April 07, 2011

The Thank You Girls 2008 (a film review by Rick Groen)

The Thank You Girls
written and directed by: Charlie Bebs Gohetia



produced by:

Brooklyn Park Pictures
Alchemy of Vision and Light Film and TV Productions
CPC Creative

45th Chicago International Film Festival
10th Calgary International Film Festival 2009
27th Annual Vancouver International Film Festival 2008



Starring:
Gie Salonga**July Jimenez**EJ Pantuhan**Kit Poliquit**Kim Vergara



**************

 Gay-Beauty-Contest yarn wins some, loses some



Amid the backstage chaos, a harried voice shouts out the obvious: “In this world, the best faker wins.” It’s the world, narrow but competitive, of gay beauty-queen pageants. Wiggling into cheap gowns with gaudy sequins, the fakers are hard at their transformative work, pulling stuff up, taping stuff down, in mid-metamorphosis from guys to gals. The pageants themselves are low-rent affairs aping the real deal, held in tacky theatres across the Philippines, complete with skimpy swimsuits and skimpier talent and the pretense of international content. And when the five finalists are announced, the emcee boomingly dismisses the losers, the bulk of the high-heeled herd, with a final note of faux sincerity: “Thank you, girls.”

Thus, the title: The Thank You Girls. The plot follows a group of perennial losers on their endless pageantry, tracking that still point where the art of deception meets the malaise of self-deception. There are five of them, mimicking female beauty with their daily dose of estrogen pills and (to say the least) meeting with varying degrees of success. They travel in a rundown bus driven by “Mommy Paola” (Pidot Villocino), a veteran of the queen scene who triples as a manager, a mother and a father. A good thing too, because most have long since been abandoned by their actual parents. Everything about them, from their breasts to their stage names to their sense of family, is an invention where artifice and truth try to peacefully co-exist. Try, and often fail.
Alas, the same might be said of this movie. Like his cross-gendered subjects, writer-director Charliebebs Gohetia is also striving for a hybrid effect here, hoping to mix the camp road comedy of Priscilla: Queen of the Desert with the demimonde tragedy of those pioneering films by his countryman Lino Brocka. But the mix never quite takes, and the result feels as cluttered as that backstage mayhem. Gohetia’s structure only adds to the confusion – the narrative keeps looping back to repeat specific scenes and incidents. If that’s a strategy designed to emphasize the vicious circularity of the characters’ lives, well, the point is made at our expense – we frequently get lost in the repetitious maze.

That makes for a perplexing journey, although not without sporadic pleasures en route, isolated moments of amusement or poignancy. For instance, the cast (led by July Jiminez and Kit Poliquit) are all adroit at capturing the desperate high spirits of the preening drama queens. Sure, they squabble endlessly, tease mercilessly, and posture pathetically. But there’s also real bravery in their bravado. In a poor country, poverty is their enemy, but so is a childhood filled with physical abuse and an adulthood fraught with homophobic aggression. No wonder the “girls” retreat behind thick layers of theatricality – it’s their statement of defence, simultaneously a proud assertion and a necessary barrier.

And so, fighting prejudice and five o’clock shadows and beauty’s inexorable decline, they head off to the next pageant and its elusive prize money, perhaps this time to join the circle of winners, but more likely doomed to cast their lot again with the thank you girls. “Destiny doesn’t favour us,” laments a plump hopeful with tufted armpits. Indeed she doesn’t – smiling on the well-born, frowning on the down-trodden, destiny discriminates too.


the globe and mail:
photo credits:

 TTYG Official Website: http://www.thethankyougirls.com/


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