Martin (Clifford Pusing) is a teenager spending his summer vacation in Batangas. While his brother Chino (Ali Asistio) and friend Paolo (Aerol Carmelo) mess around with sexually open Nadine (Yen Durano), Martin grows enamored of Adele (Franki Russell), the mistress of a well-known politician. Adele has her own hangups and she doesn't quite know her place in her romantic partner's life.
In his review of the film, Mario Bautista likens Joey Reyes' Tag-Init to a Robert Mulligan film (he doesn't specify which film, which might either be a typo or he just forgot, but all signs point to Summer of '42, starring Jennifer O'Neill.) Aside from the basic plot, the similarities end there: Tag-Init does not have the historical specificity of its purported source material, nor are most of the main characters interesting enough - except perhaps for Yen Durano's Nadine, who gets more scenes (and people) to do.
The two main protagonists of this dull affair are the worst offenders. Martin, in between masturbatory segues that leave his character cross eyed in the shower like a rejected Pee Wee Herman character, is about as exciting as watching paint dry, and Franki Russell delivers her lines with the same aplomb as a text-to-speech bot. Particularly egregious is a scene where her lover has a sudden heart attack, and she reacts to the situation as if her probably-about-to-die lover had just stubbed his toe. By the end of the film, where Martin, having come of age, wistfully waxes poetic about that one special summer where he met the robotic woman of his dreams, it gets exceedingly hard to care at anything that's happened at all.
The film is a testament to the fact that good acting creates pathos and viewer engagement, and without it, even the most promising of concepts turn turbid. That's not to say that everything is bad, however; the sex scenes are shot nicely, and drift closer to hardcore than most of the soft core titles on Vivamax - I mean, this is the guy behind the notoriously explicit Live Show (2000), so he knows his stuff. That compliment doesn't take my assessment of the movie very far, however - expect clips from the film to show up in random porn sites soon, if not already.
The latest Mac Alejandre - Ricky Lee collaboration, Bela Luna, begins with Luna (Angeli Khang), a bespectacled high school teacher, as she jumps off the building of her school. During her protracted descent (she should probably have hit the ground 20 seconds ago) she considers her situation and suddenly flies off in the air. The scene looks incredibly tacky and not well done, but it does make sense in context - in retrospect, the execution does not do the screenplay justice. That is because in its subsequent runtime, Bela Luna transforms into a fascinating meta examination of authorship and unfortunate compromises for the sake of art.
The story picks up with Bela (also Angeli Khang), a filmmaker and scriptwriter who is tasked with helping her philandering boyfriend Arnold (Kiko Estrada) write his first movie. Bela is more successful than her boyfriend and for all intents and purposes more talented, but she seems content to play second fiddle, oblivious to his indiscretions. Meanwhile Bela finds herself fighting with the film's producer Mr. Dizon (Francis Mata) over several creative decisions: namely, Mr. Dizon wants to spice things up with sex while Bela wants to write without those restrictions. The movie in question? A film about a teacher named Luna...
The push and pull interplay between creatives and producers feels relevant (or at least resonant) at least within the framework of the Vivamax production model, where creatives are allegedly given guidelines to follow (e.g. x number of sex scene per y minutes, budget and running time limitations) for their creative works. It is obvious that Luna is an avatar of her creator Bela, as much as the two are connected to screenwriter Ricky Lee himself. Bela infuses her protagonist with little features of her own life - her issues with neglectful or absent parents, or her desire to be truly loved, even though it comes from the weirdest of places. To write, Bela (and by extension, Lee) posits, is a means to liberate the self, and the right to do so should not be denied.
Granted, Bela Luna only partially manages to escape from its own production restrictions: there is still a sex scene every dozen or so minutes, and while Lee and Alejandre get a bit imaginative in their depiction of those scenes (often in metafictional sequences in the spirit of kindred films such as Last Fool Show (2018)) the production's lack of resources is quite profoundly felt in some parts.
Still, given what it did with so little and despite some first act weirdness, Bela Luna came off as a present surprise. It's definitely one of my favorite Alejandre-Lee collabirations.
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