[Click here (recommended) for desktop mode.]
Bride for Rent
Additional Language: Cebuano
Year of Release: 2014
Director: Mae Cruz-Alviar [as Mae Czarina Cruz]
Screenwriters: Charlene Grace Bernardo & Carmi Raymundo
Producers: ABS-CBN Film Productions & Star Cinema
Cast: Kim Chiu, Xian Lim, Empoy Marquez, Martin del Rosario, Pilita Corrales, Tirso Cruz III, Dennis Padilla, Matt Evans, Lloyd Zaragoza, Zeppi Borromeo, Eda Nolan, Gerald Pesigan, Santino Espinoza, Leo Rialp, Marlann Flores, Anita Linda, Tony Mabesa, RJ Ledesma, Jackie Aquino, Roden Araneta, Alex Castro, Artemio Abad, Bodie Cruz, Ivan Asuncion, Arlene Muhlach, Helga Krapf, Loven Canon, Patricia Prieto, Regine “Apan” T. Agra, Mark McMahon, Amelia Villaruel, Olive Isidro, Hersey Gonzales Gregorio, Edgar Allan Yu
High-living scion Roderico “Rocco” Espiritu Jr. is anticipating prosperity when he turns 25, since he’ll be able to collect from his trust fund, so he drunkenly gambles away the money allotted for a major company project. Since he’s estranged from his father Roderico Sr., his grandma Lala oversees his affairs, but then she’s abroad for a health procedure. On the day he expects his long-awaited windfall, his lawyer says that Lala appended a condition for the release of money: he should first prove that he’s married. Since he already dismissed his long-term girlfriend and his work partners are asking him for results, he concocts a fake audition to pick a woman to pose as his wife. The aspirant who wins the role is Racquelita “Rocky” dela Cruz, breadwinner for a large family on the verge of losing the small space whose rent they’ve been unable to cover for half a year already. Rocky soon discovers that she can’t stand Rocco’s heartless and cynical treatment and confesses the deception to the recently returned Lala, whose worrying over Rocco’s immaturity overrides her annoyance over the little trick that she already expected him to pull. She conscripts Rocky to participate in her own scheme to help him realize the error of his ways.
Possibly the closest to a conventional entry in this entire canon list, Bride for Rent nevertheless manages to execute the ordinarily objectionable class-conciliatory trick via a combination of plot reversals and clever casting choices. Allotting the narrative’s decision-making processes to strong-women protagonists has been Philippine cinema’s strong suit ever since local history affirmed its feasibility in countering the excesses of military dictatorship nearly half a century ago. The aspect that required careful treading was in setting up the collusion between a grande dame and a hard-working slum dweller, who first meet as allies-to-be when the latter is evicted by her landlady in the pouring rain. The project certainly benefited from casting Xian Lim and Kim Chiu, love-team actors who then had minimal social baggage of their own and could commit to tragicomic role-playing without much difficulty. But the unexpected coup was in the selection of a performer whose classy-mestiza projection was always complemented with camp, of a sort that cut across classes, genders, and nationalities. A long list of contemporaries could certainly outperform her without much effort, but Pilita Corrales’s benign and self-amused presence, anchored on several marks of Otherness starting with her halting delivery of Tagalog lines, arrives at just the point when the story required the intervention of the equivalent of a fairy godmother. All that BfR had to do after Corrales shows up is ensure that Chiu’s working-class character never loses her moral ascendancy and avoids the usual pitfall of turning a slum resident into a princess-in-waiting. BfR facilitates this by configuring its male object’s status as a popular media figure and endowing the woman with the immediately recognizable dignity derived from a life of hardship. Proof that genre elements can still be faithfully observed yet yield rewards that art cinema could only aspire toward at the risk of losing its own dignity.
Back to top
Return to Canon Decampment contents
Go to alphabetized filmmakers list
Á!
ORCID ID 
Ámauteurish! 