NO OTHER WOMAN Review
Ruel
Bayani's No Other Woman has
supposedly earned for itself the distinction of being the highest grossing
Filipino movie of all time, for now. It's essentially about marital infidelity,
tackling the sordid turns in a married couple's life when another girl enters
frame. The premise alone makes it an unlikely crowd-drawer. However, the movie
is designed for commercial success, featuring pretty faces and sexy bodies living
and breathing in places that are seemingly removed from the reality that its
targeted audience should be familiar with. It's essentially escapist fare,
piling gloss upon gloss to arrive at a final product that resembles the tacky
front cover of a random lousy romance novel.
Ram
(Derek Ramsey) has been selected to supply furniture to a luxury resort, where
he meets Kara (Anne Curtis), the daughter of the resort owner. The two start an
affair. Charmaine, Ram's wife, starts to become suspicious and eventually
discovers the affair, forcing her to compete for her husband's attention. The
story's quite thin, riddled only by extraneous complications involving the
characters' familial histories, supposedly adding depth to the characters'
convictions and motivations. Unfortunately, the characters, despite all the
needless details, are nothing more than caricatures that are meant to be
objectified.
Although
the movie parades with the sheen of seriousness and importance it borrows from
its subject matter, it sometimes resolves to treat the subject matter with disarming
humor. The movie shines when it is upfront with this irreverence, such as when
the movie's internal rules of fate and circumstance connive to have the wife
and the paramour meet each other in the mall while wearing outfits of the same
hue, with both of them bursting in the seams with knowledge of each other's
secrets, throwing each other one-liners with irresistible double-meanings. Joey
Gosiengfiao is an obvious reference. However, Bayani seems unable to completely
surrender to the pleasures and sophistications of camp, making his movie an
unwieldy and inconsistent romp that leads essentially to something that is best
described as dull, ordinary, and ultimately offensive to the intellect.
The movie is mired by an utter lack of integrity. It is unable to decide what it wants to be, a persisting problem of movies produced by mainstream studios whose addiction with formula and morally and socially acceptable but completely illogical endings has ruined nearly most of their films. Kara, a promising character who represents the Filipino woman that is uncharacteristically not beholden to marital vows and declares herself immune to love and guilt, unfortunately drowns in remorse, betraying whatever complexity the character has. The marriage of Ram and Charmaine, in what seems like a product of the director and his writers' chronic lack of imagination, is as good as new. Even more bizarre is the resolution wherein the married couple actually becomes civil with the woman who nearly threatened their relationship, completely forgetting the shouting sprees and the violent catfights.
It is as if nothing happened, and the entire ordeal is simply an avenue to learn lessons in life and gain new friends. I don't even see why Bayani bothered to tell that story of infidelity at all, if infidelity turns out to be that inconsequential, that negligible. But then again, there's big money to be made serving junk in pretty platters.
(Cross-published in Lessons from the School of Inattention.)