GIRL, BOY, BAKLA, TOMBOY

Stars: Vice Ganda, Maricel Soriano, Joey Marquez, Ruffa Guiterrez, Cristine Reyes, Kiray Celis, Bobby Andrews, JC de Vera, Ejay Falcon and Xyriel Manabat.
Writer: Alyz Henrich
Director: Wenn V Deramas.

Rating: 3/5

The latest giddy, silly, colourful romp from Pinoy low-brow maestro Wenn V Deramas, Girl Boy Bakla Tomboy will test the tolerance of those uninitiated with his trademark mix of crass sentimentality, shrill hijinx and frantic pacing. For those already in on his jokey style (who clearly number in the 10,000s, if the film’s blockbuster status in its homeland is any measure), Deramas’ wacky vision is good-time cinema of the highest order.

Originally a vehicle for local celebrity John Lapus (dismissed from the project when he refused to lose weight for the lead role), Girl Boy Bakla Tomboy has become a high-profile platform for the versatile Vice Ganda to work his considerable physical comedy schtick in four different roles. The film represents a tour de force of sorts for the TV/film actor; the script and pacing does not allow him explore any particular depth across the four siblings he embodies, but he supplies each with a strongly defined personality and vivid physicality.

Ganda’s four archetypes are a family of quadruplets, who are deviously separated into pairs as babies. Their father, Peter (a rather bewildered Joey Marquez) flees to the US with two infants, who grow into LA princess ‘Girlie’ and cool player, Peter. Meanwhile, the birth mother Pia (Marical Soriano, the pick of the support cast) is left with homosexual son Mark and lesbian daughter Panying.

The family is forced back together when it is discovered Peter requires a liver transplant; when Peter and his LA brats return to Manila, wildly farcical set-ups and grand melodrama become the order of the day until the feel-good ending inevitably plays out (and not soon enough, with the running time stretched to an overly indulgent 104 minutes).

Ganda and Deramas have fun with the various techniques that allow the modern filmmaker to place the same actor in the same frame. It is a credit to the technically proficient crew that these scenes work so well and that the film overall has a superbly polished sheen. The director overplays the tiresome trickery for which he is known, such as sped-up, ‘Benny Hill’-style sight gags and meta references (one character claims her subplot is most important because of her order in the films’ title), but anyone buying a ticket for a Wenn Deramas film knows what they are in for by this stage of the director’s career.

It is a given that for some western viewers who may stumble into Girl, Boy, Bakla, Tomboy during its international rollout, the broad caricatures painted of homosexuality will be unforgivably crass (not to mention that one child character spends the entire film in blackface), as will Deramas’ tendency to value a cheap giggle over a worthwhile, narrative-driven laugh. But there is no denying that the filmmaker has savvy commercial instincts (the diasporic Filipino audience that attended the session in Sydney’s western suburbs with Screen-Space bellowed laughter thoughout) and that he has found a free-wheeling soulmate in his energetic, uninhibited leading man.