The look-alikes

It all started with Gadge, Gadge Gunn. Though we didn’t know her from Eve, we saw her near the tail- end of the short digital film Babae at the Cinemalaya film festival last July. We thought she looked familiar. Could it be Nana Buxani, the cinematographer and partner of the documentary filmmaker Ditsi Carolino? Though we didn’t see Nana’s name in the credits at the end of Babae, we assumed it was she, especially in that part where the role called for the character to beat up the guys. The resemblance was uncanny, and we didn’t know Gadge from Eve.

It turned out we didn’t know Nana from Adam either, or from Gadge too for that matter. Because weeks later, we received a text message from Ditsi, informing us that it was a Philippine-based German actress who appeared in the short film, and not Nana, who has lately been receiving more offers for acting than for her camerawork.

"Nana feels that the real actress deserves the credit," Ditsi said. She also said we weren’t the only ones who were fooled. Many others who had seen Babae and knew Nana but didn’t know her from Gadge, soon enough also began congratulating the cinematographer for her latest career path.

This latest adventure in the oops department got us to thinking about other pairs who seemed to have been separated at birth, and had us shuffling through books in the old children’s library, for a title called The Look-alikes by Henrik Drescher, profusely illustrated and once a favorite of the now all but grown up kids.

The Look-alikes tells the story of the Pearsons who live on their small green planet in the middle of space, and featuring the Pearsons’ young son Rudy and his pet monkey Buster, both of them incidentally wearing eyeglasses. One morning in the midst of breakfast, Buster the monkey "babbles in rhyme" and after giving weird signals to Rudy, the pair rush to their tree house where they take out a box of toys, in which is a pair of dolls who resemble them, a little Rudy and Buster, complete with eyeglasses.

Soon enough we, along with the real Rudy and Buster, follow the adventures of their look-alikes, the dolls Rudy and Buster, as they climb an elephant’s trunk and go through a window, and as they fall into a tunnel which at first they thought was an egg. The dolls also get into a "soupy situation" and are plucked out of it by a bird’s giant beak, and are eventually guided back home by a two-faced fantastic being "in a roundabout way."

The dolls’ adventure over, the real Rudy and Buster put away their look-alikes and themselves head for home, not however in a roundabout way. At dinner with the Pearsons, Buster no longer "monkeys around" and both kid and monkey have a good night’s sleep, dreaming of their look-alikes on a small green planet in the middle of space.

Aside from Gadge and Nana, we also got to thinking of other look-alikes, and if similar booboos could be committed because of the so-called spitting image resemblance of one to the other.

I always do a double take whenever I run into the artist and poet Sid Hildawa because San Francisco Chronicle journalist Boying Pimentel might have blown into town without my knowing it, and may simply be doing the rounds of cultural shows at the CCP.

The stage actor Miguel Castro’s emotive eyes in the musical St. Louis Loves Dem Filipinos kept me wondering if the lifestyle writer and wine taster Tino Tejero still retained the same expressive mien during the all-night drinking sessions and he didn’t want anyone to leave until the last drop of beer had been consumed.

The Hollywood actress Kirsten Dunst made me an even bigger fan of Spider-man, until I caught Filipina actress Chynna Ortaleza at a videojock contest and made me a fan not only of Dunst but also Ortaleza.

Alternative musician Grace Nono had me swaying and snapping fingers in time with the ethnic beat, until the poetry of Marra Lanot flashed through my ever-unreliable memory and sobered me up.

Gay poet Danton Remoto had us speculating if he did not in fact turn into a straight guy at night and sang folk songs as Paolo Santos. Actress Mimi Rogers? A local facsimile would be writer Hedwig de Leon.

Then there’s the issue of the doppelganger, popularized in no small measure by the cult classic of a movie Deadringers starring Jeremy Irons. At the offices of the now defunct Midweek magazine in Quezon City, we always reveled at the sight of contributor Carlos Novenario engaging editorial consultant Greg Brillantes in endless debates about life, letters and politics, not to mention one episode that had Novenario walking home drunk and shoeless at dawn. But Greg wasn’t the cause of this misadventure, though in a roundabout way maybe he was.

And the curly hair as seen from the back of journalists Boy Galvez, Davaoeño, and Enrique Merino, Mallorcan, at the Agencia Efe in the mid-’90s had us worried if we were seeing double after going through the Spanish dispatches we had to translate into English.

I guess it all boils down to an act of rightful, proper discernment, because what we see is not always what we get. There’s the movie Ilusyon, a must-see for all those who’ve been victimized by the double take, as well the Monica Bellucci film L’ Appartement that has her playing the role of Lisa, opposite a look-alike with the role of Alice, in the midst of a not so merry-go-round of illicit affairs and post-existential meanderings.

But for Drescher’s book that we rescued from the shelves of the no longer children, we wouldn’t have had the gumption to laugh at these foolish things on a small, not-so-green planet in the middle of space.