Films or works of art that discuss or portray intersex individuals are rare. Perhaps the first of its kind in the country, J.E. Tiglao's Metamorphosis is a tender coming of age film about one such person's journey to discovering their identity.
The film does its best to be informative, though the proceedings sometimes follow a conventional melodrama (this is felt even more by the end scenes.) As a side note, perhaps partly because it was originally intended for Cinemalaya, the film feels like a Cinemalaya film stuck in another film festival.
Regardless, it's surprisingly tender and sensitive towards its subject matter. Even though it shows the long road we all have to take as a society in accepting our intersex brothers and sisters, the film shows that in your heart and mine, in the hearts of parents and siblings who love unconditionally, in the hearts of friends who find common ground (or just empathy), there is room for acceptance and love.
NOTE: Some spoilers for Lucid are present.
Alessandra de Rossi plays Annika, an accountant who uses lucid dreaming to live an idealized version of reality. In Annika's dreams, she can snag the guy of her dreams and she can eat in fancy restaurants that she has no realistic chance of affording on her lower-middle class salary. It's all good until she meets Xavi (JM de Guzman), a mysterious man who intrudes on her dreams.
One would assume that this becomes a romantic movie where Xavi and Annika hook up. But Lucid isn't a romantic love story. I'd also argue that it isn't exactly about dreaming, either. Perhaps one would argue that the film's point is how some people use dreams as escape, or how reality is better, even though it's not our personal ideal. That's only partially true. As Annika gains stability in her life during the second act of the film, if that notion held true, then she would be happy.
She is not.
When Annika gains what she desires - a home, a family, companionship - she finds her dreams and reality merging, and it does nothing for her. If dreams achieved in reality become true, what then is the source of her discontent? Lucid is a film that tries to document a growing sense of loneliness that is not focused towards any one person or thing, but towards something bigger, something harder to define. It is numbness, grief and discontent towards a world whose reality has been overtaken by what society imposes on it. And that thing that society imposes, that "reality" where we suffer day by day to systems we cannot control, driven by our need to acquire capital and survive - why is that our ideal? Annika only begins to achieve a sort of peace with herself when she uses her dreams not as an instrument of escape, but as an instrument of introspection.
In terms of what it tries to say, Lucid is unlike anything I've ever seen before, and while the film is far from perfect, it is perhaps one of my favorite movies of the year.
Like last year's Pang-MMK, Yours Truly, Shirley doesn't quite feel like a film that belongs in the lineup of this festival. By itself, it's a mainstream flavored, lighthearted film about a woman who thinks her deceased husband has been reborn in the body of a popular idol.
It's occasionally cute, and Regine Velasquez-Alcasid does the best she can do with her character, considering how she was written, but it really doesn't elevate itself to more than just fluff. The film doesn't convince us why Shirley is so hung up on her husband, or why she is so determined to revive him in another's form.
There's something potentially interesting here, in that the film could show us how and why we attach ourselves to pop culture figures and icons, or perhaps an exploration of fandom. The ideas are there, but the film doesn't quite take that extra step.
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