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1—#WalangForever

English Translation: #NoForever
Year of Release: 2015
Director: Dan Villegas
Screenwriter: Paul Sta. Ana
Producers: Quantum Films, MJM Productions, Tuko Film Productions

Cast: Jericho Rosales, Jennylyn Mercado, Lorna Tolentino, Pepe Herrera, Kim Molina, Jerald Napoles, Myke Salomon, Sarah Pagcaliwagan, Patrick Sugui, Nico Antonio, Juan Miguel Severo, Sebastian Castro, Irma Adlawan, Rustica Carpio, Matet de Leon, Paolo O’Hara, Quark Henares, Lilit Reyes, Geraldine Villamil, Phoemala Baranda, Cai Cortez, Phi Palmos, Derek Ramsey, Maja Salvador, Yves Flores, Alyana Asistio, Jon Lucas, Michelle Vito, Julian Estrada, Jason Francisco, Melai Cantiveros, Khalil Ramos, Jane Oineza, Sid Lucero, Liza Diño, Star Orjaliza, Francis Grengia, Ebe Dancel, Miguel Faustmann, Bianca Balbuena, Mackie Galvez, Matt Daclan, Cathy Garcia-Samana, Nonoy Froilan, Edna Vida, Carlo Aquino

Mia Nolasco’s a successful scriptwriter of romantic comedy films, although her latest works were box-office disappointments. In a TV interview, she confesses that she lost her inspiration when she broke up with the man she thought she could share the rest of her life with. As proof of the accuracy of her statements, we see scenes from the films she wrote alongside the actual events she experienced. Her ex, Ethan Isaac, resented her for prioritizing her career, even refusing to travel with him to Taiwan to meet his overseas-based mother for that reason. When he returns, he accidentally meets Mia in a bookstore and realizes that his life will never be complete without her. At the same time, he seeks second opinions not about his relationship, but about his health.

2—How to Be Yours

Additional Language: Cebuano
Year of Release: 2016
Director: Dan Villegas
Screenwriters: Patrick Valencia & Hyro Aguinaldo
(Based on a story by Dan Villegas)
Producers: Star Cinema & Viva Films

Cast: Bea Alonzo, Gerald Anderson, Bernard Palanca, Janus del Prado, Alex Medina, Anna Luna, Nicco Manalo, Jerome Tan, Divine Aucina, Cheska Iñigo, Brian Sy, Teetin Villanueva, Lito Pimentel, Katya Santos, Ricardo Cepeda, Ana Roces, Chkristopher Tan, Marnie Lapus, Geraldine Villamil, Fredison Lo, Alexander Soriano, Evelyn Santos, James Christie, JC Movido

On a night out in Chinatown during Spring Festival with friends from work, Niño notices Angeline Mendoza (Anj for short) and makes her acquaintance. She also finds him attractive and invites him to spend the night at her place, but her roommates make too much noise for them to have an intimate moment. In the morning, Anj introduces Niño to her friends and they invite him to the food stall where she practices her cooking skills; she tells him that she’s the only member of her family who didn’t become a doctor so cooking’s her way of finding fulfillment in something she enjoys doing. One time, Pocholo, a famous chef, tries a dish prepared by Anj and is impressed enough to invite her to apply to his restaurant. She gets accepted but the work demands so much time from her that Niño decides to invite her to live with him so she can commute more easily to her job. She devotes herself to her job so assiduously that Pocholo appoints her his sous-chef; but since investors for a new restaurant that Anj can run are nervous because of her lack of extensive experience, he offers to send her to Paris for further training—a prospect that further strains her relationship with Niño.

The now-expended period of dominance of the romantic-comedy film genre in the Philippines might be good news for the high-brow critics who claimed concern for the mass audience’s cultural well-being yet hypocritically denounced whatever mode of presentation happened to draw their attention at any historical moment. A vital component of the trend that set it apart from its Classical Hollywood origin was that millennium-era Pinas romcom production was by and large female-dominated, with women and gay-male directors attending to the creative side of specific projects, including the occasional comedy byproduct. (One way of getting a handle on the homegrown expressions of incommensurate anti-romcom hatred is by recalling the conservative backlash in the US against disco music, for its having been essentially a synergism that brought together black producers, women singers, and gay appreciators.) Romcom had flourished so overwhelmingly that it enabled the emergence of talents who could fill any perceived lacks by resisting or even overturning some of its generic premises. The case of Dan Villegas holds special significance in this context: by providing an identifiable and credible straight-male perspective within the feminist terms of the genre, his output helps explain how romcom films could attract such a broad viewership sector. #WalangForever went about its proof of concept by resorting to an admittedly old-fashioned strategy: invest the male partner with a tragic circumstance so extreme that it inhibits him from pursuing romantic fulfillment. The film provides a reflexive device by having the more successful woman partner turning their story into public spectacles—an undeniably creepy choice if it were perpetrated by a man, but it somehow earns its druthers by ultimately enabling the doubt-ridden man to witness, as the audience does, how his lover was processing their affair. How to Be Yours can also be solidly situated in this dynamic: it allows its primarily female character to dictate the terms of her relationship (as any of her real-life counterparts would), but in finding a narrative equivalent of Pinay citizens’ overseas-labor designations, it manages to refocus some attention on the left-behind chap, contriving to reconstruct a life that had already fully burgeoned in the presence of someone who’s no longer around. The depiction of men coping with loss was one of the standard highlights of the best local action films, as was the imaging of women commanded by love—and such are the means by which genre developments address audience concerns regardless of the narrative mechanisms they utilize.

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Hintayan ng Langit

English Title: Heaven’s Waiting
Year of Release: 2018
Director: Dan Villegas
Screenwriter: Juan Miguel Silverio
(Based on his one-act play)
Producers: QCinema International Film Festival, Globe Studios, Quezon City Film Development Commission

Cast: Eddie Garcia, Gina Pareño, Kat Galang, Joel Saracho, Mary Joy Apostol, Jomari Angeles, Geraldine Villamil, Dolly de Leon, Francis Mata, Karl Medina, Che Ramos, Mel Kimura, Reynald Raissel Santos, Errine Danan, Neil Guillen, Martin Lazaro, Hadaneeah Cubico, Monina Fe Meraces, Jonel Pusing, Miguel Mascareñas, Nina Ybanez, Miko Yu, Angelica Tapia, Elizabeth dela Cerna

Upon his arrival, Manolo’s informed by the halfway place’s concierge that the room allotted to him has been damaged, so he’ll have to share sleeping quarters with someone he used to know. He finds out that it’s Lisang, who used to be his girlfriend before he married someone else several decades ago. After remembering how he died, he figures out that he’s in Purgatory, awaiting a final trip to a higher realm along with the other residents. What he wonders about is why Lisang keeps delaying her own ascent, even committing an infraction in his presence.

Hintayan ng Langit would literally translate as “heaven’s waiting room,” so the idea of Purgatory, problematic even to enlightened Catholics, serves as the closest possible equivalent of the concept of a way station in the afterlife where the recently deceased could resolve their personal issues before attaining a state of eternal peace and happiness. Those with enough historical awareness might also recall that colonial-era Spanish clergy earned for the local church incalculable wealth and property based on instilling the fear of purgatorial suffering on vulnerable wealthy natives, in order to claim their inheritance right before they expired. The challenge for the filmmakers therefore lay in selling the fantasy—which the narrative unexpectedly performs by fusing classical values with a covert modern sensibility. Traditionalists will have to be inordinately picky to find fault with HnL’s visual design as well as the first-time pairing of two studio-era old-timers known for both their consummate skills and their willingness to tackle daring roles: their extended exchanges and individual monologues are reserved for the film’s climactic section, and unsurprisingly they make it worth the trouble. The modern element, in terms of Hollywood samples, requires a recollection of which American film came closest to HnL’s example. In general, US productions could not resist resending their dead characters back to the real world, so even in these terms, HnL remains distinctive; but the first American film to focus on a woman’s post-life predicament was Gerard Damiano’s The Devil in Miss Jones (1973), arguably the first undisputed masterpiece of the Golden Age of Porn.[1] It shouldn’t be too surprising that what was so unusual for Americans that it could only be initially made on the fringes of their industry became standard fare for Pinas cinema in the late twentieth century, after the collapse of the country’s authoritarian adventure.

Note

[1] The title once appeared in the decadal Sight & Sound survey of 2002; I was the respondent who entered it, along with another X-rated title, The Opening of Misty Beethoven (Radley Metzger a.k.a. Henry Paris, 1976).

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The Day After Valentine’s

Additional Languages: Hawaiian & Baybayin (written)
Year of Release: 2018
Director & Screenwriter: Jason Paul Laxamana
Producer: Viva Films

Cast: Bela Padilla, JC Santos, Regine Tolentino, Jordan Castillo, Stacey Gabriel, Phoebe Villamor, Rayton Lamay, Hermie Go, Merwyn Abel, Aries Go, Rhedz Turner, Don Michael Roxas, Easy Ferrero, Ianne Oandasan, Lars Magbanua, Maverick Manalang

Lani, a salesperson at an ukay-ukay or secondhand clothes shop in Angeles City, proceeds to assist a customer, Kai, after she realizes he needs to buy arm sleeves to hide the scars of the self-harm he committed. He tells her that he decided to remain in the country after his family returned to the US, because of a woman he had fallen in love with but who broke up with him afterward. Following psychological advice she learned, Lani realizes she could use the native writing system, which Kai’s ex had taught him, to help him heal. Grateful for her intervention, Kai invites Lani to his home on the Hawaiian island of Lanai, where their relationship tenses up and raises questions for both of them.

The travelogue romcom was bound to reach a level of maturity despite the antimainstream misgivings of local critics, partly because of the persistence of expert practitioners, but also because of the still-expanding overseas Filipino population and their wealth of still-to-be-tapped stories. The Day After Valentine’s exemplifies new potentials in the format, focusing on the first generation of overseas migrants—kids who could still return to their parents’ country of origin and find enough familiarity to be able to thrive by themselves. It also makes use of a cis-het partnership that may be the most satisfactory in Pinas film culture, both partners being equally matched in terms of appeal, intelligence, and chemistry. Their maturity (relative to the usual teenage age-group of local movie love teams) ensures that their teamups won’t generate hysterical responses, but that also enables their projects’ creatives to focus on discursive issues that can guarantee longer-term satisfaction. The manner in which TDAV steps beyond romcom territory and transforms into social-problem drama may be so subtle that the realization might only arrive after the viewing experience. Whether we regard this type of innovation as useful or insignificant, the fact of its availability should be justification enough.

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Ded Na si Lolo

English Title: Grandpa Is Dead
Year of Release: 2009
Director & Screenwriter: Soxy Topacio [as Soxie Hernandez Topacio]
Producers: APT Entertainment, Directors Guild of the Philippines, Sine Direk

Cast: Roderick Paulate, Gina Alajar, Elizabeth Oropesa, Manilyn Reynes, Dick Israel, Perla Bautista, Rainier Castillo, BJ Forbes, Tony Cruz, Richard Quan, Mosang, Froilan Sales, Phil Noble, Diego Llorico, Rhen Escaño, Karylle Quijano, Dave Cervantes, Arpee Bautista, Perry Escaño, Richard Jason Paje, Rudy Meyer, Manny Castañeda, Cesar Cosme, Mike “Pekto” Nacua, John Feir, Gene Padilla, Deborah Sun, Gigette Reyes, Noel Cabangon, Jess Evardone, Nor Domingo, Edel Templonuevo

Lolo Juanito fails to wake up one morning. After his body is returned from the morgue, his grownup children have to gather together at his house for his wake and burial. They all resent Dolores, their eldest, for being the least affectionate sibling. Mameng and Charing bring their families to help out, while estranged son Junee arrives straight from a drag program. Finally the older son, Syano, brings a stranger to the funeral and makes the others realize they never really knew their parents that well after all.

Ded Na si Lolo underwent a trajectory of being overrated, then underrated; but in the period since its release, it deserves to be regarded as a fitting tribute to the highly regarded talents of Philippine Educational Theater Association stalwart Soxy Topacio. The narrative situation indicates an intimate familiarity not just with the score of performers in theater and TV that he worked with, but also with the reality of growing up in an urban working-class milieu. The plot would have challenged most film-trained directors, with characters who keep giving vent to their anguish, with dramatic fainting as one of the family’s quirks. Nosy neighbors and importunate superstitions, usually depicted as annoyances if not obstacles in local cinema, are presented with bemusement and acceptance of their inevitability. The narrative builds up to a quietly devastating final-act revelation, heartbreaking and heartwarming in equal measure, that evinces the kind of presence we lost with Topacio’s sudden demise.

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Ang Tanging Ina

English Title: My Only Mother
Year of Release: 2003
Director: Wenn V. Deramas
Screenwriters: Mel Mendoza-del Rosario & Keiko Aquino
(From a story by Mel Mendoza-del Rosario & Freddie M. Garcia)
Producer: Star Cinema

Cast: Aiai delas Alas, Connie Chua, Eugene Domingo, Edu Manzano, Tonton Gutierrez, Andoy Ranay, Alan Chanliongco, Jestoni Alarcon, Carlo Aquino, Nikki Valdez, Heart Evangelista, Marvin Agustin, Serena Dalrymple, Shaina Magdayao, Alwyn Uytingco, Jiro Manio, Marc Acueza, Yuki Kadooka, Jojit Lorenzo, Rommel Rellora, Anthony Griar, Nestor Balla, Angelica Panganiban, Dianne Tejada, Michelle Ayalde, Nikki Laurel, Liberty Lometillo, John Pratts, Jestoni Alarcon, Dennis Padilla, Edu Manzano, Tonton Gutierrez

Ina Montecillo falls into a pattern of discovering a handsome hunk eager to marry her, then suddenly losing said hunk in an accident and discovering her next marriageable prospect just when she lays her previous hubby to rest. After three husbands and a dozen kids, she decides to live as a single parent, to spare any future men whatever jinx she may be cursed with. Her BFF Rowena helps her in applying to any available job, but her burgeoning brood, the oldest members of whom are already of school age, demands her attention as well because of their growing-up pains.

One of a number of millennial-era victims of the punishing workload of TV-dominated film work, Wenn V. Deramas suffered further from the film-as-art ideology propagated by academe-based critic-instructors and mindlessly mouthed by practitioners—all of whom should have known better. Ang Tanging Ina’s revenge on this state of affairs actually sealed its fate as a permanently downgraded entry: not only was it produced by the most successful film studio since the end of the Second Golden Age, it was also the most profitable Filipino film project up to its time. It generated a number of sequels (although, strictly speaking, Deramas made only two that proceeded from ATI’s narrative premise); more significantly, and just as casually neglected, was the impressive development of his expertise in comedy, along with several of the talents in ATI. At the time of his demise, over a decade later, he seemed poised to rival Manuel Conde and Maryo J. de los Reyes, guaranteeing (if his and our luck hadn’t run out) one master for each of our Golden Ages plus himself as the millennium’s current one. He remained prolific, to his tragic detriment, with ATI standing as proof of his then-nascent comedic gift: an ability to deliver complex expositions, an incomparable sense of timing, a fearlessness in extending setups and payoffs, and a sharp attunement to the quotidian concerns of the audience. Underlying the expected generic compromises and containment, ATI nevertheless maintains a drag-queer edginess in upholding a funny-looking elderly lady as the flamboyant master of a multifariously strenuous situation.

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Moron 5 and the Crying Lady

Year of Release: 2012
Director: Wenn V. Deramas
Screenwriters: Mel Mendoza-del Rosario & Wenn V. Deramas
Producers: Viva Films & MVP Pictures

Cast: Luis Manzano, Billy Crawford, Marvin Agustin, DJ Durano, Martin Escudero, John Lapus, Andrew Wolfe, German Moreno, Jon Santos, Roden Araneta, Dennis Padilla, Roldan Aquino, Deborah Sun, Arlene Muhlach, Joy Viado, Mark Felix, Marco Brillo, Carlos Dala, Kevin Kier Remo, Martin Venegas, Kule Ang, Eagle Riggs, Tess Antonio, Dang Cruz, Christopher Roxas, Carlos Agassi, Eri Neeman, Hideaki Torio, Phobie, Ya Chang, Renee Hampshire, Flora Gasser, Nikki Gil, Reynand Luarez, Jennylyn Mercado, JC Parker, Ricky Rivero

As elementary-school classmates, Beckie harbored a crush on Albert, but his tight-knit group, comprising Isaac, Aristotle, Mozart, and Mike, kept mocking and bullying him. The five remain such nitwits that they become the oldest high-school students at St. Andrew Academy. When they see an ad looking for performers, they apply but get instructed to wear G-strings for an audience of gays and women. They flee from having to service the customers but wander into the church wedding of a Japanese bridegroom and his Pinay fiancée. Mozart remembers a Japanese word from his street-smart parents and they keep repeating it, which happens to mean “queer.” Upon hearing it, the bridegroom realizes that his wife-to-be, Beckie, was born male and dies from a heart attack. From that point onward, Beckie vows revenge against the five friends and uses her wealth to devise various ways of framing them so they could get arrested and thrown in jail.

What appears to be a formulaic setup with the usual plethora of jokes, witticisms, and absurdities packaged within a crime-doesn’t-pay framework and exacerbated with a valorization of infantile behavior, prevails despite its baggage because of its creatives’ and ensemble’s accumulation of comedic skills, complemented by an embrace of political incorrectness and careful tweaks of potentially awkward portions. The most rewarding reformulation is in the casting of the central collection of gagsters: the logical expectation would be to hire young pre-breakout talents, the way that past group films managed to minimize salary budgets while maximizing the actors’ collective appeal. What Moron 5 and the Crying Lady did instead was corral the precise opposite—post-famous actors, replete with performative skills as well as personal histories already familiar to observers—a strategy that was surefire in the past, but only in the case of sexually mature actresses and far older actors. Their melding of interactive exchanges and delight in one another’s presences succeeds so well that the presentation of differences among them could be treated as incidental necessities. The accrual of their early-millennium personas also makes them queer-friendly enough so that the title character’s Crying (trans) Lady can confidently indulge her brand of postqueer meanness, with the extra treat of other skilled performers cross-dressing into some of the supporting and cameo roles. We don’t need to launch into another diatribe right now against critical high-mindedness that wasted the opportunity to honor one more contribution of a directorial talent who would be departing not soon after: the closing credits, worth some spare attention for summarizing the Moron 5 actors’ real-life careers, also shows the Crying Lady bantering with (the impersonator of) a political figure who’d be making her own triumphant comeback not long afterward, a symbolic consequence of our failing to heed one of the warnings casually sounded in pop culture.

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Kembali Saorang

English Title: One Came Back
Language: Malay
Year of Release: 1957 / B&W
Director & screenwriter: Ramon A. Estella [with dialogue by S. Sudarmadji]
(From a story by Run Run Shaw)
Producer: Malay Film Productions

Cast: Sa’adiah, Ahmad Mahmud, Salleh Kamil, Mariani, Daeng Idris, Supatri, Saamah, Habsah, Malik Sutan Muda, Omar Suwita, M. Rafee, Ali Muhammad, Kemat Hassan, Nyak Osman, Shariff Dol, Ibrahim Pendek, H.M. Busra

Hussain wants to marry his fiancée Aminah and, out of love for her, rejects Zaitun. When Hussain attempts to collect money from a debtor, he finds the latter dead and asks Zaitun to hide him. Aminah’s father searches for Hussain but gets arrested by the police. Meanwhile, Zaitun informs a detective where Hussain is hiding. Hussain flees and jumps into the sea. When the police announce his death, his best friend Yusof comforts Aminah by asking his mother to take care of her and her sister in their home. Believing that Hussain has perished, Yusof begins to develop feelings for Aminah. But Zaitun threatens to expose Yusof’s past with her. The kampung (Malay village) where they live is small enough so that the characters’ personal affairs become public knowledge sooner or later.

Only an excerpt remains of Ramon A. Estella’s 1956 triumph Ang Buhay at Pag-ibig ni Dr. Jose Rizal (The Life and Love of Dr. Jose Rizal), the same condition in which Manuel Conde’s Juan Tamad Goes to Congress (1959) can be found. But where Conde’s Vietnam-set Krus na Kawayan (Let Us Live, 1956) can be fairly described as propagandistic drivel, the output of several Filipino directors for Sir Run Run Shaw in Malaysia is of a generally noteworthy quality, with none more accomplished than Estella’s. Earlier recognized for political controversy over the long-lost Ako Raw Ay Huk (I Was Called a Rebel, later retitled Labi ng Bataan or Remains of Bataan, 1948), only one apparently complete local production of Estella’s remains. Fortunately most Filipino filmmakers’ Malay-language output has been carefully preserved in Singapore, with Estella’s debut contribution, Kembali Saorang, outshining the rest.[1] Estella admirably navigates a surprisingly complex narrative (in addition to finishing in record time, per reliable accounts) and demonstrates why his producers prevailed on him to make several more films before continuing with his peripatetic explorations.[2] For close comparison, Teodorico C. Santos made a charming effort, Taufan (Typhoon), later the same year, in the same locale and with many of the same actors; but even in reprising the melodramatic elements, Kembali Saorang pulls away with more ambitious scope, appreciation of social forces, and psychological complexity, with a resolution that honors Estella’s new sponsors’ culture as much as it reflects the maturity of Philippine film artistry.

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Samseng

English Translation: Gangster
Language: Malay
Additional Language: English
Year of Release: 1959 / B&W
Director: Ramon A. Estella
Screenwriter: Ralph Modder
Producer: Malay Film Productions

Cast: Zaiton, Aziz Jaafar, Jins Shamsuddin, Rosnani, Saamah, A. Rahim, Haji Mahadi, Omar Suwita, M. Rafee, Ali P.G., Mohd. Hamid, Kemat Hassan, Sharif Dol, Ismail Abdullah, Ibrahim Hasan, S. Sudharmadji

Daud serves time in prison after being arrested for forgery. His good behavior impresses the warden, who promises him a job after he is released. His younger brother Ahmad meanwhile deceives his mother by claiming to be a car dealer when he actually engages in extortion and robbery. Their neighbor Kiah sympathizes with the brothers’ mother but Ahmad ignores her and takes up with a nightclub hostess. After Daud has served his sentence, he follows up on the job offered him. It turns out to be undercover police work. Daud is assigned to shadow a troublesome criminal gang, unaware that his own brother is its ringleader.

Samseng exists in atypically poor condition, since it appears to be sourced from a TV-broadcast version. But that also attests to its effectiveness as a film-noir favorite. The primary locales—Changi Prison (now Complex), then fairly new and also featured in Ramon A. Estella’s Kembali Saorang, and the underworld hotspots of Singapore—become as much dramatic players as the performers themselves. A well-regarded member of the Philippine social-realist painters circle, Estella understandably upheld verisimilitude even in shifting to cinema, and the result in this case is a tale firmly rooted in time and place. He also apparently valued memorable resolutions (possibly a consequence of his professional musicianship), which nearly saves his Mata Hari (1958) from masculinist overvaluation. The device works whoppingly for Samseng, where the standard chases, shootouts, and heartbreaks build up to an unforgettable night in the lives of the city’s dispossessed.

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Saudagar Minyak Urat

English Translation: Massage-Oil Merchant
English Title: Love Crazy
Language: Malay
Additional Language: English
Year of Release: 1959 / B&W
Director: Ramon A. Estella
Screenwriter: Ralph Modder
Producer: Malay Film Productions

Cast: S. Kadarisman, Normadiah, Aziz Sattar, Mariani, S. Shamsuddin, Leng Hussin, Ani Jasmin, Ahmad Nispu, Ibrahim Pendek, Mohd Hamid, Zainom, Saloma, S. Sudarmadji, Sharif Dol, Omar Suwita, Kemat Hassan, Ali P.G., Kassim Masdor, H.M. Busra, Omar Harun, Ismail Abdullah

Fatimah, a bossy though still-bodacious wife, has her hands full making sure her hubby stays faithful. The philandering Yusof Hamid asks his assistant to take him to a nightclub, where he meets and falls for Hamidah, even arranging to serenade her one night. Since she already has a boyfriend, she resists Hamid, forcing him to look for a miracle. He approaches a witch doctor, who arranges to cast a spell on Hamidah. When Fatimah finds out, she also asks for help from the same magician.

Only the lost Caprichosa (Whimsical Woman, 1947) and possibly Kenkoy (1950) in Ramon A. Estella’s previous film record suggest that he might have dabbled in romantic comedy. After assigning him a series of genre exercises—melodrama, horror, war, and gangster films—with generally satisfactory results, Sir Run Run Shaw must have marveled at how he came up with his best Malay-language product at that point. Saudagar Minyak Urat is a silly, rambunctious outing from start to finish, with occasional use of slapstick and sped-up footage, but like the best comedy directors, Estella ensured that a dramatically valid foundation was fully developed beforehand. He displays impressive skill in blocking and choreographing groups of performers so that the lines of action crisscross but never result in confusion, and stages a charming open-air musical interlude midway (an effervescent beach number titled “Hula Hoop” that cleverly rationalizes hip-grinding women in skimpy wear), succeeded in later scenes by a feverish song-and-dance number featuring Saloma. He also shows smart gender reversals that may have drawn on the contemporaneous full-scale treatments of Gregorio Fernandez. But until the emergence of the talents behind Juan de la Cruz Productions in the 1970s, nothing we have in available Philippine film samples has as queer a figure the way that Normadiah (as the domineering missus) is configured in SMU: garrulous, hotheaded, swaggering pugnaciously, yet winning her battles via judicious deployment of the womanly masquerade. So the great Manuel Conde movies are lost? We have this entry from Estella, and it will fulfill expectations of accomplished old-time Philippine comedy, even if it’s set in neighboring territory.

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Pusaka Pontianak

English Title: The Accursed Heritage
English Translation: The Pontianak Heritage
Language: Malay
Additional Language: English
Year of Release: 1965 / B&W
Director & Screenwriter: Ramon A. Estella
Producer: Malay Film Productions

Cast: Saadiah, Ahmad Mahmud, Dayang Sofia, Salleh Kamil, Normadiah, Mariam Baharum, Aziz Sattar, Ahmad Daud, Ibrahim Pendek, Ahmad Nisfu, Haji Mahadi, Jah Hj. Mahadi, Omar Suwita, Kuswadinata

Related individuals from various walks of life keep sighting a distant uncle whom they all regard as wealthy, but the apparitions either disappear or turn scary. They then read a newspaper report that identify the man, Datu Pengiran Sutan Kudus, as having perished in a fiery automobile accident and wishing to gather all his relatives for the reading of his last will and testament. They travel to his estate on a rubber plantation where tigers roam, and await the reading at midnight. The lawyer introduces a young woman as the late datu’s wife, who should be his rightful heir. But in acknowledgment of his many descendants, he makes a revelation along with a condition: his ancestors were pontianaks destroyed by his human family and cursed thirteen generations of the human descendants, with the datu as the last of the accursed. Those wanting their share of inheritance must remain on the plantation for four weeks, with those who leave or die forfeiting their share. A few other characters introduce themselves as investigators who find the datu’s own death suspicious.

The question of how much closure Ramon A. Estella provided for the most productive phase of his career, in Malay-language cinema, must have been on his producer’s mind as well: he was given his third pontianak assignment, but with a treatment reminiscent of his most memorable achievement, the musical comedy Saudagar Minyak Urat. The further question of how far he was allowed to subvert his material might be impossible to determine by now, except from the historical record that no other pontianak movie was produced afterward until well into the next decade. Estella was also making films in Vietnam and Japan around this time, and would continue working in New York, Puerto Rico, and Italy, until finally retiring in Florida with his Japanese wife. As a final intertextual appreciation, a remake of the similarly structured Ten Little Indians (dir. George Pollock, 1965) would be released in English-speaking territories only the next year—a testimonial to Estella’s accomplished timeliness. The pontianak may be considered the Indo-Malayan counterpart of the Philippines’s manananggal although the also-female entity possesses the tragic backstory of childbirth trauma. Estella updates his narrative by introducing rock and roll music, with the theme song (translatable as “Rhythm of the Pontianak”) performed in doo-wop style by Ahmad Daud and the Swallows, consequently rationalizing the sharia-proscribed arrangement specified by the characters’ forebear. As described by film expert Amir Muhammad, the pop brashness “brought the pontianak out into the harsh modern light of parody and cynicism, away from the shadows of whispered superstition and taboo where she thrived” (120 Malay Movies, Matahari Books, 2010). The characters and their relationships are developed as a drawing-room drama, although the narrative resolution expands the setting in an unexpected yet apposite manner. An aura of gloom nevertheless suffuses the proceedings, derived as much from the nighttime settings as from our awareness that agricultural wealth will not be able to hold its own against a fast-industrializing economy.

Notes

[1] Available internet information on Ramon A. Estella is reflective of the negligence with which he has been treated in general, since he always seemed ready to move from place to place in search of work. As of this writing, the Internet Movie Database does not list this film as well as Saudagar Minyak Urat (Love Crazy, 1959), Darah-Ku (My Blood, 1963), and Bunga Tanjong (Cape of Flowers, 1963), and lists the earlier version of Raja Bersiong (The King with Fangs, 1963) in his name rather than K.M. Basker’s; it also misidentifies Pusaka Pontianak (The Accursed Heritage, 1965) under the credit of its assistant director, S. Sudarmaji. The Singapore Fillm Archives contains a comprehensive listing, including an Estella-directed Japan-set film, Melanchong ka-Tokyo (Holiday in Tokyo, 1964) also produced by Malay Film Productions. A missing Estella Filipino title is Ang Tagala (The Tagalog Woman, 1941), the Vietnam-set Kim (1957), and an unplaceable Italian work, Consiglio Costoso (Expensive Advice, no date provided)—all from the director’s entry in the Film volume of the Cultural Center of the Philippines’s Encyclopedia of Philippine Art, 2nd ed., CCP & University of the Philipppines Diliman Office of the Chancellor, 2017, pp. 449–450.

[2] One rudimentary context of Estella’s relocation to Malaysia, which I am still in the process of further evaluating, is that his arrival coincided with the announcement of a strike for higher wages by film performers and technicians from Malay Film Productions, through the Singapore Malay Artists’ Union, submitted to Shaw Brothers. Although a Filipino actor-director, Eddie Infante, preceded everyone in 1955 with Gadis Liar (Elephant Girl, apparently unavailable), after an earlier notice concluded amicably in 1954, the near-simultaneous solicitation of a clutch of Noypi directors in 1957 and 1958 raises the disturbing possibility that our talents might have been envisioned to function as safeguards against the possible inactivity of Malaysian and Indian creatives.

11011However, filmmaker, critic, and historian Amir Muhammed provided a crucial qualification: “I’ve asked three people who’ve written about the era and all of them say it was never a policy akin to hiring scabs; it was more like two things that happened in parallel. The strikes were never major enough to cripple production for long. (P. Ramlee’s Panca Delima, released in 1957, was one of the few films that got delayed; then there was a bigger strike in 1965 where Shaw had to temporarily close.) The Filipino directors were hired based on cultural similarities but also access to more sophisticated ‘Hollywood techniques’” (Messenger reply, November 5, 2025). For essential basic resources, see the list of references at “Malay Film Productions & Cathay-Keris Studio (1943–1973),” Wiki.sg (last edited August 6, 2019).

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Taufan

English Title: Typhoon
Language: Malay
Year of Release: 1957 / B&W
Director: Teodorico C. Santos [as T.C. Santos]
Screenwriter: Teodorico C. Santos with dialogues by S. Sudarmadji
(From the story “A Storm on Pearl Island” by Chua Boon Hean)
Producer: Malay Film Productions

Cast: Ziaton, Ahmad Mahmud, Salleh Kamil, Mariani, Saamah, Aziz Sattar, Baby Suraini, Nyak Osman, Salbiah Kardi, Shariff Dol, Fatimah Osman, Ali Fijee, Jamilah, Mohd Rafee, Omar Suwita, Mustarjo, Kemat Hassan, H.M. Busra, Ibrahim Pendek, Mohd. Hamid

The fishermen of a coastal kampung or traditional village catch so little fish after a strong typhoon that they borrow money from Hamid, who takes advantage of their situation by charging usurious repayment rates. Hamid has set his sights on Fatimah, who has to attend to her father who’s ill but owes Hamid money; Hamid offers her medical care if she agrees to be his mistress, abusing his own wife when she criticizes his intention. He intends to get rid of Amir, Fatimah’s betrothed, by promising to write off Fatimah’s loan if Amir’s able to bring him a large pearl from the shark-infested waters. Fatimah protests, but Amir is determined to win her from Hamid and proceeds with the life-threatening mission.

One of the more highly regarded talents of the First Golden Age, with over forty titles to his name as director and several more as scriptwriter (including Gerardo de Leon’s Sisa), active through the 1970s—yet the only still-available Teodorico C. Santos-directed film, apart from Fernando Poe Jr.’s recently remastered koboy entry …At Sila’y Dumating (And They Came, 1967),[1] was the one he made for Sir Run Run Shaw. The material is old-fashioned melodrama with musical interludes, enhanced by the rural setting and made even more exotic by a cast more reticent and graceful than what we might find in a Philippine production. Santos benefited from an apparently bigger budget than Philippine-set projects could allot, and made sure none of it was wasted: any plot excuse to follow pearl-diving characters is realized with impressive underwater photography, while Santos frames and blocks his island-set actors with sufficient evidence of technical lessons learned on Gerry de Leon projects. The propensity for excess must have been the national value he brought over; it provides him with a means to revitalize the genre’s conventions and gives the story a nervy edge, like a finely woven fishnet stretched to the point where it could easily tear in several places.

Note

[1] The once-popular problematic Western genre was, in simplistic terms, a commemoration of the expansion of Euro-derived civilization from Atlantic-coast US territories into the “wild” Pacific states; the expansion of the US into independent countries such as Hawaii and Guam, leading to the successful colonization of the Philippines and unsuccessful attempt in Vietnam, may be seen as an extension of this impetus. The very first acknowledged narrative film story, Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903), partook of elements that were identified with Westerns, although the overseas popularity of the genre, including the Philippines’s koboy (from cowboy) samples, may be traced to so-called Italian spaghetti Westerns. Ironically these were acknowledged as influenced by—plagiarized, in fact, from—an Asian hit, Kurosawa Akira’s Yojimbo (Bodyguard, 1961), which in turn led to such coinages as Easterns or ramen Westerns. Teodorico C. Santos’s …At Sila’y Dumating is saddled by excessive psychotic villainy, with FPJ himself arguably modifying the koboy elements in his own Panday film series and finally creating a historically inflected peak with Ang Maestro (The Master, 1981).

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Dementia

Year of Release: 2014
Director: Perci M. Intalan
Screenwriters: Renei Dimla & Jun Lana
Producer: IdeaFirst Company

Cast: Nora Aunor, Jasmine Curtis-Smith, Bing Loyzaga, Yul Servo, Chynna Ortaleza

Mara returns to Batanes with her adoptive family, who’re hoping that her memories of her childhood experience will help cure her dementia. What Mara remembers is how a couple brought her home to keep company with their biological child, Olivia, who suffers from psychotic disorder and has to be chained to furniture. Mara’s able to pacify Olivia’s violent moods, but she faces a crossroads in her life when the man she has fallen in love with asks her to be his wife.

Dementia succeeds primarily by relying on expectations that it fulfills in unexpected ways. It proceeds primarily as a supernatural horror film but brings up a social condition, that of orphaned subjects for whom exploitation is more acceptable than abandonment. It pursues a narrative throughline that brings up unreliable recollections of traumatizing events, then flashes the title credit like an afterthought, nearly an hour into the presentation; where it goes from then on will have to be part of the discovery process. Finally, it features Nora Aunor, older and wearier after her long-drawn-out sabbatical in the US—but the greater portion of her character arc is taken up and developed by younger actors. In fact, one would be misadvised to expect one of her fireworks-laden readings in this film; her comeback career teems with such treats, but Dementia is a reminder that her artistry cannot be separated from her expertise as producer and director.[1] She exercises self-restraint in order to allow the work’s various possibilities to branch out and raise further questions about the function of the mind in comprehending pain, memory, desire, and pleasure.

Note

[1] Spoiler alert: on May 21, 2025, in commemoration of Nora Aunor’s first birth anniversary after her death, the producer’s Facebook page uploaded the raw and unedited take titled “Seq. 74, Shot 2,” comprising the central revelation in the film. Mauro Feria Tumbocon Jr., who reposted the file on the same date, reported the director’s account: “I whispered to her to stare at the camera. I told her that her character will go from not remembering to remembering bits and pieces, then without understanding she remembers the pain, then slowly it all fades away. I didn’t expect her not to even blink. There was nothing in front of her except our cinematographer and the camera. She was literally only looking at the lens. But the power her eyes wield. Mackie [Galvez, cinematographer] said he couldn’t believe what he was recording. Unfortunately for the film we had to sacrifice this one long take by inserting flashbacks to better serve the story.”

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Ang Nerseri

English Title: The Nursery
Year of Release: 2009
Director & Screenwriter: Vic Acedillo Jr.
Producer: Cinemalaya Foundation

Cast: Jaclyn Jose, Timothy Castillo, Lance Raymundo, Alwyn Uytingco, Claudia Enriquez, Ynez Veneracion, Tony Mabesa, Chona Fernando, Babit de Luna, Eunice Lagusad, JM de Guzman, Carme Sanchez, Irene Llopis, Gigi Locsin, Chiqui del Carmen, Gigi Pirote, Imelda Valunsat, John Hernandez, Chona Fernando, Troy de Guzman, Carmelo Soberano, Anthony Corpus, Jayr Cerdenola, Loy Maga, Mark Macalintal, Arvin Trinidad, Jonathan Olano, Melqui Sedic Asuncion, Raymond Roman, Emma Galvez, Flor Salanga, Ma. Ozita “Chit” Pambid, Bernie Villapando, Janice Fuentes, Ian Paraiso

Mai is at her wits’ end as a single mother caring for several kids, all grownup except for Cocoy. Her eldest son moved out and refuses contact with the family, while another son, Jun, has just been recommitted to drug rehab. Still another son, Dean, is acting out also because of addiction, harassing his only sister, Lyn, who eventually suffers a nervous breakdown. Realizing that she’ll need extra funds, Mai decides to go to Bohol to sell off some property, leaving Cocoy in charge of his siblings as well as Mai’s orchid nursery. Cocoy however has also been masquerading as an outstanding student, and has to assume more than his share of responsibilities when Mai keeps extending her sojourn.

Personal projects in independent cinema are so commonplace that they have become near-synonymous with the practice. No surprise then that the material of Ang Nerseri—familial difficulties arising from a combination of psychological and financial problems—observes the expected pattern of these troubles resolving in increasing complications, with barely enough breathing space for the characters to recover from the suffering they have to endure. Yet the film sets itself off from like-minded works by being devoid of any form of narcissism, focused instead on a careful recounting of the emotional costs of the incidents that it narrates. What showiness it possesses lies in the technological risk-taking of using a then-newish digital single-lens reflex camera, the Canon EOS 5D Mark II, a full year before other productions (mostly in Europe) figured out its usefulness for their film projects; even in this undertaking, the fine arts-trained Vic Acedillo Jr. wound up muting his screen colors except for the cooler hues, providing an uncanny feeling of comfort and distance amid the internal turbulence swirling within and among the characters. Acedillo approached his material with hesitation and humility, ironically investing it with an approachability that it affirms via well-observed details and subtle unexpected humor.

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Talipandas

English Title: Traitor
Year of Release: 1958
Director: Conrado Conde
Screenwriter: Ding M. de Jesus
(From a serialized komiks story by Francisco V. Coching)
Producer: Sampaguita Pictures

Cast: Rita Gomez, Luis Gonzales, Van de Leon, Carlos Salazar, Rosa Mia, Bella Flores, Zeny Zabala, Bert Olivar, Ely Roque, Art Morado, Lydia Correa, Jaime Javier, Pablo Raymundo, Willie Dado, Sabas San Juan, Matimtiman Cruz, Marcela Garcia, Loida Medina, Apolonia Aguilar

Having taken the fall for his brother Andy, Bien Lopez confronts his sibling for betraying him by cohabiting with his wife Stella while he was still in prison. Although Stella insists that she was forced into the arrangement, Bien’s rejection drives her to stab Andy and commit suicide. Unaware so far of what his wife did, Bien watches a striptease number at Moonlite Cabaret; the performer, Esperanza, migrated to Manila to work at the same place where her mother once performed, to track down the man who ruined her mother’s life. Bien and Espie manage to provide comfort and support for each other and develop an alliance just when a besotted customer provides Espie with better lodging and a gang leader named George Mendez takes a prurient interest in the nightclub’s hit performer.

The fact that two komiks-sourced melodramas from the same year—this and Gregorio Fernandez’s Malvarosa—featured slum residents living by railroad tracks must have been more than coincidental. Intensely psychological where Malvarosa was sociological, Talipandas eventually abandons its expository locale when its central female character upgrades to better housing (courtesy of a loaded patron); but the opening scene’s train not only brought her to the city in the first place, it also ended the life of her would-have-been rival, the narrative hero’s wife. The plot’s twists and reversals affirm the serial nature of its origin, although it would take over a decade, with the emergence of Lino Brocka, before such irregular dramatic arcs could be tempered by an adequately prepared talent. What Talipandas provides in recompense for its directorial unevenness is a willingness to embrace material that Hollywood’s Hays Office would have rejected as extreme if not beyond-legal, from white slavery through suicide and fratricide to incest. The heroine contends with a pair of concerned surrogate mothers, one benevolent (Ely Roque) and another malignant (Bella Flores); but Rita Gomez’s sensuous and fiery reading ultimately draws the strands together in an impressive braid, while making it clear why the directors of the next Golden Age considered it a treat to work with her.

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