Edna (Ai Ai delas Alas) lives in a perpetual haze. Suffering from dementia, she lives out her twilight years at an old folks' home, where she serves as the bane of the caregivers and residents there. The only link Edna has to her past is a wall of pictures, full of people she no longer recognizes. After yet another tantrum, she meets Angel (Quinn Carillo), a feisty new caregiver who is more than a match for the cantankerous grandma.
I've seen news articles describe Ai Ai's performance here as "unrecognizable," but if you're familiar with any of her collaborations with Ignacio, her committed performance in this film isn't so unusual. Carillo, on the other hand, has mostly made her mark in Vivamax films, and she shines here in a film outside of the Vivamax ecosystem.
What transpires as Edna and Angel bond is also (mostly) nothing out of the ordinary, though there is a twist that is literally explained by someone implying they have supernatural abilities, Personally, the proceedings feel a little stagey and may not be to everyone's taste. If you can get over that, Litrato has a number of emotional moments that can tug at the heartstrings, moments that affected even this cynical viewer. Otherwise it's not a film I'd freely recommend.
Love stories by their very definition are narratives; they are stories that may grow organically, or may spring from the consequence of intentional, sometimes one-sided efforts. Like any kind of story, love stories are not immune to manipulation. Who controls that story and whether one or both parties are privy to all the information involved (i.e. the truth), is very important.
Hope (Julie Anne San Jose) is privy to all that information... or so she thinks. In a spreadsheet, she neatly outlines all of the evidence she has found of her cheating boyfriend's infidelity. She organizes all of this information into neat little cells, thinking that she's on top of it all, and she resigns - from her job and from her relationship with him. To her, relationship is work, and her subsequent job search makes it clear that to her, it works both ways.
Things are set into motion when a sex video of her now ex boyfriend is leaked on the internet. Hope has nothing to do with it, but her ex thinks so and hounds her to delete it. At the same time, she is hired by a content creation company, where in the process of creating web content she comes across Miguel (Rayver Cruz), a charming businessman with whom Hope takes a liking to.
At first, I was baffled at who produced this particular film: GMA Public Affairs, who is better known for several award winning documentaries. Having split from GMA Integrated News, the division has moved on to produce other forms of media - this is their first foray into fiction film. But after seeing The Cheating Game in its entirety it makes perfect sense. The Cheating Game is a film about truth in all its forms, and how people are affected, for better or worse (mostly the latter) by withholding it, especially in the context of a personal relationship.
That idea finds itself in all kinds of places in the film: during her job search, Hope asks for transparency in exchange for her labor, transparency that is not always provided by her prospective employers. Her eventual employment in a content farm, headed by Mister Y (Paolo Contis), feels a bit ironic in that sense - to Mister Y, engagement is the bottom line, whether the content's "truth" is manufactured or not. As the film goes on, we see that even engagement itself can be manufactured. Various characters withhold the truth to Hope, sometimes for her own good (at least in their eyes) but without Hope's consent. What becomes most important for Hope (and for all of us watching) is the need to think critically in the midst of the deluge of information given to her. A stubborn commitment to facing the truth, no matter how painful, and the ability to process and think critically is what gets Hope out of her predicament. As opposed to, say, a documentary, it's a subtle but interesting way of communicating that idea to audiences - and transparent, honest communication between people and society is the heart of what public affairs is.
The Cheating Game does have its share of faults. It runs into some awkwardness near the middle of the second and third acts, resorting to a denouement that feels staged right out of an old timey detective show, and although the film tries to build upon the relationship between Miguel and Hope, there are some times when I wished the film wouldn't rush through it so much.
That said, the film's strength is apparent from the very start: Julie Anne San Jose's performance is the film's beating heart. Though she has had several lead roles in television, San Jose has only had one other lead film role (Mac Alejandre's Just One Summer (2012)). San Jose brings a pragmatism to Hope, a sort of world weariness; a character that's tired of all the bullshit and pretense and prefers an ordered, sensible world. It's honestly quite an eye-opening performance; one of my favorites of the year so far. Rayver Cruz isn't a slouch in this film either - there is one scene on a rooftop near the end where he matches his on screen partner beat for beat, effectively selling me on the film.
There's a big ask near the end of The Cheating Game that will likely influence one's appreciation of it - whether a certain character can be forgiven for their mistakes. It's extremely hard to pull this off without making said character very unsympathetic (see The Hows of Us for an example on how not to do it), but in this case, I think The Cheating Game manages to pull it off. It all goes back to one of the film's themes - that a relationship is work, or rather, a work in progress - one that necessitates the continuous, painstaking yet mutually beneficial "labor" of both parties.
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