Boso doesn’t disappoint

During more lucrative times, Viva Films (set up in 1982) was known for churning out the glossiest of movies and starring cinema’s top leading ladies: Vilma Santos, Nora Aunor, Lorna Tolentino, Hilda Koronel and, of course, its resident megastar, Sharon Cuneta.

But now that the local film industry has hit rock bottom, Viva is paving the way for a cheaper alternative of producing movies – via mini-digital. The film studio’s first project of this kind is entitled Boso, which is now making the rounds of Robinsons cinema chain.

With its title as giveaway, you must have guessed that Boso (a slang word that entered the Pinoy street lingo glossary in the early ’70s) is all about voyeurism – which it is.

Boso is set in a dilapidated 1960s home that has been subdivided into rooms rented out to couples or small families. Acting as caretaker is Jeffrey Quizon who has made it his pastime to crawl along that space between the ceiling and the roof of the house and watch the activities of the different tenants through his many peepholes.

From above the ceiling we are introduced to the cast of characters in that house: A young man who constantly lifts weights, a married couple who are active in the Catholic charismatic group, but spends a lot of time watching pornographic tapes in their VHS and a native-looking young woman who projects a prim and proper image to everyone, but dances wildly in front of the mirror once she is within the confines of her bedroom.

Needless to say, it is the sight of this young woman (Gwen Garci) dancing practically naked that our peeping Tom enjoys watching the most – that is until a newlywed couple (Katya Santos and Allen Dizon) moves in and his attention shifts to them.

For a while, our sexually perverse lead character has a grand time monitoring the sexual activities of the honeymooners, except that not all good things last – even for peeping Toms.

Boso is directed by Jon Red, who was plucked by Viva from the world of short films. Among our short filmmakers, I’ve always considered Jon Red (or Juan Pula) to be among the best. He won in the Gawad Urian Best Short Film category two years in a row for Tiempo (1992) and Trip (1993).

I therefore had high expectations when I went to see Boso at the Robinsons Galleria last week. Fortunately, Jon Red’s handling of this digital film doesn’t disappoint. He orchestrates Boso’s technical elements well and all throughout the movie I didn’t mind the fact that I was watching a film in another form– different from the certified mm.

Even if the film was shot only in four days and in one location, I didn’t feel shortchanged as a viewer. The cast members for one thing give their all. Jon Red is also lucky that his performers – particularly Jeffrey Quizon and Katya Santos – are basically competent or even way above competent, in the case of Quizon, who swept several awards as Best Supporting Actor in Markova in 2000.

But the fact that he is also able to extract above- average performances from sex nymphets Ella V and Gwen Garci only shows that Jon Red can also be an actor’s director.

My only problem is the material of Boso. The closing credits attribute the screenplay to a May L. (ma-L?). May L.’s script isn’t really all that bad. The humor, for one, is very effective – wickedly delicious, in fact, especially in the part where Allen Dizon uncovers Jeffrey Quizon’s secret.

Boso, however, is no Scorpio Nights and I would like to compare it to this Peque Gallaga masterpiece because the two films have a lot in common in terms of plot and setting (Scorpio Nights is set in a Binondo accesoria).

Whereas the script of Scorpio Nights is fine and rich like silk, the material of Boso is almost threadbare. While I appreciate a lot of its comic moments (Jon Red is very good at staging these), I was hoping that there would be more to the script. May L. – whoever she (he?) is – could have padded it up some more and layered it with fresh ideas because a full-length film (with a running time of about an hour and 45 minutes cannot stand on just sporadic humor and bare breasts (there’s a lot of that in this movie).

Comparing Boso to Scorpio Nights may be unfair because I can imagine that Peque Gallaga had a huge budget (I am not very sure about that though) while making this controversial 1985 film.

But in the case of Boso, I am willing to overlook the fact that the film is shot on a shoestring budget and that it cut corners here and there. In fact, I salute Viva for trying to find a solution to the problems of a local film industry that is in throes of death if not dead yet.

So go ahead and cut down on location sites and hire non-superstars but nonetheless competent actors. But the quality of a screenplay is something we should never sacrifice because that is the basic framework of any movie. Maybe that wouldn’t have cost a lot.

After all, aren’t creative ideas basically free?