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Metamorphosis
Year of Release: 2019
Director: J.E. Tiglao [as Jose Enrique Tiglao]
Screenwriters: J.E. Tiglao & Boo Dabu
(With Ricky Lee as script consultant)
Producers: Cinema One Originals & Rebelde Films
Cast: Gold Aceron, Iana Bernardez, Dylan Ray Talon, Ricky Davao, Yayo Aguila, Germaine de Leon, Bodjie Pascua, Lui Manansala, Sarah Pagcaliwagan, Raqs Regalado, Mae Ann Tiglao, Daryl Zacarias, Jasper Martinez, Christian Sta. Maria, Robert Villar, Arj Acierda, Daniah Alysandra Jamon, Divine Grace Magaru, Len Jamby Malinab, Johna Pasamonte, Karla Luisa Espas, Paola Gumpad, Annie Meting, Trina Sobrepena, Alex Vistro, Patrick Mesiac, Jaelen Greece Merin, Jeffiyl Medina, Erika Jianzid Malinab, Mark Gabrielle Costales, Carl Mesias, Marian Albay, Christian Perez, Harry Reymundo Niño
Adam keeps getting teased by his male classmates for not being as masculine as they are. He calls their leader “supot” (meaning uncircumcised) and manages to beat him up during confrontations. Duriung class, their teacher welcomes Angel, who’s pretty but looks old for her age. Adam keeps hanging out with Angel, who reveals that she’s actually 24 years old; but when they swim in a river, Adam panics and runs home. His parents find him bleeding through his shorts and his father, a church pastor, contacts a doctor in their congregation, who says that Adam will need to be tested to determine his exact genital condition. Angel assures him that she can accept whatever he is and confesses that she performs sex work to be able to live alone. In the course of making out, she discovers Adam’s intersex nature and tells him later that she doesn’t judge him. Adam’s father, however, is convinced that the child he raised should be a daughter and makes plans to raise money and move to a different community. A young doctor stays over at Adam’s residence because of the rain and Adam finds himself getting attracted to the guy.
The presentation of any precarious human condition will always be the greatest strength of the narrative arts, and Metamorphosis has earned satisfactory notices from the admittedly narrow circle of observers concerned with the condition of intersexuality. The compliments are fully earned, with the film avoiding any dogmatic issue-raising and promoting the easily overlooked principle of allowing the intersex subject to determine their own preference in their own good time. (Those who still believe in intervention should be encouraged to read Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite, discovered and published in 1980 by Michel Foucault, where the implementation of a law that required that citizens be classified as only one of two genders resulted in scandal, heartbreak, desolation, and early death.) J.E. Tiglao also devised several means of evading the verbal supplication of understanding their social Otherness, except possibly for the argument of sisterhood articulated by a female sexual outlaw. Adam’s highlight scenes are bathed in a late-afternoon glow that evokes the Japanese concept of mono no aware, or the inevitability of melancholy in realizing beauty. The project also benefits from the execution of Gold Aceron, an extraordinary new talent who, in spite of his real-life cis-het orientation, manages to perform androgynously without any self-consciousness and succeeds in pulling off the several potentially awkward scenes involving the growing awareness of difference and isolation, the unpredictability of sexual desire, and the revelation of taboo body parts; the highest compliment one can pay for such a performative achievement is the mistaken impression of at least one foreign viewer that he must be intersex himself. Deserving to have a wider impact than it had, Metamorphosis is poised to greet a future where its presence will be more than welcome.
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