Directed by Dan Villegas
I have no confidence in the Metro Manila Film Festival’s selection criteria. To determine a film’s qualifications solely by its script or treatment (more like the latter, I suspect) is like judging bread based on ingredients alone. It must take a lot of imagination. Then again, a look at the MMFF’s roster of films on any recent year is enough to convince me that a monkey with a dart can do better. Plus it would gladly do the work for bananas, saving taxpayers a lot of expense.
The premise of English Only, Please (last year’s Best Picture runner-up) is as hackneyed as they come. Fil-Am Julian (Derek Ramsay) travels to Manila and hires a translator (Jennylyn Mercado) to help him get back at/with his ex-girlfriend. Even by rom-com standards, it’s a pretty lame set-up. But as the late Roger Ebert liked to say, it’s not what a movie is about — it’s how it’s about what it’s about. For a film with heartbroken characters (Mercado’s Tere also carries a torch for an ex-boyfriend), it is never mean-spirited. Or even introspective. The humor comes fast and furious — sometimes germane to the scene, at times contrived, but often stingingly familiar — as the movie slaloms towards its predictable (and sappy) conclusion.
If you are not immune to the charms of its lead stars (no one apparently is, not even my friend Connie, who had earlier said she didn’t much care for the two, but changed her mind 15 minutes into the movie), you’re in for some serious kilig. Ramsay is basically playing himself here, with his smoldering looks and convincing American accent, which are parlayed to the story’s advantage. It’s a triumph of casting, just one among many (Callalily’s Kean Cipriano turns in a pitch-perfect performance as Tere’s douchebag of an ex, totally unsympathetic and completely outrageous, eliciting the loudest howls from the audience). Mercado goes over the top at times, as do most of the film’s female characters, but it’s on par with Pinoy comedy culture. She gives the role her all, all right, and she mostly succeeds. It’s really her show.
Director Dan Villegas and fellow screenwriter Antoinette Jadaone are equal-opportunity offenders. The males in this movie are macho and/or sleazy, the women deluded and trampy (no “or” there, note). And they all get skewered (for the former, refer to the throwaway scene with the botched pick-up). Jose Javier Reyes does that too, but his sensibilities hark back to a less frenetic era. While English Only, Please never loses momentum, it plays as if it’s afraid to disengage the audience. It’s that kind of movie that doesn’t stop to regard its characters staring off into the distance, or to even pause long enough to make the audience think. It’s an exhilarating exercise in wish fulfillment that makes you forgive how silly it ultimately is. I didn’t even bother to stay for the bloopers at the end; I’ll be a monkey’s uncle, I was afraid they would ruin the spell.
Should you watch this movie? Absolutely. It’s genuinely funny as well as technically accomplished. It won’t enter the Filipino cinematic canon, but it’s easily one of last year’s best. And it creatively employs title cards (a very old-school technique) to comment on the action. You can tell someone’s winking at you from behind the camera. I’m betting you won’t get that feeling watching My Big Bossing. Well? You tell me.
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