Theater Report: Ploning

May 4, 2008
SM Cebu Cinema 6
7:00 PM
Attendance: a pitiful 3% of capacity

Previews: Just in time in coming in. Missed all of them.

Story:

More than a story about a woman who waits for the return of her lover whom she had not seen for over a decade, this is a story of a town in Cuyo, Palawan. This is a story of a small towns, traditions, beliefs, culture, and day-to-day life.

Thoughts:

Some brave reviewers called this the rebirth of Philippine cinema. If it's true, I'd say it came out of the womb gasping for breath. First, it opened along side Iron Man, this year's Hollywood curtain call for the Summer Blockbuster Season. People who are skeptical of or hate Tagalog movies will flock to Iron Man. Second, people who dig Tagalog movies and all the negative thoughts they connote will flock to "When Love Begins". The rest will skip the movies altogether and buy any of Shannon Hale's books (Goose Girl, Enna Burning, River Secrets, Princess Academy, A Book of a Thousand Days) that have recently been carried by National Bookstore. Only people who still believed that the Philippine cinema could produce good movies from time to time will go see this. And there were only 10 of us when I went to see it.

And it was confusing. For a simple enough premise, it managed to confuse the audience and probably itself. It tried to be a drama, comedy, romance, and suspense all at the same time, all the while (or perhaps because of it) becoming nothing more than a sketch of a small coastal town in the Philippines. From the first minute down to about five minutes before it ended, the movie beg me to ask questions, the biggest of which is what's the deal with Ploning? And at the very last minute we got the answer, in a monologue, with tears under the rain scene. The answer was wholly unsatisfying because there was no clue whatsoever that it was the reason why Ploning acted the way she did. And so it felt contrived. The writer or writers withheld information so that in the end they can surprise us with the answer.

I saw this movie as nothing more than the writer/director's vehicle for his love of his homeland in Palawan. Yeah, Cuyo is beautiful. Its beach breathtaking (in an undeveloped, natural kind of way). But mixing it with the unfocused and underdeveloped story of a girl named Ploning was an unfortunate decision. Add to this the decision to release it during the kickoff of the summer blockbuster season in the US (and the now common worldwide simultaneous release of big Hollywood movies) and this will inevitably be lost in the crowd. This is different from the usual Tagalog movie fare (not the least of which is the language used in the dialogues), but it shared the same weakness as the other Tagalog movies.

Would I see it again? No. Would I recommend it to my friends? No.