MANILA, Philippines — Controversial filmmaker Darryl Yap attempted to present what he claimed were the untold final hours of the Marcos family before leaving the Philippines in "'Maid in Malacañang," through the eyes of Imee Marcos and the family's househelp that were present at that time.
Darryl — who also penned the screenplay — appeared to have taken some creative liberty in dramatizing these events, which he called not a biopic but rather, the story of a family.
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The narrative direction he decided to go with, splitting into chapters and rolls of text, doing most of the storytelling outside the Palace, is quite one-sided and doesn't allow for the many characters to shine on their own.
The film begins with a long-take of Cristine Reyes' young Imee walking through a building in what is supposed to be Singapore, set to Sampaguita's "Nosi Ba Lasi," an indication that some innovation could be at hand.
But such a gimmick is used for nearly half the film, never as clever as the opener because of conversations that lack the necessary cuts or direction needed for discussions.
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Propagandistic themes seep into and sour what could have been the movie's emotional beats, particularly one scene between Cesar Montano and Diego Loyzaga — pretty much an underutilized eye candy — which involved a really long pan around the two.
In fact, all the acting in the film seemed to bounce from two ends of an emotional spectrum and never settles on one that works. Victims of these are Christine, Ella Cruz and Cesar, the latter seeming to forget his character had a health condition presented in earlier scenes.
That is where the movie mostly falls apart, trying to conjure a story when it can't keep up with its own words or find well-enough direction to tell it. Political motives aside, the effort just appears lazy yet expects to elicit a response.
The film's hugest drawback is trying to be clever about who the titular "Maid in Malacañang" is — though early on it can already be assumed — and in doing so doesn't do any justice to the actual maids being portrayed, even when it tries to.
Any redeeming factors are lost in the attempts to be clever or creative, and the movie just ends up as another piece of gossip to be passed around as it fails to acknowledge other bits of history that were crucial to the fall of the Marcoses.
Feels like a one-act play
One thing that makes many Hollywood movies great is believability — if they say that the setting is a palace, for example, your feet would really be swept away with grandeur. But this was not the case in "Maid in Malacañang." It fails to make one feel like you're indeed inside the Malacañang. A field trip to Malacañang even felt more grand and memorable. The film seemed to have only happened in just one wing of the Malacañang. What you can feel more are its lack in budget and in access to the rest of Malacañang.
While it is laudable how the flick tried to recreate the family's many artworks and portraits, Imelda's shoe collection, for example, did not seem like they were 3,000 pairs. They only seemed to count for a hundred to a few hundred within the small room where they were in.
The dialogues and the monologues are a snooze fest — dragging and like many Filipino soap operas, over-the-top emotional. Cristine is shouting most of the time, almost to nagging levels, and it's quite irritating.
The lines are so long that the camera had to circulate all over the characters' body to prevent the characters to turn into talking heads. In an emotional exchange between Cesar and Diego, for instance, the camera ran through Diego's ass at least twice! The director was even seen in a window glass in that scene, proof that the film was not well-edited (or was he attempting to pull-off a Stan Lee cameo effect?).
In the highly-contested scene where former President Corazon "Cory" Aquino was depicted as playing Mahjong with nuns, Giselle Sanchez, who portrayed Cory, actually acted more like Cory's daughter Kris in her giddiness, rather than the more demure Cory.
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But of all characters, Ruffa is the one that impresses the most, even soliciting some claps from the audience. In the posters and the trailer, she didn't seem to look like Imelda, although both of them are beauty queens and moms. Let's admit: an iconic character like Imelda could be very hard to pull off, but Ruffa is the one most believable in achieving the task. The mark of a good actress is if she can disappear and become the character, and Ruffa did just that. From her beauty to her elegance, she is really Imelda in that film. If award-giving bodies would only not be biased in giving awards even to a pro-Marcos film, then Ruffa is the one that deserves to be named Best Actress. If there is a good reason to watch the film whether you like the Marcoses or not, it is to be amused by the imeldific Ruffa. — Philstar.com Lifestyle and Entertainment
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