Love, or something like it
Review of Sigrid Andrea P. Bernardo's "Ang Huling Cha-Cha ni Anita"
I first saw Sigrid Andrea P. Bernardo's debut feature "Ang Huling Cha-Cha ni Anita" (Anita's Last Cha-Cha) back in 2013, when it screened (and won Best Picture) at the first CineFilipino Film Festival. Seeing it again, four years later, reminded me why I loved the movie so much. "Cha-Cha" is a near-perfect movie on its own, showcasing the filmmaker's talent for mixing humor with pathos.
The film concerns Anita (Teri Malvar), a headstrong kid who seems to reject the gender roles mostly assigned by her traditional mother Lolita (Lui Manansala), such as wearing feminine clothes and participating in the annual Santacruzan. Instead of helping her mother in their business producing and selling dried mussel chips (which is an innuendo the size of a planet, in case you haven't noticed), Anita spends her time with her friends Carmen (Len-Len Frial) and Goying (Solomon de Guzman), riding their trolleys and role-playing. In one scene, Goying is forced to marry Carmen and Anita in a role-playing game. Bernardo takes this as an opportunity to parallel traditional versus modern concepts of marital union.
In fact, "Ang Huling Cha-Cha ni Anita" discusses LGBTQ issues through the lens of a traditional rural society, where the word "morality" gets thrown around a lot as if an HR handbook that has no gray area. In the film, questions of identity and acceptance and social stigma are being dissected through the unique friendship between Anita and the mysterious Pilar (Angel Aquino), a real headturner who suddenly has the whole town talking about her. Anita, Carmen and Goying are all captivated by Pilar's enigmatic beauty, but it is Anita who is struck the hardest.
Given the emphasis on dissecting morality, "Cha-Cha" surprisingly doesn't sensationalize the LGBTQ struggle, and rightfully so. Anita struggles with her secret admiration of Pilar, but it is Pilar who has the heavier burden due to her unresolved past. The film wants to expose the hypocrisy of small-town ideology that embraces religion for religion's sake without the willingness to forgive and accept. As exemplified in one of the lighter scenes, the group of mothers faux-rehearse a Church song while gossiping about Pilar.
The story's looming absence of father figures or strong role models is also an interesting point of discussion. From the beginning, we are introduced to Anita without a father, same with Pilar, since both their fathers are already deceased. The husbands of the other women are subjects of conversation, but not shown, reminiscent of the same approach taken in the 1939 George Cukor film "The Women." Through this omission, we are forced to understand the struggles of women in the absence of men, and learn that what we often brush off as mundane really aren't, because as one filmmaker notes, women are one of the most, if not the most marginalized in society.
One young teenager even gets gets another pregnant, and while this is not an uncommon element in local cinema, the inclusion heightens the film's feminist leanings. Perhaps the closest thing we get to a rational male character would be Oscar (Marcus Madrigal), Anita's older cousin. Oscar has also impregnated his current girlfriend (whom we never see), and her aunt Lolita, traditionalist that she is, eggs him on to make wedding plans as soon as possible. However, what Oscar seems to lack in resolve, he makes up for kindness, aware that both he and Anita are trapped in places they currently don't want to be in.
On the film's grand theme of first love, Bernardo employs dream and musical sequences to depict Anita's thoughts and feelings. Bernardo, who hails from theater, blocks her scenes masterfully as if a play, yet maximizing the film medium via closeups, match cuts and parallelism. Malvar and Aquino are electric onscreen, heightened via Bernardo's script that never runs out of wit. Malvar is a natural, and for two hours, we are seeing a young girl, not an actress, experience first love.
To say that the film has many layers would be an understatement. The theme of death and birth/rebirth plays out in jaw-droppingly subtle fashion in the third act, as the birth of a child is transposed with the death of another, and the loss of innocence goes hand-in-hand with the promise of a new tomorrow for the story's many wounded characters.
There is an important reason why the original poster of the film shows a toy robot. In that particular scene towards the end, mother and daughter finally confront their unannounced truths, and for a film that spends most of its time taking us on a roller coaster ride of laughter and romance, this one sure knows how to destroy hearts.
I previously wrote a review of this film in 2013. You can read that review here.
