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Kailangan Kita
English Translation: I Need You
Additional Language: Bicolano
Year of Release: 2002
Director: Rory B. Quintos
Screenwriters: Shaira Mella Salvador & Moira Lang
(From a story by Shaira Mella Salvador, Moira Lang, Emmanuel Dela Cruz)
Producer: Star Cinema
Cast: Aga Muhlach, Claudine Barretto, Johnny Delgado, Liza Lorena, Jericho Rosales, Dante Rivero, Cholo Escaño, Nicole Judalena, Igi Boy Flores, Cris Villanueva, Rissa Mananquil, Gerald Madrid, Ces Quesada, Madeleine Nicolas, Jon Achaval, Fonz Deza, Farrah Florer, Jessette Prospero, Albert Zialcita, Randy Gamier, Idda Yaneza, Edgardo Pascua, Cyrus Balinguit, Rocky Martinez, Morten Bremelhoej, Florante Tagulo, Carl Rosales, Anthony Ranguani, Lowell Conales, Rheylord Camacho
Carl Diesta, a successful chef in the US, goes to his bride-to-be Giselle Duran’s Bicol hometown to help prepare for their forthcoming wedding. Giselle however keeps finding reasons to delay her arrival while Carl observes that her sister Lena shares his passion for food and extends a hand to insurgent fighters, despite the objection of Carl and her family. Carl realizes that Lena had to break up with the man she loved after he joined the rebel army. She convinces him to relish spicy preparations in coconut milk, a specialty of Bicol cuisine which he initially resisted. As Carl starts doubting whether marrying Giselle was a wise decision, Lena tells him that she knows the town’s best cook of laing (taro leaves cooked in coconut milk) and takes him to the old man’s hut. Carl realizes that the cook was someone he knew in the past, before he moved abroad.
The reality of Filipinos returning from overseas sojourns has always been a source of vital narratives on national identity and global engagement, ever since the native ilustrados of the nineteenth century brought over the Enlightenment ideals that Spanish colonizers strove to keep at bay from the native population. The Philippines’s long-enduring labor-export policy has made the influx of returnees, whether staying temporarily or for good, a permanent certainty in the country’s national imaginary. The reality has become so commonplace that Star Cinema, which once had to depict a Philippine character in a foreign setting in Marilou Diaz-Abaya’s May Nagmamahal sa Iyo (Madonna and Child, 1996) to affirm her status as an Overseas Filipino Worker returnee, could now endow a character with enough foreign-voyage markers and occasional long-distance phone calls to establish the authenticity of said character’s alienation from local cultural phenomena. Kailangan Kita coasts along satisfactorily enough on its lead male character’s classically inflected dilemma—the way that, say, Newland Archer realizes that Countess Ellen Olenska incites his nostalgic imagination more than his betrothed does in The Age of Innocence (1920 novel by Edith Wharton, 1993 film by Martin Scorsese). But the net it casts is woven from sturdier fabric than the usual flimsy premises of popular romances. The incursion of an insurgent movement, whose origin can be tracked to the country’s anticolonial revolutionaries, is only the first of a series of direct challenges to the central family’s conflictive existence. Other prognosticators of even more inescapable social shifts show up, sometimes without warning, necessitating in one instance a generational conciliation that could devastate unprepared viewers. The representation of nation is expertly divided between a rational, First World-residing male, and a subservient, neglected, but constantly appraising daughter; KK decisively triumphs in its casting of Claudine Barretto in peak form, as a woman resigned to her own fate who yet realizes self-fulfillment in clandestine relationships that she maintains with as much discretion as she can get away with.
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