This girl is on fire

By Carmen Aquino Sarmiento

Movie Review
UnTrue
Written and directed by Sigrid Andrea Bernardo

MARA VILLANUEVA’s skull cap of fire engine-red hair is like a red flag, a warning that anyone who would choose the same shade as the Ronald McDonald clown, but in an asylum patient’s buzz cut, can’t be all right in the head. It is a signal flare for disaster. Mara (played by Christine Reyes) is not whom she appears to be: just another Filipino OFW, toiling away in the kitchen of a bistro in Tbilsi, Georgia. Why Georgia? Because, as the director Sigrid Andrea Bernardo explains, it is one of the few places left on planet earth where we are unlikely to run into a Filipino, or into anyone else for that matter. Although the Philippines has approximately five times Georgia’s land mass, our population of 110 million Filipinos is 30 times that of their around only 4 million Georgians. There were probably fewer than three dozen Pinoys living and working in Georgia during the two weeks that the UnTrue crew spent shooting there.

The social isolation of UnTrue’s protagonists is key to nudging its plot along — no usisero’s (busybodies) with tiresome questions tracing past common acquaintances and finding connections: Taga-saan ka? (Where are you from?) Kilalala mo ba si ___? (Do you happen to know so-and-so?) A well-meaning but intrusive barkada (group of friends) might awkwardly distract the protagonist from festering psychotic or murderous inclinations, then down the tubes this story goes.

Bleak, dreary, and wintry Georgia is a fitting setting for the theme of revenge, a dish which is best served cold. Director Bernardo’s phenomenally popular Kita Kita (2017) had a seemingly benign and cuddly, though when you really think about it, he was actually creepy, stalker in Tonyo (Empoy Marquez), the former mascot and alcoholic vagrant whom Lea (Alessandra De Rossi) compassionately nurtures when she finds him, drunk and destitute on a Sapporo sidewalk, instead of turning him over to the authorities of law-abiding Japan.

In UnTrue, the genders switch: it is the gaunt loner Mara who does the stalking. Talk about holding a grudge. She traveled 5,000 miles to the south of the Caucasus Mountains, with her dead kid sister Ana’s (Rhenz Escano) more-than-a-decade-old, unwashed high school uniform, for the sole purpose of wreaking an insanely complicated revenge on the former guidance counselor Joachim Castro (Xian Lim), a sexual predator and S&M bondage aficionado who done her baby sister wrong. That is surely some baggage to keep lugging around. Ms. Reyes heroically runs around outdoors, dressed only in the late Ana’s thin, wine-stained cotton blouse and skirt (no bulky thermals or other obvious protective gear), in freezing Georgia weather. She is supposed to be crazy after all.

The bright, richly saturated colors of Sapporo, Japan are the other side of the spectrum of UnTrue’s grim palette of dingy grey’s (there are a couple of pretty nature scenes of running horses), except for Mara’s scarlet pate. Even the gorgeous Xian Lim is prematurely aged and scruffied-up, with a coarse beard and a greatly increased BMI (Body Mass Index), which actually made him look manlier and still not unattractive.

Ms. Bernardo’s genius is her ability to get her audience to play along, to suspend our disbelief and allow ourselves to just be entertained. In Kita Kita, we do not question the transformation of Empoy from a drunken street dweller to the secret Prince Charming next door, a solid renter with no visible means of support or legal documentation in expensive Japan. In fact, the charming couple have all the time and means to go sight-seeing. Similarly, in UnTrue, we accept the evolution of Mara, from an orphan of lower middle-class origins with no apparent financial resources (her sister Ana desperately needed a scholarship to attend private school), into a globe-trotting Valkyrie with MacGyver-like abilities. Joachim previously spent five years in the States, where he met his business associates from Georgia, and ended up in Tbilsi as the prosperous owner of several vineyards. Logically, Mara must have known that, which was how she ended up in Georgia herself. Why didn’t she whack him in the States? Too many Pinoys.

Like a cruel cat toying with its prey, Mara gets Joachim to fall in love with her and even to marry her. Afterwards, she seems to have become a stay-at-home wifey which conveniently gives her the time and opportunity to set up an elaborate system of wireless speakers broadcasting her dead sister’s voice to guilt-trip and gaslight her hubby. She also has the abilities of a doppelganger and a quick-change artist as she flits in and out of his peripheral vision in said cherished uniform. There are incidents which establish Joachim’s volatility and violent tendencies so he was probably already on the verge, and maybe even deserves what he gets in the end. To his credit, he was undergoing therapy, proving his willingness to change, but which gave Mara the opportunity to spike his medication. Another of director Bernardo’s strengths is in her use of symbols. In Kita Kita, it was the daruma cat which Tonyo gifts Lea with. Here, it is Kartlis Deda, venerated as the Mother of Georgia, who holds a bowl of wine in one hand to welcome her friends, and a sword in the other to smite her enemies. Mara swipes the tiny sword, from a figurine of Kartlis Deda (from the scale, it’s under a foot tall) conveniently set on the police inspector’s desk. The original monument is aluminum, so this mass-produced touristy souvenir is probably of much cheaper material like a polymer resin. In the film’s final scene, as Mara confronts Joachim in the police headquarters, with law enforcement present or at least close by, she dramatically lunges with this teensy sword, like a cocktail skewer, at Joachim’s eye. She might have succeeded in partially blinding or mutilating him, but she didn’t go for the jugular and that itty-bitty thing could not inflict a lethal wound. Dare we hope: can this marriage be saved?