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Mario Bautista, has been with the entertainment industry for more than 4 decades. He writes regular columns for People's Journal and Malaya.

Jul 15, 2012

Movie Review: Mga Mumunting Lihim - A Well Actred Crowdpleaser From Director Joey Reyes

WRITER-DIRECTOR Joey Reyes has come up with a well acted crowdpleaser in his first Cinemalaya entry, “Mga Mumunting Lihim”, a story of friendship between four different women that charts the emotional high points and the painful low points in their relationship that spans several years. A brilliant mix of comedy and drama, it shows us the problems and challenges of maintaining a lasting friendship due to the fact that we are all flawed human beings with our own feelings of perennial insecurity and dissatisfaction for what we already have and envy for friends who we perceive to be happier than us.

The four ladies here are not the usual perfect goody-goody heroines. Each of them has her own faults and shortcomings, just like all of us, which make them more endearing, more believable, more relatable. Maybe you can identify with one of them or you can see your own friends in some of them.

The film starts with the death of one of the girls. We don’t want to give away so much of the plot, but the film then becomes more like a horror story when she then veritably returns from the dead to haunt her three remaining friends through the diaries she left behind. This unleashes an emotional tsunami since they’re all exposed as gossiping backstabbers. Really, with friends like them, who needs enemies? It shows that it really takes a lot of patience and forgiving and forgetting to nurture and keep a friend over the long haul of a lifetime.

Vastly entertaining and both hilarious and tragic, we’re at first bothered by the fact that Judy Ann Santos, Agot Isidro, Janice de Belen and Iza Calzado don’t really belong to the same age bracket. But as you watch them interact on screen, you’ll easily forget this as there’s warm and even palpable chemistry between them in all their scenes together. They make you want to suddenly call friends you’ve not seen in years just to keep in touch again.

Even if it’s Iza Calzado who gets the longest screen exposure since it’s mainly from her point of view that the story unfolds, all the actresses here deserve to win best actress trophies as they all have their own big acting highlights. In Tagalog, “wala kaming itulak-kaibigin sa kanila” as they can all both be wickedly funny and tenderly touching. Maybe they should just win for ensemble acting as they’re all outstanding. Giving the award to just one of them will be an injustice to the other three.

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