iWant TV reviews: ‘Ma’ and ‘Glorious’

A boy, wearing a cast on his arm and clearly distressed, is in the middle of an ominous forest. Seemingly motivated by ire, the boy chances upon a raven. He chases the bird, leading him inside a cave where he discovers a strange sapling that cures his broken limb after it cuts his finger.

Visual and aural guile

The opening of Ma reveals Kenneth Lim Dagatan as that rare horror filmmaker, who without the benefit of narrative exposition, is capable of unsettling through visual and aural guile.

The perturbing frames that comprise the prelude aren’t guided by an already established plot. Dagatan carves the tension from images that seems to be culled from a marriage of folkloric elements and nightmarish images, with the solitary boy reminiscent of the archetypal protagonist of many parables that end with a reinforcement of some moral.

Ma treads a more nefarious path, one that gets stranger and stranger every minute. The boy arrives home, where his mother (Glydel Mercado) suddenly dies. The boy, along with his two younger siblings, seek out the shrub to wish for their mother to be revived. She does get revived, but is no longer the same.

 

Ma expands, revealing another character – Cecil (Anna Luna), a pregnant school teacher. We first see her telling a story to her students, making it seem that the audacious prelude that creeps very much like a twisted fable, is but a piece of literature.

However, as the film progresses, it becomes discomfortingly apparent that the visceral horrors of the opening are of the same world as the one where Cecil lives in. Dagatan never relents. He pursues the bizarre promise of his spectacular opening, piling absurdity over gore, blurring the sharp lines that separate right and wrong, and corrupting innocence, motherhood and all related virtues along the way.

Ma vigorously perturbs from start to finish.

Mood and feel

Like Ma, Connie Macatuno’s Glorious opens with a scene that manages to capture the mood and feel of the entire film.

Glory (Angel Aquino) talks about happiness over an inelegant montage of images ranging from picturesque views of Baguio City, and hurried shots of Glory rushing out of her house, riding the jeepney and eventually having passionate sex with Niko (Tony Labrusca). The montage segues to a scene where the two lovers reveal their age and eventually joke around the glaring gap.

It’s a giddy setup, one that exposes the film’s drive to titillate without necessarily abandoning the only thing the film has that separates it from other glossy steamy romances, which is the clear and constant female perspective.

 

The opening also reveals the most glaring problem of Glorious, which is the lack of tension, whether through plot conflicts or through the chemistry that is forced between Aquino and Labrusca. Macatuno relies on boilerplate issues and absurd twists to move the plot beyond its preoccupation with all the clichés ever written about the kind of relationship the film tries to put a spotlight on. The result is that the film only uses the May-December romance into more of fetishistic gimmick than a diving board for compelling discourse.

This is quite unfortunate because there are times wherein the film feels more than just the escapist fantasy that it is and more of a buoyant portrait of a woman breaking free from the expectations of a patriarchal society.

The story just doesn’t dig deep enough, and Macatuno seems to be as bound as Glory in the early parts of the film to fulfill the role of an entertainer than a compelling provocateur.

In the end, Glorious is just too tame and too conventional to be really glorious.

Great additions

Nevertheless, Ma and Glorious are great additions to the brand-new streaming platform that is iWant TV. – Rappler.com

 

Francis Joseph Cruz litigates for a living and writes about cinema for fun. The first Filipino movie he saw in the theaters was Carlo J. Caparas’ Tirad Pass.

Since then, he’s been on a mission to find better memories with Philippine cinema.