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No Other Woman
Year of Release: 2011
Director: Ruel S. Bayani [as Ruel Santos Bayani]
Screenwriters: Kris G. Gazmen & Ricardo Fernando III
(From a story by Keiko Aquino & Ricardo Fernando III)
Producers: ABS-CBN Film Productions, Star Cinema, Viva Films
Cast: Anne Curtis, Derek Ramsay, Cristine Reyes, Tirso Cruz III, Carmi Martin, John Arcilla, Marlann Flores, Ronk Morales, Kitkat, Ricci Chan, Niña Dolino, Kat Alano, Peter Serrano, Fred Payawan, Melvin Lee, Paul Jake Castillo, Malou Crisologo, Johnny Revilla, Matt Evans, Fonz Deza, Via Antonio, Antonette Garcia, Drew Rivera, Veronica Columna, Barbie Salvador, Marnie Lapus, Renan Evangelista, Rodrigo Oliveira, Louie Tan
Ramses or Ram Escaler attends a Zalderiaga company meeting in order to propose that they hire his furniture business to handle their new upscale resort. He discovers that the owner knows his father as an unworthy business partner, and meets the Zalderiaga heiress Kara, who takes an immediate liking to him. Ram entertains Kara to ensure that he can wangle the resort assignment, but warns Kara that he’s married. His wife, Charmaine, is advised by her fiery and combative mother, Babygirl dela Costa, to always be ready to fight for the man she married. When Ram is unable to resist Kara’s charms, Charmaine considers her options. What complicates the triangle is that Kara, who’s determined to use men strictly as playthings, finds herself falling for Ram.
A sexist politician’s moralistic judgment on lead actor Anne Curtis’s appeal led to feminist pushback from concerned sectors, but perhaps the most nuanced response was the social-network argument forwarded by queer critic and filmmaker Gio Potes in his slide essay “No Other Anne: Some QueerFem Ramblings” (originally posted March 8, 2026, on his Facebook page). Referencing Susan Sontag’s recuperation of camp and Laura Mulvey’s formulation of the male gaze, Potes points out how the contradictions in No Other Woman between “woman” and “other woman” emerge “not in spite of the film’s [glossy properties] but precisely through it: the heightened sheen of commercial melodrama makes these tensions even more visible.” Potes’s appreciation evokes the transgressive achievements of pre-Code romantic comedies in Hollywood, controverting the standard charge by less historically aware critics that the film characters are atypically bourgeois and thereby misrepresent the impoverished majority. Déclassé anxieties permeate the exchanges among the women in NOW, but get weaponized when the wife’s mother (played by Carmi Martin as a smart update of her unapologetic gold-digger in Ishmael Bernal’s Working Girls, 1984) declares that she won’t hesitate to pull out all the stops once she realizes her hubby’s fallen for a rival. The challenge faced by Curtis lay in calibrating how much dignity a thoroughly besotted tiger lady should relinquish while still remaining identifiably upper-crust. The balance between wife and mistress might sound schematic since the former’s comparatively lesser status nevertheless enjoys a moral ascendancy; yet the other woman yields just enough of her self-worth to make everyone around her (and the audience, by extension) wish for an intervention. The dynamic will be recognizable to anyone caught up in passionate power dynamics, regardless of class and even gender. The film assists in further explicating this by rendering the prize, the man caught between competing damsels, incapacitated at one point, though only temporarily and possibly unnecessarily. Scandal besetting social betters is one of the many pleasures that dramatic art affords, with NOW exemplifying how the privilege of an intimate peek can provide beyond-voyeuristic perceptions.
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