A Fan Girl Short Review (And The Faces of Duterte)

 

     Metro Manila Film Festival still pushed through this year despite the pandemic, but no, you don’t have to go to the mall to watch it, you can stream it on your smart TV right in your living room. My sister and her family has this sort of tradition to watch a film or two every MMFF, so she tasked her daughter to pick a movie, and since my niece is quite a fan of Paulo Avelino and because the film has early good reviews (an excellently-crafted film, says one reviewer), she chose Fan Girl—and off we watched it.

     The film (a small-budgeted one) is about a famous actor who has a few dirty secrets and his obsessed 16-year old female fan.

     The movie is dark, or at least, it tries hard to be, with scenes that show the main actor urinating, his penis (prosthetic only, girls) showing; the actor teaching his fan (a minor) to smoke and drink; the actor using drugs; the actor cursing like there’s no tomorrow; the actor beating up a married woman he has an affair with, traumatizing her young son; the actor having rough sex with his fan (the scene was filmed quite graphically) and have I told you that the female fan is a minor?

     I like dark movies but I didn’t like this one. No character development, no resolutions, cinematography’s uninspired, dialogues bland, characters are inconsistent (in one scene, the girl is horrified and mightily scared of the actor, and in the next scene, she is shown happily teasing and seducing the actor and drinking beer with him) and don’t have redeeming values, like the film’s sole reason for its existence is to disgust its audience.  If the movie wants to relay some messages, it failed to deliver those messages clearly.

     But something is curious in this film, it keeps showing the face of President Duterte (via his campaign posters), like the movie is subtly telling us that Paulo Avelino’s character and Duterte’s are one and the same.