Etiquette for Mistresses

I'm a bit late to the party, but better late than never.

Chito Rono's Etiquette for Mistresses opens with a Youtube clip of two women fighting it out inside a mall. Given the premise of this film it's no stretch to deduce that this fight is between someone's wife and mistress. It's the kind of video that we see shared on our newsfeeds all the time. The gut reaction is perhaps to judge the mistress and cast aspersions on her. You'd think that would be the status quo for the rest of the movie, but surprisingly the film then proceeds to deconstruct the idea of the mistress by offering us an alternate take on what a mistress is.

We see the film through the eyes of Ina, a plucky Cebuana lounge singer who has become the mistress of a politician's husband. She is brought to Manila where she is taught how to behave as a proper mistress. Ina is torn by two opposing views, that of Georgina, her mentor, who uses a 'lie low' approach, and of Chloe, who is a bit more proactive with her partner. The struggle between the two opposing ideas forms the dramatic arc for most of the film.

Mistress movies are nothing new, even when considering the recent boom of similarly themed movies in the past decade. They've been around even during the eighties and nineties; when watching these films I can't help but remember Maricel Soriano's furious "are you fucking my husband!?" in Rono's own Minsan Lang Kita Iibigin (1994). Most of these movies use the conflict between wife, mistress and husband as their central point. In contrast, this film concentrates solely on the mistress, with the wives and husbands mostly pushed to the side.

Being a mistress, as Ina finds out, is an emotionally demanding role. For all intents and purposes, the mistress has to become invisible, a shadow of sorts. Ina inevitably distances herself from her friends, her loved ones and even her own dreams, living an isolated life in a lavish apartment. Ina finds that to act out their frustrations, the other mistresses shop, party and drink. On the other hand, some of the other mistresses like Georgina and Stella have mostly settled into her lives, making the point to not make their lives revolve around their partners.

In the film, the mistresses don't really have any motivation to destroy any households. They just happened to fall in love with the wrong person at the wrong time, as the movie wisely makes the point that love and morality are not mutually exclusive. Ina is guided along her ultimate decision by what she experiences with these characters and she sees exactly what she signed up for.

Many reviewers have pointed out that the climax of the film is a confrontation between Georgina and Stella. Both are symbolically bathed in shadow, which points to the notion that despite their differing worldviews, both are the same - they are still two mistresses, illegitimate partners, two shadows struggling to find light. 

However, I find that the film's most powerful scene is a confrontation between Chloe (played by Claudine Baretto) and her lover's wife (played by veteran actress Pilar Pilapil.)  It exists in stark contrast to the Youtube video at the beginning of the film, and in contrast to many depictions of the conflict in other contemporary and past films. There is no hair pulling, no rolling on the floor - but you know from the get go who is in charge of the scene. Pilapil gives life to a wife who knows, who suffers in silence because she realized several fundamental truths about her husband and herself. She is solemn, peaceful and Chloe can do nothing but sit and apologize. The scene encapsulates a lot of what the other side of the mistress-husband-wife triangle goes through and it's one of the more epic beatdowns and deconstructions of the idea of mistresses that I've seen.

This would be a fitting climax to an already interesting film, but unfortunately the film undermines what it has built up with an awkward final act. not only does it feel out of place, it also serves as a counter to what has been established. In addition, the epilogue exacerbates this by somehow making some of the characters escape the repercussions of their actions in the third act. (What it also does to the family of the husband is also another thing left hanging.)

Chito Rono collaborates once again with cinematographer Nick Daza after their turn in the Feng Shui series (he might just be Kris Aquino's DP of choice) and its clear from the way the movie is shot that this man can shoot the hell out of a scene. The first half of the movie is filled with high rise buildings and condominiums, maximizing the cinematic potential of filming the Makati cityscape. Some other shots are ambitious for a mainstream film, including the climactic scene mentioned above.

Etiquette for Mistresses ends rather conventionally, which is nice on one part because we get closure to some character story arcs, but on the other hand, the last act really puts a spanner in the works and affects the ending as a whole. It's still a fresh perspective on a genre of film, the mistress movie, that has gotten tiresome of late.