MOVIE: ' That Thing Called Tadhana' Honest Review

“That Thing Called Tadhana”

Review by Ephraim Despabiladeras

It had taken some cajoling of Cora and the threat that if I didn’t go, she would go by her lonesome. With such persuasive means, I reluctantly agreed to watch “That Thing Called Tadhana,” starring Angelica Panganiban and JM de Guzman and no one else really.

Was I in for a real surprise! Because of my stroke six months earlier, I missed the Cinema One film festival last November and was totally unaware that the film was given the Audience Choice Award and that Ms. Panganiban was chosen as festival Best Actress.

The film, in the manner of Richard Linklater’s “Before …” movies, particularly “Before Sunrise,” is about two young adults, she hurting from a very recent nasty breakup and he sufficiently recovered from his own failed romance. They meet at Rome’s international airport on the way home to Manila. He offers to check in her excess luggage. They become friends.

Like Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy in the Linklater movies, they talk and talk and talk – from the plane to Manila, to Baguio, to Sagada and back to Baguio and Manila. All that talk would be absolutely boring in the hands of other writers and directors. In the case of “… Tadhana,” the writer and the director happen to be the same – Antoinette Jadaone. Ms. Jadaone has mastered Linklater’s art of filming movie dialogue through the use of active camerawork and photogenic settings.

But no amount of fancy camerawork and colorful scenes would be for nought if all that talk were mere platitudes and empty of substance. As a writer, Ms. Jadaone has an ear for dialogue that moves the story forward and reveals the two characters to be three-dimensional with interesting back stories – she being dumped by a boyfriend of eight years and he, not wanting commitment, finds her girlfriend marrying someone else, as well as losing his mother to cancer, and both realizing in the course of all their talking the need to move on, to have a new lease on love and life.

And the burden of carrying on this talkie movie falls on Ms. Panganiban and Mr. de Guzman. Ms. Panganiban has proven her mettle as a funny girl on TV and this movie taps her comic vein to hilarious effects; the scene inside the plane when she cries over “One Chance” is a comic masterpiece. But the role requires her to show off her dramatic chops as well; her passage of rage and tears as she cries her heart out in the Sagada mountaintop can hardly be bettered. The role of the hero is less flamboyant and the movie could very well have been stolen from under him, but Mr. de Guzman more than holds his own, with his dark good looks, sensitive face and quiet strength. The two stars are very well matched.

The introduction of the boyfriend – presumably following her from Rome and carrying a bouquet of flowers – at the tail end of the narrative strikes this viewer as a false note, unmotivated and introduced merely to serve some last-minute conflict and suspense.

Despite this false note, the movie, which ends happily, is the most delightful intelligent local movie I have seen since “Ang Babae sa Septic Tank” in 2011.

Watch the Movie Trailer :

Posted by Chef Juan