With Love, Bridgit review: an Iloilo film that earns its comedy

By Francis Allan L. Angelo

ILOILO CITY – The narrator of Kevin Pison Piamonte’s latest film is a dog, and the joke is not that she talks. The joke is that Bridgit owns nothing.

Every human quarrel in Barangay Inday is a property dispute. Who owns the recipe. Who owns the parlor. Who owns the santos, and who owns the land. Bridgit belongs to no household and holds no title, which is why she alone can narrate the place whole. It is also why the last image of her is a portrait — a thing you carry when there is nothing left to carry it into.

The setup is straightforward and familiar: An urban poor community, shot on location in Brgy. San Rafael, Mandurriao, has one month before a government project levels it. The residents respond the way actual communities do: not with a united front but with bingo, gossip, a price war between two sisters selling beef soup at PHP 50 and PHP 49.50, and a barangay council session that accomplishes nothing.

That last detail is the film’s method in miniature. The council scene is procedurally useless. The bingo table and the two food stalls are where power actually moves. Reputation is the currency, spent in insults, in who is shameless, in whose customers defect on a Tuesday. Piamonte understands that Philippine village politics runs on the informal register, and he films it that way. The comedy is not decoration laid over a social realist skeleton. The comedy is the politics.

The film never reads as Manila product wearing a Hiligaynon coat, and the reason is structural rather than cosmetic. Three sisters named Marimar, Rosalinda, and Maria Mercedes are not a gag about telenovelas; that is how a generation of households in this country named their daughters, and the film treats the names as inheritance rather than punchline.

Language does the rest of the work. The Hiligaynon in the barangay is loose, obscene, and fast, and it sits against a completely different register whenever a broadcast enters the frame. The television and radio reporters speak the language of the state and the press, in the balanced, sourced, both-sides cadence that any newsroom in this country would recognize. Development displaces communities, one anchor asks, so can we still call it progress? The project benefits the majority, according to another reporter, but disadvantages the residents here. Both are accurate. Neither is in the language the residents use, and the film lets that gap sit. It is the sharpest thing in the picture about who gets to describe a demolition.

The economics get the same refusal to sermonize. “Do you think you can still cook if you are relocated?” does what a three-minute speech would ruin. It names the real cost of off-city resettlement: not the housing unit, but the severed livelihood, the two rides into the city, the cramped floor plan, the customers who will not follow. Republic Act 7279 promises adequate relocation. The film shows what adequate turns out to mean, and never says the number.

The faith material is handled with more sophistication than the premise suggests. Sabel explains that she prayed for a good-looking husband and neglected to specify a faithful one, which is a joke, and also an accurate account of how Catholicism is practiced in these streets: negotiation, specificity, and a saint who can be bargained with. Lucing the manghihilot pulls stones from a neck. Sherlyn practices makeup on a corpse. The funeral parlor, the beauty parlor, and the novena belong to one continuous field, and Piamonte films them as one.

Which sets up the film’s best scene. Shebang, the barangay captain, publicly refuses the miracle attributed to him. There was no apparition, he insists, not the Virgin, not the Lady of Medjugorje. The miracle is in the hearts of people. We create our own miracles, and we also make our curses and our gods. Then he tells them the demolition will happen, and that they have a month. Kristoffer Rhys Grabato plays the whole speech without a wink, and the film earns something rare in Philippine comedy: a character who dismantles his own myth and loses no authority for it.

Shebang is the boldest thing here. He is a gay barangay captain who is also the barangay’s only functioning institution, and the film gives him an origin story in explicitly Christological terms. He was Sherwin. Nobody believed in him because he was gay. Then there was a bang, and Sherwin was shot, and after three days Shebang was resurrected. It is played for laughs and it is not a joke. The community’s sole source of protection is the person it once refused to take seriously, and no one remarks on the irony, because in a barangay this is how authority accumulates.

Port carries the film’s other “queer arc”, and Sean Ethan Sotto underplays it correctly. He is taunted on a basketball court, told that a fourth gay son is a waste, and announces he will be a seaman, which prompts the only sensible question in the scene: can a seaman not be gay. Lucing tells him not to be serious with girls, or with boys, and that fate will take him somewhere he cannot predict. Port ends up a makeup artist in Japan, and the picture declines to resolve him into a coming-out narrative or a tragedy. His future stays open, which is both truer and harder to write.

The migration subplot risks broad farce and avoids it. Two sisters married to two brothers, both lost at sea; a third sister who escapes to America with a visibly frail American husband. The grief is competitive, expressed in the same idiom as the soup war, and that is the observation. Communities organized around absent kin do not process absence solemnly. They process it as another arena for standing. When one woman tells her husband to come home before her ovaries give out, and another announces she is bound for America while everyone else is bound for the relocation site, the film is describing a labor economy without once naming it.

Laragene Servando-Retazo and Jastine Felmae Lemos keep the karinderya war funny for the better part of an hour, which is the harder assignment, then land it in a single scene over a coffin. The sisters reconcile because someone died, not because anything was resolved. Death is good after all, Bridgit observes. They are now okay with each other. It is the driest line in the film and the most honest.

Pacing is the weaker craft. Thirteen principals mean several threads get a setup and no payoff. Mando and Lucing barely register as a couple. Harold and Gary are difficult to tell apart. The Tay Juaning flashback is delivered almost entirely as narration because there is no room to stage it. Then the handoff from broad comedy to demolition arrives abruptly, and the tonal shift is more asserted than earned.

The picture is strongest when it stops talking. The near-wordless stretch before the bulldozers and the procession of santos carried out of a flattened barangay are what everything else is built to reach. A statue accumulates a community’s biography over generations, and when the houses go, the image is what walks out. The television reporter narrating that procession says their faith remains even though their village is gone, and it is the one moment where the broadcast register and the barangay’s actual experience finally describe the same event.

Only two things do not work (read: my nitpicks). Bridgit shuts her eyes at both moments of real violence, chirping herself back to happy thoughts, and what is charming the first time is evasive the second, because it lets the film decline to look at the thing it is about. And the epilogue, with its survivors declaring themselves still happy on the relocation ground, forgives the state considerably faster than the preceding hour earns.

None of it undoes the film’s achievement. Barangay Inday is funny, petty, horny, devout, and specific long before it is a victim, which is why its erasure registers as the loss of a culture rather than of a statistic. This is not a Tagalog story translated into Hiligaynon. The soup war, the Dinagyang reference, and the Holy Week procession are load-bearing, not local color, and a Manila production would have kept the demolition and thrown out everything that hurts.

Piamonte has said the emotions transcend geography. That is the festival line, and it undersells him. The film will travel because it is particular, not because it is universal, which is the argument regional cinema has been making for decades.

He also told me Bridgit was his “darkest ever,” and that the film was a personal challenge to do comedy, knowing that comedy is a matter of pass or fail and nothing in between. That is the harder standard, and few directors of social realist material agree to be judged by it. On it, the picture passes. If dark is this fun, let it reign.