Besides the Blue Suede-sequence from Boy Golden, the epilogue in Chris Martinez’s Kimmy Dora: Ang Kyemeng Sequel is one of the cleverest things to grace last year’s Metro Manila Film Festival. The scene is subversive and (meta-textually) expositive of the festival it contends on. It is postmodern mind-fucking in an event which you least expect it to happen.
Suffice it to say: Martinez, in true y’all-be-damned spirit, is pulling the same rug beneath his audience with The Gifted, yet tiptoes carefully on the fact that with it he might just be repeating himself.
And not that he has any business to bother himself with, much less to justify. The charm of his films is after all drawn from their preening self-awareness: Here Comes the Bride, for instance, is intriguingly spare and assured for a film that comes in relentless jabs of oft-unhinged laugh-out hilarity; and the Marlon Rivera-directed Ang Babae Sa Septic Tank – whilst essentially viewed as an intimate exposition of (guerrilla) filmmaking – understands that it is first of all a comedy, so it mustn’t stop inspiring laughs. Yet the delight of Martinez’s films comes from his brand of humour already distinct of its own. You laugh at his films because there is deep truths about them: regardless if it is discovering humane voids, only fillable in a different human body; or if it is compromising artistic vision and freedom.
This subtle truthfulness is perhaps what lacks in The Gifted, a film whose primary vision is carried with a similarly undermining epilogue as Ang Kyemeng Prequel. Martinez has pulled the same joke, if in lacking sincerity.
The film is an obvious satire on Filipino melodramas, albeit seemingly awful, which is exactly what Martinez wanted you to think. The plot is scatterbrain and the acting is sheer camp; the direction, undue and buckled. Yet, standing alone epilogue-less, the film could have passed as a two-hour frenzy of camp and of consumable (if rubbery) popcorn. At least it keeps enough gusto to engage a full-on gunfight, and not just yammer on stilettos and Balenciaga-couture quasi-fierceness like the film it rips off. And oh, Anne Curtis is glorious!
No Other Woman is clearly the mould upon which Martinez had based his film (might as well dissect class-A melodrama that his principal actors have lived). Where the plot is somewhat different, the arc is aimed at the same materialism and seemingly eternal discontentment of women, and man in entirety. One (Curtis) will not accept that the other (Christine Reyes) is superior to her at everything; so she cuts the deal with the devil and asks the male to roll up his shirt. Make the other swoon for his steely abdomen, assuming that women are no-better than slaves to oozing hormones.
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