Ivan Andrew Payawal’s The Comeback is a very, very loud movie. It tells the story of an actress whose bad behavior has pretty much gotten blacklisted from the industry. Throughout the film, we see vestiges of her former success, as well as several attempts to kill herself. The plot kicks off with the arrival of an urn of ashes at her doorstep. It turns out that it’s the ashes of a person who once lived in her house. A letter that comes with the urn explains that he has killed himself, and he is asking that several letters be delivered to other people. This whole story is seen as an opportunity for a comeback, but it becomes something more for the faded actress.
There are all sorts of interesting things going on in The Comeback. It could be mentioned that almost all of the primary characters in the film are women, and that these characters are able to talk frankly about sex. There’s just something intriguing in how the film depicts the relationships between women in general. But in the end, it all feels pretty half-baked. All these ideas are mired in a plot that just fizzles out. And there just isn’t enough nuance in the entire film to let these ideas shine. The movie is actually kind of okay when it quiets down and lets its characters speak from the heart. But that happens pretty rarely in this story.
Though the acting is all pretty good, the zaniness gets tedious pretty quickly. The film feels like it’s overcompensating for a plot that just wasn’t going to go anywhere.
Ralston Jover’s Hamog follows four kids who at the start of the film are all sleeping in a concrete pipe under the Guadalupe bridge. They work as thieves and hustlers, stealing from cars on the road. The film splits them up pretty early on, and then goes backwards and forwards in time as it follows their exploits. One of them dies pretty early on, leaving his best friend to try and put together funeral arrangements for him. One of them is caught while trying to steal, and ends up in a far stranger situation. Another can’t deal with everything happening, and looks everywhere to make sense of everything.
Not all of it works, but when it works, Hamog is pretty amazing. The footage alone is often remarkable, the movie ably capturing the chaos of this uncaring city through its visuals. But then it goes deeper into the stories of children who have been shaped by the streets, who through the abandonment of their parents, either literal or metaphorical, are left to fight for their lives in whatever way they can. I found the film most compelling in the little bits of compassion that emerge from this mess, the kindness of which are still capable in the middle of this horrid mess.
But with the film going in so many different directions, it isn’t really able to make everything connect. There is an intriguing of magical realism in this film that just doesn’t pan out. The character involved in these bits has the narrative fizzle out as well. And then the movie just seems to end on a touch of cynicism that doesn’t fully represent what these stories have provided.
But there’s so much more to Hamog than the bits of which I am skeptical. There are just some dynamite scenes in here, and all of it is buoyed with some terrific acting, particularly from Therese Malvar and Anna Luna. In what is probably the most engaging of the stories of this film, these two young actresses grab hold of the messed up psychology of the characters and turn into cinematic gold.
