Movie review: 'Sosy Problems' works as parody upon parody

It might be “Sosy Problems” that was the most contentious entry for the recent Metro Manila Film Festival, owing to the fact that watching that trailer barely made it seem like it’s a parody, and as such you think it should come with an apologia for its subject matter. And too, there is this: we generally fail at parody in this country, and to some extent, you don’t have high hopes for a comedy like this. 

And then you realize in the first 20 minutes that you’re just wrong. Save for the use of Tim Yap who lacks even a smidgen of acting talent, this was quite a successful film as far as parodies go, rare as those are for our local comedies. It is self-conscious about its display of the sosy, the acting’s consistent in so far as you can believe these girls truly exist, and it’s controlled in its portrayal of these particular lives. 

 

The story at its most basic is what you expect. The sosy barkada of Lizzie Consunji (Rhian Ramos), Claudia Ortega (Heart Evangelista), Margaux Bertrand (Solenn Heussaff), and Danielle Alvarez (Bianca King) live the lives of socialites, who are celebrities to some extent, the ones we like to call “It Girls” these days. The peg of course for these Pinays is Paris Hilton, and in this film you get a sense of precisely that, with some Nicole Richie thrown in for good measure. That is, they are superficial, are about their fancy clothes and bags and shoes, and don’t do much but hang out in the country club. Until they are forced to look beyond that life.

 

What of course makes these sosy girls different from their American counterparts is that they’re but Pinays in the Philippines. As such their language is not quite, and never will be totally, American English, and they will never sound American—not even foreigner Margaux. We know of this language to be of the classic tusok-tusok-the-fishballs kind; we know of this language now as the norm for certain First World spaces in Third World Manila, where it is tone and intonation that makes it particularly sosy.  

 

This language of course is enough fodder for comedy. “Sosy Problems” could’ve lived off this, given us disconnected situations where it would be magnified tenfold, and call it a comedy. But it gives you more than that, and allows for the parody to take over.

 

Don’t touch the country club! 

 

The crisis is that the land on which their country club stands was sold, and the new owner wants to build a mall. It seems superficial enough and you get why the girls would want to save their spa, their horses, this place that had witnessed their friendship through the years. It helps their cause some when they realize that the one who’s bought their country club is newly-wealthy social climber Bernice (Mylene Dizon), who in passing is mentioned as someone who kind of looks like the cashier of the country club, who apparently has since married rich.

 

It is still stuff for superficial comedy, yes? Where the layer of social class works at highlighting the difference between the real rich and the nouveau riche, where the latter threatens the status quo of the lifestyles of the rich and famous, and the put-downs can go on and on. This is especially true given the fact of Bernice, as the over-the-top, utterly despicable specimen of a social climber. Loud, in bad designer clothes, doing her own kind of English like it’s nobody’s business. But too she is the classic example of the matapobre turn in the new rich. 

 

So Bernice turns against the workers of the country club, telling them all that they’re fired, never mind that they’ve worked there since forever. The girls, led by Lizzie, stage a rally, because they think enough is enough: taking na nga their country club, oppressing pa the workers! That’s, like, unacceptable. 

 

Stilettos in the rally, in the probinsiya

 

But they don’t plan anything other than a rally, and it flops, what with the police on the new owner’s side. But no worries, the girls have their own individual narratives to live up, each one working toward bringing them back to the cause of the country club.

 

For best friends Claudia and Margaux their crises is the handed down rivalry of their mothers, played by Cherie Gil and Agot Isidro, respectively. The two girls are able to ignore the competition until a boy comes along—that is, until they set their sights on the same boy. That this boy is Benjo (Aljur Abrenica), son of the country club janitor (Robert Arevalo), and temporarily working as everything from waiter to stable boy, lifeguard to valet driver at the country club, is nothing but absurd. Where what is highlighted is not so much that girls this sosy can overlook class differences, but that these sosy girls could turn silly infatuated, sacrifice their friendship, only to later find they’ve been had by this good-looking boy. 

 

A good-looking rich boy meanwhile is Danielle’s solution to her family crisis, where they are in the midst of their fall from grace, her congressman father embroiled in some corruption charge or other. She’s sold her well-loved Christian Dior bag, to buy a fake designer bag and shoes. She thinks what she needs to do is find the next rich bachelor to marry, in the process meeting Santi (Mikael Daez) who likes her, but who she isn’t giving the time of day. She has no time. 

 

Lizzie has the most flimsy crisis here, where she is punished for her irresponsibility in Manila, by being forced to live with poorer relations in the province. She is the sosyalera that she is, doing the whole ungrateful bit in the face of a grandmother struggling to feed her the way she’s used to. Lizzie’s coming of age in the probinsiya happens exactly as you expect. 

 

Of course it is also in the probinsiya that the funnies come in, as the three other girls come and visit their suffering friend, and all four of them try to make the best of the place: they look for the pilapil but also their mobile phone signals, they think manure is organic mud pack, they use the arinola as teapot. 

 

This is also where their personalities actually seem different, and they are meaner to each other as they walk in their stilettos for hours looking for the pilapil where they can have a picnic. One wishes these characters were further fleshed out, maybe allowing for a little more complexity. Instead it is only Lizzie and Danielle who are allowed some depth. The two others just seem like the most superficial of socialites, made larger than life by the fact of parody. 

 

Parody upon parody upon parody…

 

Because “Sosy Problems” does ultimately make fun of these sosy girls, whether those with real problems like a family crisis, or those who are just competing for the boy who doesn’t care for either of them anyway. It makes fun of the fact that they think losing the country club is the end of the world and pokes fun at their collective superficiality. And no, this movie does not make a pitch for naiveté in these girls, nor does it seek to humanize them. Instead it tells us how these sosy girls exist – designer bags, family problems and all – and theirs are lives that can be funny because it is absurd that they exist the way they do at all.

 

Of course this is working with the context that is Third World Philippines, and you know it too because it dares deal with notions of workers’ rights and a yaya mall. The latter is the one glaring failure of this film, as its articulation is one that is beyond parody here. What also seemed to have missing parts was the final task of proving that Bernice’s ownership of the country club happened through corruption. That just happened too quickly for comfort. As parody, Dizon’s Bernice is also too much of a caricature to be successful.

 

Which is to say that the real surprisingly well-acted in parody here is Ramos as Lizzie. Where she provided the most laughs, thinking herself capable of changing the world, at the same time that she breaks down in front of a kalabaw in the probinsiya. She’s the one character who actually goes all Nicole Richie and dares try to catch a piglet in the mud, do some planking on the concrete, all the while not losing her character. Ramos herself proves she’s got more balls – and acting chops – than we give her credit for. Between her first wide-eyed surprise at hearing she would lose the country club, to her last “Amhergaaawd!” she is en pointe. 

 

But of course what works for “Sosy Problems” in general, is the fact that Ramos and these three girls are also the stereotype that they are parodying. This is not to say they are as dumb or ignorant, as flaky or as superficial, as it is to say that we as a public already imagine them to be a version of this sosy girl, what with their designer outfits and bags, and their Inglesera selves. As such watching them parody a version of this sosy, is like seeing parody upon parody upon parody. 

 

As such really, the success of “Sosy Problems” as parody has to be credited to the movie’s director Andoy Ranay and its writers Aloy Adlawan and Marlon Rivera, no matter its loopholes. Because in truth this is the kind of film that can get out of control, the kind that can fail tremendously at keeping on the track of parody. But there was an obviously deft hand that kept the discussions here within the limits of its narrative of the sosy, and there is intelligence in the refusal to go all politically correct on us. For this particular kind of sosy, where language is key and voices tend to be loud, this creative team also kept it classy. And thank heavens without any trace of gay lingo. 

 

I dare say it would be great to have another installment of “Sosy Problems,” as class contradictions and poking fun at the wealthy are gifts that keep on giving in this country. There are countless other believably sosy characters in our midst after all, and one can only imagine what a team like Ranay, Adlawan and Rivera can put together. Like, oh my god, the possibilities are endless. —KG/YA, GMA News

 

Katrina Stuart Santiago writes the essay in its various permutations, from pop culture criticism to art reviews, scholarly papers to creative non-fiction, all always and necessarily bound by Third World Philippines, its tragedies and successes, even more so its silences. She blogs at http://www.radikalchick.com. The views expressed in this article are solely her own.