January 20, 2024
Larry (Victor Relosa) and his wife Edna (Denise Esteban) gathered and sold mussels for a living. Despite living in a simple hut with their limited means, the two were very happy with their life together. One day, they saw a young woman unconscious on the sand. They brought her home and cared for her until she woke up and introduced herself as Amy (Aiko Garcia).
Edna took a liking to Amy, and treated her as a friend and sister, despite the warnings of her best friend dress shop owner Tanya (Amabella de Leon). Greg (Chester Grecia), the boyfriend of the local prostitute Alona (Rain Luna), kept trying to strike up a friendship with Amy. However, it seemed that Amy wanted to reserve her fresh mussels to someone else.
As the wife willing to sacrifice her own dignity for love, Denise Esteban showed why is was constantly considered one of the best actresses in the Vivamax fold. As the snake in the grass Amy, Aiko Garcia builds on her success from "Haliparot" (my #1 Vivamax film of 2023). As the husband caught between the desires of two women, Victor Relosa's face reflected the weakness of men to temptations of the flesh, so his role was quite evident from his first scene.
The basic story of a happy marriage ruined by treacherous third party is in itself a very old and common plot in local movies. Writer Ronald Batallones's odd choice of setting may presumably be because the Tagalog term for mussels ("tahong") had a naughtier second meaning related with a certain delicate part of the female anatomy. At one point, there was even a reference to "Raise the Red Lantern" (1991) using a white towel instead.
Like his other Vivamax output, cult director Roman Perez, Jr. never settled for the bare minimum when it came to choosing his shots for his films. The main setting of a seaside village may sound drab, but Perez and his cinematographer Rommel Andreo Sales employed a lot of artistic camera angles for aesthetic enhancement -- with views from the top, in mirror reflections, or through windows where the warm sun was beaming in.
The title "Palipat-lipat, Papalit-palit" was also the title of a Lino Brocka movie back in 1982 with a totally different topic. Here, how that title applied to the story was not that clear until an additional revelatory scene after the title came out at the end, which cleared up exactly who was moving around and changing. I would have liked another flashback scene to explain how Amy ended up unconscious on the beach at the start of the film. 6/10.
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