When love & passion go haywire

The thing with movies made for TV audiences is that you don’t expect much.

You are offered star values, you are expected to be tickled pink by romantic trailers and you hope you catch it in your free time.

But when you are 60 and above, romantic flings are not likely to appeal to you. You leave the kilig factor to the very young but you secretly hope a kind of déjà vu happens in your TV viewing.

Because like it or not, you identify with the characters when it touches or resembles a part of your private past.

Given this reality among one sector of TV audiences, TV 5’s Bawat Sandali — directed by Joel Lamangan with Eric Quizon and written by Racquel Villavicencio —  is a big surprise because the senior citizens in the preview audience were hooked by it to the very end and rooting for the married heroine gone bad and the single swain gone hopelessly in love.

A clue that a film has sunk on the viewers’ consciousness is when they start reacting on the predicament of the lead actors. They are given time to enjoy the love scenes until something the opposite of romance sets in.

At first glance, you don’t expect much as you see the balikbayan photographer played by Derek Ramsay meeting the married Angel Aquino while vacationing in the historic Taal town in Batangas. With her young daughter in tow, she meets him by chance and the mutual fascination begins.

With much gentle prodding, he guides her to his ancestral house where he was born. While he is busy preparing refreshment, she is fascinated by the shiny wooden floor and begins to dance. There is pure spontaneity in this scene with literate inputs from a dancer’s life. Luckily, Aquino has a dancer’s body and the movements she creates make you conclude she is indeed into dance. She tells him the floor is  conducive to dancing. Then one meeting leads to another and all at once you see instant love and passion at work.

Torn between loving and resisting the young man, the young wife accidentally pushes him by the window and reality sets in.

What happens to the young lover and how she copes with the arrival of the husband gives the viewers a chance to root for the beleaguered wife.

There are many things going for this TV movie and one of them is a well-written script by Villavicencio. The story unfolds without the benefit of unnecessary sub-episodes and the screenplay illumines the characters for what they are.

Everyone delivers a sterling performance in this film. Phillip Salvador (along with Mon Confiado) as the small-town cop has a deeply marked role worthy of a cosmopolitan detective, while Yul Servo as the husband and Mylene Dizon as Aquino’s confidant are equally standouts.

Aquino carves a delicate portrait of a young wife in love and Ramsay is indeed a young Romeo out to get a very much married Juliet. Together, they make a perfect love pair with love scenes so gentle and yet passionate to the very end.

The actress is at her best and so is the young actor. The romance-suspense film gives them all the frames in which to shine as first-rate actors.

There is so much to say about how director Lamangan made something beautiful about this love story with an unusual denouement. He followed the thread of Villavicencio’s story and guided the cast to a suspenseful ending. This film is Lamangan at his sensitive best.

Bawat Sandali is a superb post-Valentine treat aired on TV5 last Feb. 25 and will soon be shown in selected theaters nationwide.