I happened to catch Villaluna/Ramos’ Ilusyon yesterday at the Galleria, at my girlfriend’s behest. I’ll go right out and say that we both thought it was crap, so if you’re a fan of local cinema then you should probably stop reading this review right now.
Ok, so back to that piece of shit.
Ilusyon is a movie set in 1950’s Manila. I need to stress 1950’s here because the movie goes to exaggerated lengths to position itself in the timeline. In the first 5 minutes alone, the main character wakes up in an old 50’s car, listens to 50’s music on the radio, talks to a landlady in a 50’s hairdo, and the camera actually lingers on a newspaper with a nice big 1958 date on the front.
You get the impression that the filmmakers’ knowledge of the 50’s don’t really go beyond all the obvious cliches, and their need to go into screaming detail is rather tragic. (There are two terribly-rendered montage sequences where our characters walk through a torrent of glowing movie marquees and other royalty-free 50’s clipart, neither of which serve a purpose other than to hide the fact that they didn’t have any real sets to shoot the characters in.)
This over-zealous production-design is exemplified by a brief scene where the characters visit a doctor’s office. The walls are peppered with charts and diagrams, the tables are littered with medical books, the shelf behind the doctor’s desk is lined with flasks and tubes, and the camera pushes in on the doctor’s notepad, because you know, you can’t really tell if she’s a doctor or not until you see that "M.D."
The reason why I point all this out is because the movie tries (ironically) to be subtle in every other aspect. Ilusyon’s basic plot involves a young farm-boy (Yul Servo) who travels to Manila to visit his painter father. When he gets there, his father has left for parts unknown and he is obliged to stay and tend the house while he waits for his return. Our farm-boy isn’t much of a painter, but when a pretty model (JC Parker) comes for a session, his libido gets the best of him and he pretends to paint her just so he can see her naked.
This has all the makings of a mildly funny arthouse comedy, but the laughs are few and far between, believe me. Instead, we are treated to long sequences of our two main characters sitting at a table, silently eating, or equally long sequences of gratuituous nudity on the part of JC Parker. The movie clocks in at nearly two hours, and the amount of screen time given to these two idiots trying to act like they’re falling in love is unbelievable. (Conversely, the amount of screen time alloted to showing Yul Servo’s growing dissatisfaction with JC Parker after he’s fucked her a few times is surprisingly short, and comes out of nowhere.)
Naturally, JC Parker dies at the end. We don’t know how or why, but she does, and their story draws to a close with Yul Servo seeing her apparition on a lonely country road. The movie makes a small stab at profundity with a voiceover from Yul, noting that his father used to say that life was all an illusion, when in fact, it was the reverse that was true: it was all real.
Given the level of skill that this movie exhibits in portraying "reality" that line lands with a fairly dull thud.