Cinema One Originals – Reverse Delay

‘Changing Partners’: postmodern love

The film celebrates, heartbreaking as it is, the universal difficulty of love.

In these times of shifting attitudes and emerging identities, how could films portray romantic love, that most celebrated of human relationships, with its universal allure and unchanging essence as well as its contemporary complications?

Changing Partners, Dan Villegas’ deft adaptation into film of the stage musical by Vincent de Jesus, feels like an answer to that challenge. It is the story of Cris and Alex, lovers separated by 15 years in age; this disparity is only the first among many contrasts explored in this film.

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‘Shift’ captures the transient millennial spirit

Passions, youth, diversity: ‘Shift’ is about the millennial and their fleeting desires.

Shift sells itself as an offbeat romance film, about the boyish Estela (Yeng Constantino) and the proudly gay Trevor (Felix Roco). While this is its heart, it is not its spirit.

The story follows Estela more than it does Trevor. Once, strolling through the quaint shops at the Cubao Expo, she spots a Che Guevara portrait, the bold reds of the artwork matching her own fiery dyed hair; she asks Trevor to take her picture with it. This is more than a whimsy: she studied sociology in school, and she knows what Che stands for. There are no flashbacks in Shift, but the film teases with details here and there, and we figure out that she used to be an activist—a rough, full-blooded tibak, a past life that corroborates with her boyish manners.

Now she spends her days, and nights, in call centers, taking up jobs to sustain her impractical passions. She answers a phone interview once, with remarkable confidence and skill—but underneath that compelling corporate talk is the contradiction between her past convictions and her present place. She keeps this simmering irony under wraps, mostly unspoken, though it manifests in her lethargic attitude to work: she often comes in late, and her performance has not been up to standard.

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‘2 Cool 2 Be 4gotten’ (Petersen Vargas, 2016): confronting nature and nations

The power of nature and the past of a nation lurk behind this story about the volatilities of youth.

It is the late 1990s in the province of Pampanga. Several years have passed since the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo that buried so many of the province’s towns under massive volumes of debris. The volcanic material combine with rainwater from perennial typhoons to produce lahar; the government builds the Megadike in an attempt to contain its destructive power.

Meanwhile, American military forces have recently evacuated the bases in Clark air field and nearby Subic Bay, partly as a result of the Pinatubo disaster, and partly as a result of political decisions by a nation asserting its sovereignty.

This is the backdrop of 2 Cool 2 Be 4gotten, though the film obscures the consequences of its setting behind blithe cinematography, frames color-graded to a fresh and hopeful palette. Even the aspect ratio is an unusual 5:4. The combined visual effect evokes the nostalgia of old Kodak photos—a nostalgia that tends to summon simple, happy recollections while conveniently forgetting painful, complicated memories.

Petersen Vargas, in a limited résumé consisting of such shorts as Geography Lessons and the music video for BP Valenzuela’s Steady, has already demonstrated a distinct style before working on 2 Cool. Sometimes, as with Steady, he paints a mood through the cinematic equivalent of sweet nothings—stylized, mesmerizing visuals with no particular statements. Sometimes, as with this film, his first full-length work, he maximizes cinematic language in telling his story, while still infusing it with his unique gaze. Combine this directorial reputation with young actors capable of competent, convincing performances, and we have a compelling film in our hands.

Warning: this review presents a reading of the film, and it necessarily shares details of plot and other elements, or ‘spoilers’.

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