A melange of fine film elements

Ihman Esturco is a seasoned stage actor who regularly makes an excursion into television and the movies. You’d probably remember him as the lecherous mayor client of Isabel Granada in Ligaya ang Itawag Mo sa Akin.

This time – under his very Christian name Emmanuel – Ihman is branching out into filmmaking. For his first directorial job – an independent film entitled Troika – he takes on a very touchy subject matter: ménage a trois involving one woman and two men.

The story begins when a mining engineer (Andre Soriano) is sent to supervise a mining camp up north. The mining engineer is married to an Indian mestiza (Mara Altiera) and they have a son (Peter Lacana) who has a learning disability.

Prior to his assignment in the mining camp, the mining engineer has been experiencing problems at home: He is cold and distant toward his son and is unable to perform his marital duties on the matrimonial bed.

To iron out whatever marital kinks they have between them, the wife decides to follow her mining engineer husband up north and even brings along their son. They are happy for a while and the marriage seems salvageable for a moment there.

One night, however, the husband decides to set up the wife with one of the workers at camp (Jamil Basa) who also stays in the house – until comes a time when they form a ménage a trois.

As a first-time director, Esturco delivers an impressive enough work. For one, he seems to be very adept when it comes to handling the technical side of a film. From the photography – all the way to the music score, Esturco pays close attention to all the little details and so we have a film that is very rich in texture.

My only problem with Troika is how the narrative is almost rushed toward the end. While there is so much character build-up in the beginning, the conflict is hardly resolved in the latter part.

Feeling uncomfortable with the awkward circumstances they get themselves into, the mining engineer drives their lowly miner lover out of the house and even kicks him out of the mines. But with one bout of tantrum from the child who has become accustomed to the presence of the third party in the union of his parents everything returns to their regular routine and they even have a picnic far happier than any gathering the family Von Trapp could ever organize.

Then there is the matter of Troika going environmental. As a sub-story, we see a couple of documentary filmmakers (Criselda Volks and Raven Villanueva) making an exposé on the hazards posed by the gold mining business. This is much appreciated especially since this film opens our eyes to the harmful effects of mining to the environment – how it can maim and even kill the miners and displace the inhabitants from their ancestral lands. Minus the bloody scenes, Troika could very well be the Blood Diamond of local sex films.

The only problem here is that this subplot is a bit too long and you know that it is there only as some token – so that the conservative among us do not denounce the film as out and out soft porn (the sex scenes are quite steamy).

Shortening this secondary plot could have done the trick. In fact, if you take out this entire lecture on the ill effects of our greed for gold on the environment and the populace, we’d have an even more cohesive story, courtesy of Troika scriptwriter Enrique Ramos. And to Ramos’ credit he provides the characters of this film with dialogues that do sound artificial – basically our every day language.

But Ramos should also be thankful that Esturco is also able to guide the actors well – and so none of the scenes or dialogues in his script is wasted.

Since he is an actor himself, I guess one of Esturco’s strengths is that he is great at motivating his actors and we see this in his lead characters. All three – Andre Soriano, Mara Altiera and Jamil Basa – deliver noteworthy performances, especially if you consider the fact that they are all very new in the film acting business. Even child actor Peter Lacana reacts correctly in his scenes and it is obvious that Esturco handled him properly in this film.

Overall, despite some lapses, Ihman Esturco succeeds in his first attempt as a filmmaker. Troika, a film that tackles the complexities of a ménage a trois, is a melange of some of the finest film elements that make for good movie viewing.