Left: anxiety-ridden Yvonne Rivera (Sunshine Cruz) takes a public ride to the set of her comeback film project. Right: she arrives at her movie set, wears sunglasses, and projects a happy and confident aura. [Screen caps by the author.]
February 24, 2026 9:10 pm
Greatest Performance
Directed & written by Joselito Altarejos
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Filmmakers aware of their development constantly set for themselves new challenges, in the hope that they’ll be able to meet these goals and possibly set new, more difficult ones. These stages could be detected in all the outstanding directors of the past, although with the advent of the age of digital production in the present millennium, a new type of goal-setting has emerged: one where the community of filmmakers, consciously or otherwise, embarks on attaining certain ideals as a collective. So far two primary objectives can be tracked. The first, condoned and rewarded by prestige-granting critical groups, is where the directors create conscienticizing works focused on poverty, packaged in self-consciously high-art treatments for foreign film festivals, preferably in Europe.
Left: anxiety-ridden Yvonne Rivera (Sunshine Cruz) takes a public ride to the set of her comeback film project. Right: she arrives at her movie set, wears sunglasses, and projects a happy and confident aura. [Screen caps by the author.]
Left: Katrina (Ahlyxon Leyva), the director’s current squeeze, flusters Yvonne when she asks if she needs to have her breasts enhanced. Right: Katrina dances for the film crew but mainly for Mar Alvarez (Soliman Cruz), Yvonne’s director. [Screen caps by the author]
11011Joselito Altarejos, by apprenticing with Ishmael Bernal, Brocka’s contemporary (and for many, his superior) and commencing his filmmaking career the year after Bernal died, may be counted as one of the country’s few direct links with celluloid-era cinema. As such, he managed to stand apart from the aforementioned collective trends, although he also figured in the specialized branch of queer film production that flourished during the early years of digital filmmaking, when inexpensively produced projects could be screened in old-style movie theaters, where gay male audiences could use darkness as an opportunity for cruising. Unlike the average queer filmmaker, though, he worked with mainstream studios and, in a manner of speaking, prepared Viva Films for its successful recent foray into soft-core sex-film production.
Left: after shaming Yvonne in front of the film crew and causing her to walk out, her director Mar visits her in private to supposedly coach her alone, an offer that she resists. Right: at the end of Yvonne’s story, a similar, indeterminate event is recapitulated. [Screen caps by the author]
Left: Yvonne goes on live cam to sing “Paru-Parong Bukid,” as requested by her fans.[2] Right: Drew, Yvonne’s younger lover, uses her live appearance as an opportunity to fantasize over her. [Screen caps by the author]
11011Yet GP proffers something that no Altarejos work has foregrounded before, although it might take a second viewing to confirm it beyond the shadow of a doubt: the entire scenario is a throwback to Bernal, Altarejos’s mentor, in the sense that the proceedings unfold unmistakably as a comedy in tragic clothing. Yvonne Rivera, a once-popular performer who put her career on hold for the sake of her marriage, has to return to production when her union fails, ironically with the same abusive director, Mar Alvarez, who launched her to stardom. On the set she meets Drew, a younger soundperson with whom she occasionally enjoys a quickie, who like her has to endure Mar’s temperamental outbursts (in one instance, Mar berates Drew for insisting on noise-free ambient sound, but in their next take the noises accumulate to the point of nearly drowning out the performers’ lines and Mar has to pretend he doesn’t mind). Mar openly flirts with Katrina, a bit player who fearlessly displays her skimpy attire and coquettish teasing, determined to attain fame at any cost.
Left: After a publicity interview (conducted by the real-life director), Yvonne descends her apartment’s staircase in a state of panic over her comeback prospect. Right: unable to sympathize with Drew’s serious financial troubles during her film’s premiere, Yvonne looks for an opportunity for one last fling with her lover. [Screen caps by the author]
Notes
Previously published February 24, 2026, in The FilAm as “How Director Joselito Altarejos Sets Himself Apart as a Bernal Protégé.” Greatest Performance is produced by 2076 Kolektib, Pelikula Indiopendent, & StudioX. Many thanks to Joselito Altarejos for providing access and clarifying several crucial questions.
[1] To explicate this paragraph, in order of discussion: In one of my exchanges with the director, he clarified that the use of the same title of an unfinished 1989 film by Nora Aunor (listed in Canon Decampment) is strictly incidental; a sequence breakdown that I made of the earlier film is posted here. From a social-network discussion with Ma Nuno, I gathered the invaluable insight that Yvonne Rivera’s maid, in singing softly to comfort her mistress, could be practicing the healing custom that can be tracked to the predominantly women-led babaylan or native shaman tradition. Another query that could follow for viewers inclined to ponder gender issues: could there be transference in Yvonne’s quiet acceptance of her maid’s ministration? Arguably the women characters in the text are queerer than the males, even if the major ones (Yvonne and Katrina) engage in what might be regarded as counter-exploitation. Finally, the concept of reflexivity in film was brought up by, among others, semiotician Christian Metz, who used the term “mirror construction” in the title of his article.
[2] “Paru-parong Bukid (Field Butterfly)” is a traditional folk song originally known as “Mariposa Bella (Beautiful Butterfly).” The Tagalog version, used twice as a movie title and theme song (first directed by Octavio Silos in 1938, then by Armando Garces two decades later), is necessarily kid-friendly; a parodic variation, titled Mga Paru-Parong Buking (The Outed Butterflies, dir. J. Erastheo Navoa, 1985), about four gay-male professors of whom three are initially closeted, played only on the title and contained its own theme song. The nearly forgotten Spanish-language “Mariposa Bella” though is a more mature number, since it makes explicit the comparison of the butterfly with the native “Malay” maiden, uses richer descriptive imagery, and directly references mi tierra immortal or my immortal land, as befits a song that became popular during the anticolonial resistance against American occupation. See Pepe (José Mario Alas), “‘Paru-Parong Bukid’ Is Actually a Poor Translation of ‘Mariposa Bella’” in Filipino eScribbles: Online Jottings of a Filipino Out of Time (October 14, 2009).
[3] The opening shot of Ang Lihim ni Teresa, Yvonne’s comeback project, is taken directly from her action after her post-interview conversation with her maid, the only instance when a plot moment directly shows up in the fiction that the characters are creating. The shot an is an homage to Ishmael Bernal, who occasionally depicted distressed or giddy women by showing them unsteadily climbing up or down staircases, most famously in his first credited work, Pagdating sa Dulo (Near the End, 1971). The director’s appearance is a reflexive reference to Celso Ad. Castillo’s Totoy Boogie (1980), where the title character watches a TV interview of Castillo discussing the merits of Asedillo (1971), his Fernando Poe Jr. blockbuster. Later in the film, Castillo shows up and makes Totoy his kept man, yet another queer turn from the cis-het filmmaker, whose unfulfilled dream project was to star in his own production of Ang Lalakeng Nangarap Maging Nora Aunor (The Man Who Dreamed of Becoming Nora Aunor); in a parallel development, Totoy himself gets involved with a disco dancer who turns out to be the kept woman of a rich lesbian.
Posted by Joel David
Categories: Film Criticism
Tags: Commentaries
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