Redha, re-released here in the Philippines as Beautiful Pain, is a Malaysian family drama about a husband and wife coming to terms with the fact that their child is autistic. Their journey of discovery is not an easy one; at first the father is in full denial, while the mother goes from doctor to doctor to find out what exactly is wrong with her child.
The film also serves as a tool to teach its viewership about autism. I'm not familiar with Malaysian perceptions of autistic individuals, but if this film is characteristic of such perceptions, it seems that the public at large is misinformed about the condition, attaching some sort of stigma to people within the autism spectrum. The film repeatedly presents situations where the family experiences discrimination, or situations where people attribute the child's behavioral problems to bad parenting. In righting misconceptions and setting the record straight, Beautiful Pain makes its explanations easy to understand, and in that regard, the film works.
There are some very poignant moments in Beautiful Pain, even though the film can sometimes veer into manipulative territory. It works best when the drama does not call too much attention to itself. The film's last third feels a bit rushed, and could have benefited from dedicating more time to certain characters. Ultimately the film's simplicity works in its favor, and it works in offering a different cultural perspective on autism.
After a series of very stressful events, Sapporo tour guide Lea (Alessandra de Rossi) loses her vision. She then encounters a new neighbor, Tonyo, (Empoy Marquez) who begins a friendship with the young woman.
Genre savvy people might figure out a good chunk of the plot from the first ten minutes of the film, but the climax of Kita Kita still surprised me in a good way. It skillfully manages to create a sweet and cute story of two people finding each other in a foreign land, and subsequently avoids many pitfalls that could have messed up the final product.
Sure, the title "Kita Kita" means "I see you" in Tagalog, but the film cleverly finds the hidden beauty in things we don't see, even if it's in plain sight. The film is riddled with visual cues that make sense later on, an incentive to rewatch the film and find all the things that one may have missed. On a different level, it works too: Kita Kita is also about how even simple acts of kindness can create a ripple effect, changing lives in different and profound ways.
The film's aesthetic is a strange mix of Filipino rom com and anime that I really couldn't place, but nevertheless enjoyed. Visually the film makes great use of Sapporo as a location, and its frames are colorful and soft.
Empoy Marquez deserves a lot of credit for making the movie work. His choice as male lead is an unusual one, given what we're used to with these kinds of films, but his performance saves the film. Instead of being a pushy, even stalkerish suitor, Tonyo is sincere and comes with the best of intentions. The couple's chemistry also manages to work, despite the unusual pairing. Their growth as a couple is done gradually, a slow build-up of mutual trust.
Perhaps unintentionally, the film's title gains another meaning. Kita in Japanese can mean a lot of things (such as "it came"), but in the lingo of otaku, "Kita" as an exclamation is used when something unexpected and unlikely has happened. It's used, for example, as a reaction when other people say something crazy that they've been holding back on for a long time. Perhaps, a confession of love.
I kinda like that definition.
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