MANILA, Philippines—Don’t look now, but a new trend is emerging on local TV-film screens: the popularity and prevalence of new productions top-billing female lead characters who are housemaids, domestic workers and/or caregivers.
On the big screen, Sharon Cuneta led off with her hit film, “Caregiver,” and Vilma Santos has just followed up with her character in her new blockbuster starrer, “In My Life.”
She plays a middle-aged mother who joins her gay son in the States and is forced to take on a series of menial jobs to make ends meet.
On the TV screen, KC Concepcion plays incongruous housemaid to Piolo Pascual in their new teleserye “Lovers in Paris.” Given the show’s Parisian setting, however, it’s a decidedly upscale version of the tattered tale of the poor katulong who falls for her princely boss—and vice-versa.
Toni Gonzaga is also pretty much going through the same old stuff in her soap opposite Derek Ramsay. And Sunshine Dizon has just started her own poor-girl story in “Tinik sa Dibdib.”
And, come to think of it, Jennylyn Mercado is similarly pushed around like a pathetic slave in her new tearjerker.
And we’re not even including Michael V’s comedic take on the yaya syndrome in his new movie with Ogie Alcasid!
So many TV-film (house)maids all in a row—what is going on here?
It turns out that the incipient trend isn’t new at all, just the latest version of the tired, old “tribute” to the long-suffering aliping sagigilid who was the pathetic victim-heroine of so many tear-jerking flicks more than 50 years ago.
It made perfect emotional and financial sense at the time, because local movies then were thought to have a largely masa audience made up of poor people who could fully and lushly empathize with the weeping screen heroines’ travails.
In time, the “tragic katulong” syndrome was updated to include the millions of “domestic workers” who did the household chores for their foreign employers all over the world. The updated stories’ settings were more upscale, but the largely female leads’ travails and traumas remained pretty much the same.
The trend’s current revival has been updated yet again, with the female protagonists evincing signs of being less weak and “pathetic” than their predecessors. In fact, the characters currently being played by KC Concepcion and Sunshine Dizon have even learned to fight back when they’re pushed too hard. Well, it’s about time!
In general, however, the “new” stories about housemaids, both of the local and “exported” sorts, are still being told mainly for the escapist illusions they offer televiewers.
They fully empathize with their fantasticating promise that, if a poor girl kisses a frog, he’ll turn out to be a prince and thus make her the queen of the fondly and fiercely fictive realm—even if reality keeps clunking them on the head to remind them that, ay, Inday, it just ain’t so!
Pilita and Rico J.
Pilita Corrales and and Rico J. Puno sing together on Nov. 13 and 14 at Music Museum. For tickers to their show, “The Diva and the Debonair,” call 8919999 or 7216726.
‘Sweeney Todd’
Audie Gemora, Menchu Lauchengco and Franco Laurel top-bill Repertory Philippines’ new staging of Stephen Sondheim’s musical, “Sweeney Todd,” from Nov. 13 to Dec. 13 at Onstage, Greenbelt 1, with Baby Barredo and Michael Williams co-directing. Call 8870710 or 8919999.
‘Gossip Girl’
The third season of “Gossip Girl” unreels every Tuesday at 8 p.m. on ETC. The hit show stars Leighton Meester, Blake Lively and Chace Crawford. Log on to www.etc.com.ph.
