As Pinoy as it gets

Through the years, Metro Manila Film Festival (MMFF) has been part of my married life. My wife and I couldn’t celebrate our wedding anniversary on Dec. 30 without a movie date.

Because December is MMFF month, we always had a filmfest entry in our list and it has become our tradition to watch only one movie for the whole festival. And we just don’t watch any film, we have to see to it that it would be the best among the entries.

Most of our picks romped away with the Best Picture award or received good reviews among film critics.

The most memorable of these films and what I would say is my personal choice as Best Film in recent years is Mark Meily’s debut feature, Crying Ladies.

I’m not a big fan of Sharon Cuneta who plays the female lead character named Stella Mate in the movie.  Sharon does a fine job in eliciting our sympathy (and laughter) for Stella’s never-ending woes and her many wacky attempts to solve them. And to think that she looks chubby or losyang in Crying Ladies, far from the  more glamorous portrayals she had in most of her previous films.

But after I watched Meily’s film, I realized Sharon  indeed deserves of her Megastar status.

No, Crying Ladies is  not only about Sharon. It’s about the clever plot of a story cobbled with local color and the ordinariness of life, centered on an old Chinese practice of hiring professional criers to fool the gods into thinking the deceased would be sorely missed for his/her good deeds. The humorous, witty script by Meily himself put together the individual stories of the three criers played by Cuneta, Hilda Koronel and Angel Aquino and that of the deceased’s son, played by Eric Quizon. The funny shrieking trio and the relatively subdued Quizon came out with winning performances, marked by their brisk rendition of their characters’ desperation with humor and poignancy.

It’s a Filipino version, if not second best, to Forrest Gump, in terms of the cunning use of comic relief to temper the heavy stuff and the depiction of an affectionate yet satirical portrait of an ordinary life with interesting twists at the end of the story. This is the kind of script  I wish I would have written.

A couple of scenes remain vivid in my mind up to these day, perhaps because of the movie’s Pinoy-ness or comic effect.

One shows Stella having a hearty McDo meal with her son, her exasperated ex-husband and his wife. Others show Stella’s regular encounter with the balut vendor, her audition piece for an entertainer’s job in Japan and her winning  an international acting award as a videoke model-artist.

And to think my wife and I almost missed watching  Crying Ladies! We were celebrating our seventh anniversary that year and our two boys — then aged five and three, wanted so much for the family to watch Bong Revilla’s Captain Barbell.  But I did not give up watching Crying Ladies for a fantasy movie about an over-exposed local superhero. So we hired my wife’s niece to accompany my boys to watch the film of their choice, while my wife and I watched Crying Ladies.

For the next years, I gave in to my kids’ wishes. With kids in tow, our anniversary date has turned out to be a family affair.