The Escort is about Yassi (Lovi Poe), who at the start of the movie is working as a waitress. While working one night, she catches the eye of Cyrus (Derek Ramsay), who runs an escort agency. He intends to draw Yassi into becoming an escort, hiring her as a receptionist. He's hoping that exposure to the work will tempt her into doing it. What he didn't expect is that he'd fall in love with her. This becomes a real issue when the recently widowed businessman Gary Montenilla (Christopher de Leon) becomes a client of his company. Cyrus has been pursuing the businessman for a while, and initially offers up Yassi as a selling point.
This is only the start of it. It may seem like the setup for a weird love triangle, but the movie has other in mind. At no point is Yassi even really tempted to be with Gary. The movie instead focuses on whatever is supposed to be between her and Cyrus. Except the movie doesn't really make an effort to make that particular relationship make sense, either. Considering the fact that Cyrus was lure her into becoming an escort, it's a little difficult to understand what it is that's supposed to be drawing Yassi to him. The film takes that for granted, because it doesn't really care about Yassi.
Curiously, the film is really about the men that hover over her. The film only extends sympathy to her as a victim of their manipulations. And she is only worthy of this sympathy because she is unlike the escorts that work for the agency. She makes both Cyrus and Gary fall for her precisely because she remains a virgin, and is unwilling to become an escort. In the world of the film, women are either victims or worthy of ridicule, or even both at the same time. In one particularly galling scene, a woman's apparent rape at the hands of her father is played like a punchline.
Of course, the film's moralistic stand doesn't extend to the men in this world. The film keeps making excuses for Cyrus, playing him up to be complex and tortured, his general heartlessness driven by the trauma of his childhood. It doesn't work, and the film is only burdened by the extra of all this backstory. Even if we give the film leeway for its odious subtext, the text itself is pretty bad. The dialogue is odd and stilted. The characters don't talk like real people. The strangest conceit in the dialogue is that the characters are at times quoting things rather than just saying things. In crucial moments, the immediacy of the scene is broken by the characters talking about something they read somewhere, instead of what they're feeling at the moment.
The production package is subpar as well. One need only look at the sign hanging at this supposedly high-class escort agency to see that corners were cut. The big romantic montage of the film plays like an AVP for the resort location. In general, the film is made to look cheap by all the establishing shots that linger on the sign boards of all the places where they got to shoot. The acting isn't any good, either. Naiveté is an awkward fit for Lovi Poe, who often displays a worldliness that belies her age . Derek Ramsay looks lost as the character begs for sympathy. And Christopher de Leon hams it up as usual, resembling nothing that seems remotely human.
The Escort is a curiously regressive piece of work. There are all manner of interesting dynamics at play once sex is treated as a commodity, but the film can only muster up sympathy for a woman as long as she remains a virgin. For all of its sexual swagger, for all of its willingness to exploit its actors as sexual objects, in the end the movie doesn't have enough imagination to conceive of romance outside of moralistic structures that demand that a woman be virginal and pure, and afford men sympathy for their bad behavior.
My Rating:
