By Maridol Ranoa-Bismark
We’re supposed to live in enlightened times. The highest court of the land, the Supreme Court, recently ruled that same sex couples who prove that they contributed to real estate property may co-own these assets.
Still, this doesn’t mean that time has erased bias towards the LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer) community.
In a media conference for her upcoming drama Until She Remembers, seasoned actress Boots Anson Roa-Rodrigo said she realized how strong the social gender bias against the LGBTQ community is, when someone came up with a shocking question. Will she have intimate laplapan scenes with Charo Santos-Concio, since they play a same sex couple in the movie?
A supposed openness to the LGBTQ community failed to erase the fact that a film about an LGBTQ couple is expected to have torrid sex or prurient scenes.
Romance
Boots explained that no, her scenes with Charo, a former student who has turned doting grandma (to Barbie Forteza’s character Angel), are far from sexual. On the contrary, they are tender, oozing with a gentle love that endures silently, and gets stronger through the years, and the pain of memory loss.
It’s not a love sustained by lust or things physical, but one that transcends the obvious. Charo is so swept away, she admits feeling giddy with romance.
Director Brillante Mendoza, who wrote the story while on vacation in Portugal, agrees his film doesn’t capitalize on the physical aspect of same sex relationships. The first Filipino filmmaker to get a Best Director award from the Cannes Film Festival says this one depicts an enlightened love so deep it can move people in a positive direction.
And while it’s all for love the LGBTQ way, Until She Remembers is also about love that doesn’t happen all of a sudden, but burns slowly, simmers comfortably, and stays.
Barbie, many years younger than her co-stars, she who belongs in a generation steeped in instant, even automatic responses, grasps the meaning of it all.
No hurry
One need not hurry love, she notes. You don’t lose it, because it’s real. It will come back to you, unexpectedly.
It did come back unexpectedly, for Catherine (Boots’ character), an Alzheimer’s patient and Concha (Charo’s character). But the road to finding love again is fraught with sacrifice. This, Concha and Angel (Barbie’s character) discovered the hard way.
At 81, Boots accepted the offer without ifs and buts. She felt this career opportunity is a now-or-never point in her long, distinguished acting career. Charo, Boots’ friend off camera, also had no misgivings, comfortable as she is with her co-star, decades even before the film was conceived.
And so, they worked without a script, relying on raw emotions instead, with their director’s blessings, of course.
“My actors are my co-creators. I trust them, and they trust me back,” say Mendoza.
Boots, Charo and Barbie arrived on the set, not only without a script, but sans makeup. It was that organic, that raw.
They owned their character, and with it, the film itself.
Moviegoers will give their verdict on how this affects them when Until She Remembers opens in cinemas nationwide Wednesday, Feb. 25.
