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'Born Beautiful' is a fun and engaging film that will make you ask the right questions
Now showing is "Born Beautiful," the much-awaited sequel to the 2016 surprise dramedy hit, "Die Beautiful," which among other things featured the makeover marvels of television comedian, makeup artist, and impersonator, Paolo Ballesteros.
As in the original, "Born Beautiful" is all about the performativities of gorgeous and spectacular kabaklaan, as enacted this time by the character of Barbs (Martin del Rosario), the devoted best friend, who carries on the role of funereal makeup artist after Trisha, Ballesteros’s character, ceremoniously dies upon winning in a beauty pageant.
Directed by Perci Intalan, this film’s narrative proceeds on more or less the same campy lines, with conveniences, improbabilities, and coincidences occurring with the brash inevitability of a sneeze: lightning striking another bakla friend, frying her to a crisp, setting the heroine to wonder about the inexorability of her gender-crossing fate; two winsome working-class men falling head over heels in love with the confused and unhappy Barbs, who is always impeccably coutured and personally styled and in her indecision and wishy-washiness apparently somewhat ditzy; a botched and evil ‘conversion therapy’ eventuating in our heroine’s unlikely sexual encounter with a prostitute, who of course must promptly get knocked up (to befuddle her even further); Trisha the ghostly counselor’s still-imposturous apparitions, that arrive just when Barbs needs them.
It’s the same creative team behind both films, and clearly they have hit upon a generative storyline: byukoneras or beauty-pageant-obsessed bakla characters who are also talented makeup morticians as well as a hybrid ‘dramedic’ formula that does deliver the laughs, but also broaches certain timely LGBT-specific issues: gay parenthood in the first film, bisexual polyamory in this one.
As decreed by this formula, the manner in which these social commentaries are dramatized cannot be remotely profound or thorough, and must remain superficial and often altogether perfunctory and curt, else the film might turn serious and dour and the laughs stop coming.
All this is well and good, of course, if this is as far as the filmmakers’ ambition goes. If the objective of these avowedly LGBT-friendly films were simply to increase and popularize the amount of LGBT cinematic representation and merely to flag certain urgent LGBT social issues, then one would think this is enough.
However, the fact that the comedic points come by way of the ‘excesses’ of camp—mostly involving willful improprieties, the reveling in vulgar and even downright offensive and blasphemous images and words, the inversion of endorsed social hierarchies—does not necessarily distinguish this film from the mainstream and entirely commercially motivated productions of multimillionaire bakla celebrities who do in fact perform these by now increasingly ‘normalized’ gestures (also known in showbiz parlance as ‘antics’).
What constitutes these films’ difference is its dramatic project, which coincides with their makers’ publicly declared ideological interest in not only promoting LGBT representation in our films but also in occasioning an intelligent public discourse about LGBT issues.
It’s in regard to these films’ own declared ‘difference,’ their makers’ own avowed ‘political’ desire to promote a greater understanding of LGBT lives in our country, that we can register our own specific demurrals.
In "Die Beautiful," the comedic requirement results in the underdeveloped story of Trisha’s relationship with her daughter. Here, the same fate befalls the stories of Barbs’ relationships with the two men she supposedly equally and concurrently loves.
Born Beautiful showing in cinemas nationwide this January 23, 2019!
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Hence, while these films broach the questions of gay parenthood and polyamory, these selfsame questions are patently—actually, spectacularly—underserved by them.
This is an unfortunate thing, given the fact that these questions do need more than just getting raised in our films. They deserve to be explored and more deeply understood.
In particular, it would have been a wonderful thing if the reality of polyamory had been more dramatically unpacked; the concept is far from exotic or newfangled in our society.
For example, outside the ‘bakla/tunay na lalake’ relationships, that invariably include a woman (who must validate the latter’s masculine and ‘heterosexual’ identity), the immemorial practices of concubinage in our cultures do bid us to reconsider the truth of multiple simultaneous affections and loves.
Especially in our representational context, a film interested in making a political difference must take this medium’s mimetic obligation seriously, regardless of whether the film is a comedy or a drama.
The ‘sanitizing’ and ‘idealizing’ of the everyday worlds, lives, and ‘looks’ of working-class bakla aside, the hyperboles in "Born Beautiful" are laid on unremittingly thick, so much so that the film may be said to move away from comedy toward farce, diluting further its verisimilitude, to the detriment precisely of whatever real-world causes it purports to espouse.
When the two inexplicably besotted men duke it out in the house/funeral parlor of Mama Flora (Lou Veloso), and when the potty-mouthed and pregnant ‘Bisaya’ prostitute arrives to join in the fray—while the bakla undertakers perform their own over-the-top variations on the theme of slapstick hysterics—the film simply surrenders its interest in being real.
It shouldn’t be a problem except this abdication of mimetism holds true even in the characterization of Barbs, whose inner life is all but non-existent in this story.
While it’s likely that such a detour into ‘depth’ would detract from the surface-oriented aesthetics of camp, we must insist that this shouldn’t be a problem at all, given the already syncretic quality of this project, which seeks to meld elements of the comedic with the political.
What we’re possibly asking are just ‘moments,’ after all, which might take the form of ‘telling’ scenes here and there, in which some revelation of the interiority of Barbs might be gleaned, an interiority that can only texture and dignify her. Like her lovers, she is all but flat in this story, functioning more as the illustration of a foregone conclusion, an already established idea, rather than as a fleshed out cinematic character. This is slightly disappointing, since Trisha in her film fares better on this score, by contrast.
What we can perhaps invoke as a recent example of the successful deployment of dramedic depth are the memorable characters of the film "Patay na si Hesus," which incidentally included the formidable Chai Fonacier, whose glib but truth-telling character in the film is unsurprisingly the only one that strikes an appreciably ‘real’ (but still heartily funny) note.
That film succeeds because the comedy inheres in the world it creates, which remains recognizable and believable because it’s resolutely rooted and local on one hand, and only moderately transfigured and/or ‘hyperbolized’ on the other. And then, it must be acknowledged that being securely situated in its ‘indie’ commitments, that film simply exceeds Intalan’s, whose other half-heartedness lies in its clearly detectable aspiration to be, despite the courage of its politics, finally ‘assimilable’ to mainstream sensibilities.
"Born Beautiful" is admittedly different from its predecessor, especially in regard to the heightened degree of its effrontery, its audacity to ruffle orthodox and even pious feathers, as evident in the gleeful use of candidly vulgar and pedestrian words for sexual objects and acts on one hand, and in daring to ‘trope off’ a Marian image on the other.
BEAUTIFUL is BACK. Abangan ang full poster at trailer! #BornBeautiful soon in cinemas!
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The latter is the clear ‘newness’ of this film, whose campy heedlessness dares to breach the conventionally accepted boundary between the sacred and the profane.
One wonders, however, how much more resonant (rather than simply unnerving) Trisha’s impersonation of the Madonna—fondly called Mama Mary by Filipinos—would have been, had a memory of her being a maternal and loving parent figure been foreshadowed somewhere (after all, in "Die Beautiful" she had a daughter, who is strangely absent—actually, altogether unacknowledged—in this sequel).
A clear strength of this production is its competent cast led by Martin del Rosario, who it would be nice to see in substantial roles, hopefully in more frankly indie projects.
Now and then, Lou Veloso’s Mama Flora reminds one of Dolphy’s Coring and Markova, and newcomer Akihiro Blanco is cute and refreshing.
As mentioned, Fonacier’s by turns pathetic and unflappable pokpok steals the show. Her camp irreverence (and humor) isn’t forced at all; it just is. As elsewhere, here Fonacier practically runs away with the movie.
Despite the missed conceptual and narrative opportunities and filmic shortcomings, "Born Beautiful" is a fun and engaging film, that may occasion just the right kind of questioning in the discerning and sympathetic viewer.
That may or may not be you. Go watch to find out and enjoy yourself in the process. — LA, GMA News
