Titillating in good measure

Film review: Talk Back and You’re Dead

MANILA, Philippines - The willing suspension of disbelief is one of the basic prerequisites for one to enjoy a movie. Talk Back and You’re Dead, however, requires a willful suspension of disbelief.

The pattern for the plot is usual enough: Bad boy meets good girl. It is war between the sexes from the beginning. Soon the bad boy is revealed to be a good boy at heart, and boy and girl inevitably fall in love with each other. The movie has Beauty and the Beast written all over it, and, in fact, at one point, Talk Back directly alludes to the fairy tale. 

James Reid plays Timothy “Top” Pendleton, the wealthy, ne’er-do-well leader of a gang called Lucky 13, made up of presumably equally affluent tisoy boys. The Lucky 13 gets into fights with other gangs, in particular one led by Piggy, who, for reasons unexplained, has a proclivity for abducting Top’s girlfriends.

Nadine Lustre plays Samantha Perez, supposedly a “perfect” girl, whom Top dupes into playing his girlfriend at a family dinner.  When his family shows signs of disapproval and he breaks up with her, she realizes that she has fallen for him despite herself.

So far we’re clear, but the plot quickly thickens like mulligatawny (pace PG Wodehouse) without its becoming satisfactorily digestible. (How much the movie departs from its source, Alesana Marie’s novel published on Wattpad, I cannot tell.) Without giving away too much of the plot (whose convolutions rival any telenovela’s), we learn that Top was convicted of abduction and rape; that, without her knowing it, Samantha’s parents have doomed her to a pre-arranged marriage out of business interests; and that Jared (played by Joseph Marco), Top’s right-hand man, is really (surprise!) attracted to Samantha himself. 

Characters either pop in without narrative economy or are conveniently introduced when there’s a knot to untangle. As an example of the former case, Samantha’s cousin Lee, played by AJ Muhlach, has the sole function of revealing that it is the family’s tradition for parents to arrange their children’s marriage. He is otherwise dispensable. As an instance of the latter case, Amarie, whom we are led to think was Top’s ex-girlfriend, turns out to be his half-sister, a twist that recuperates Top’s standing with Samantha. It would spoil the movie to have the final scenes revealed here. Suffice it to say that like many of the incidents depicted in the movie they beggar belief.

As troublesome is that the movie’s premises are not firmly established. The source of the rivalry between the Lucky 13 and Piggy’s gang is not made clear (Given the differences in the gangs’ respective get-ups, is it a class-based war? And what are the parents doing, we wonder?). We are not given enough of Samantha’s back story to make sense of her blow-hot-blow-cold relationship with Audrey, played by Yassi Pressman, nor are we told just how Jared knew that Samantha and Top had met as children — a key plot point.

The movie is set ostensibly in the Philippines, but the rarefied spaces that Samantha and Tom inhabit — the exclusive schools St. Celestine and Pendleton, high-end shopping malls, the beach house — bear little resemblance to the lived world. The world of Talk Back is perhaps intentionally unrealistic, and that is cause for some relief: For if the movie were accurate about what children from privileged families do, Jose Rizal, who placed such high hopes on the youth, would be turning in his grave. (And should children of underprivileged families find Top and Samantha exemplary, the Philippines would be “nuestro perdido Eden,” indeed.)

But these loopholes slide off most of the viewers in the packed cinema, who after all, are in it for the titillation. And titillate the movie does in good measure. The cast is uniformly good-looking.  More important, there is a Benedict and Beatrice quality to the banter between Top and Samantha, something that is essential for teen romantic comedies to work. When the couple move from trading insults to exchanging endearments, the electricity is palpable. 

The movie has more twists than a candy cane to keep viewers ah-ing and as much saccharine to keep them ooh-ing. Talk Back and You’re Dead delivers what it promises — an adolescent glycemic high — and closes with the threat of giving viewers another “hit” (Never Talk Back to a Gangster, coming soon).

Should one be elated or alarmed?