personalities winding up in still the wrong bodies, provides the standard race-against-time suspense prior to the requisite happy ending. Its arrival signifies as much the closure of the present plotline as the opening up of a challenge to tackle more high-concept projects with equal or greater ambition, matched with all the preparatory ability our collection of talents can muster.
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