Tuhog (Larger Than Life, Jeffrey Jeturian, 2001)

Skewered

Jeffrey Jeturian and Armando Lao’s Tuhog (Larger Than Life, 2001) is, simply put, a film about screwing-- about a mother being screwed, about her daughter being screwed, about their life's story being screwed over on the way to the big screen by an unscrupulous pair of softcore filmmakers

The mother Perla (Irma Adlawan) and daughter Floring (Ina Raymundo) sell their most marketable commodity-- their life’s story-- to a director and his writer; months later the two women and their friends go on a daylong trip to the nearest Metro Manila cineplex to watch the results: exaggerated, caricatured, distorted out of all recognition. Everything has been reduced to the ridiculous and they have been shamed and humiliated far worse than ever before.

Irma Adlawan, possibly one of the best (and, ironically, least seen) actors in recent Filipino cinema (she played a crucial role in what I believe is Tikoy Aguiluz’s best work Bagong Bayani (Unsung Heroine, a docudrama about Flor Contemplacion, the domestic helper executed for murder in Singapore), here gives a wonderful performance as the mother. Hers is a supporting role, but it’s her story that gives the film its bite. She's hurt the most not because she's been lampooned but because her character has been oh-so-subtly subverted-- as played by the more obviously sensual Jaclyn Jose, she wasn’t exactly forced to have sex; she asked for it. Adlawan can only watch helplessly as this monstrous lie is played out onscreen, and the worse thing about it-- the crowning irony-- is that the change was probably done simply to give the actress more sex scenes in the film. Gratuitous? Goddamned right it is.

Ina Raymundo is very good as the daughter which is surprising, having seen her give one wooden performance after another in just the kind of sex flicks (Sobra-Sobra, Labis-Labis (Too Much is Just Right), Burlesk Queen Ngayon (Burlesque Queen Today)) that Tuhog lampoons. Here she has the fragile quality of a fresh-hatched chick, something I’ve never seen her do before; when her breast is finally bared late in the film it comes across as a real obscenity, like a child being stripped by a pederast.

Armando Lao’s script has everything you can ask for-- intelligence, wit, care for characterization and the telling detail-- that it seems almost churlish to complain about flaws. The cheap sex flick titled Hayok sa Laman (Greedy for Flesh), features cliches from almost every bad Filipino film in recent memory-- sex flick or melodrama; comedy, intentional or otherwise-- and there are plenty of them, no mean feat to collect and condense in one hideous parody. The parody at times reflects and reinforces the feelings of the people watching it, at times cruelly ridicules them; it’s a delicate balancing act that Jeturian and Lao somehow manages to maintain for about three-fourths of the picture, until mother and daughter walk out. Once they do walk out, balance goes out the window and their friends (who stay behind) are treated to the travesty that’s the rest of the 'film'-- an unholy mix of gothic melodrama and slasher movie as if Douglas Sirk had directed an installment of  Friday the 13th, a chopsuey serving of worse excesses of some of our most pretentious Filipino filmmakers, and while it’s fun to see Lao and Jeturian rip open a new orifice in the carcass that is contemporary Filipino cinema, they do so at the expense of characters they had so carefully prepared-- characters we have come to care for, and resent being shunted aside.

This isn’t Jeturian and Lao’s best work to date, I think; that would be their previous film, Pila Balde (Fetch a Pail of Water), a lighthearted yet precisely observed drama about life among slums and housing projects. Still, Tuhog is one of the best, most daring, most imaginative Filipino films to come out last year.

First published in Cinemaya Magazine, 1.28.02