directed by Dan Villegas
written by Antoinette Jadaone and Anjeli Pessumal
As a person with limited time and cash but a fervent love for movies, I generally gravitate these days towards movies I either know or believe I will like as well as those I am willing to give the benefit of the doubt. After I saw the trailer, English Only Please became just such a movie.
Julian (Derek Ramsay) an American of Filipino descent (on his mother's side), is about to take a trip to the Philippines, and he has a very specific errand in mind: he wants to tell his ex-girlfriend off in Filipino. He already knows exactly what he wants to say, but his problem is that, having grown up in the United States, he cannot speak a word of Tagalog. He goes online to find a translator, and of all of the candidates, he ends up picking Tere (Jennylyn Mercado) an English tutor who is basically the sex-toy of her ne'er do well "not-boyfriend" (Kean Cipriano). Of course, they meet, get to know each other and...well, it's fairly self-explanatory where the plot goes from this point onward.
There really isn't much else to the plot besides jilted boy meets neglected girl, but if there's one thing I know from having watched romantic comedies from four different decades (I started in the eighties), it's that plot is nowhere near as important as a credible chemistry between the two lead actors, and Mercado and Ramsay have it in spades.
I used to follow Mercado when she was still a gangly teenager on the television show Encantadia. I found her portrayal charming enough, and she was as the vernacular goes simpatica, but even though I knew she was a capable enough actress I found myself pleasantly surprised by her performance in this movie. Her comic timing was brilliant, and the best thing about her portrayal was how genuine it felt. Too often in Filipino movies and even in romantic comedies in general actors put on performances that are often cloying and manipulative, but Mercado rarely strayed into that territory, if at all, and even when she did, the conviction of her performance was more than enough to overcome any sense that she was playing it to the hilt.
Ramsay, of whom I have not seen a whole lot of outside of television commercials, was a perfect foil for Mercado; his Julian was the "straight man" to Mercado's somewhat zany Tere, and their dynamic really plays out well, especially since the audience already knows exactly where they're going. Also, I don't really know how well or poorly Ramsay actually speaks Tagalog in real life, but he really did a good job of playing the clueless "Fil-Am," especially in a scene where, having been misled by Tere, he sincerely congratulates a local toughie who has beaten him at checkers by telling him "bakla ka!" At any rate, he was a lot more fun to watch than the insufferable KC Montero in Kubot.
Cipriano is appropriately slimy Tere's not-quite-boyfriend who basically just uses Tere as a sugar mommy, while Cai Cortez is a hoot as Tere's BFF. The fact that her single-mom character is with a different guy in every scene she's in is one of the film's running jokes, the other one being a constant reference to traffic on EDSA as an (often untrue) excuse for being late.
The film's script may not have anything profound to say about the human condition, but it really works well, and the dialogue feels quite natural rolling off the actor's tongues. Sure, some of the jokes might not be the most politically correct, and there overused story tropes all over the place but there is real wit to most of the humor here; it's several cuts above the usual brainless Vic Sotto tripe. The actors really carry the whole thing.
Unfortunately, I haven't been able to get this review out quite as quickly as I would have liked, which means this movie may not be in as many theaters as it was when I wrote this, but even though the Metro Manila Film Festival is over and the usual Hollywood product is starting to creep back into the market, this is still worth checking out, wherever it may be playing.
8.5/10
No comments:
Post a Comment