A Very Good Girl (2023)
“Drag Me to Netflix” is the section of this Substack where I make up for my lack of interest in anything Netflix by watching the Filipino movies available on the platform. Fuck, guys, I’m trying! I treat you all as adults so, although we have different backgrounds and preferences, I see no point in including a specific content warning or spoiler alert.
What makes the rape in A Very Good Girl out of place is that, whether seeing it unfold on-screen or ruminating on it after the credits, it doesn’t even have to be there. The attempt to rape Mercy (Kathryn Bernardo) speaks of the many walls that the film keeps hitting. The filmmakers are already bent on building a world ruled and populated by women, and yet they are still compelled to show the titular character being forced to submission, her body mishandled and her head pressed violently on the table.
I am not saying that rape must not be represented, or that rape is all there is to a film that utilises it and an audience can dismiss the work based solely on that. On the contrary, judgment is connected with the criticality of seeing. But it’s integral to our understanding of film language to admit that, in over a century of the art form and the massive changes that have happened to society since, rape on-screen isn’t anymore a mere random occurrence and must not be treated as such. I understand that commercial films recycle tropes and stereotypes for familiarity, and rape is often a part of the formula, but it has turned into a tired and lazy device that rarely comes across as cinematic or discerning.
While it’s true that rape, whether attempted or consummated, is a reality of the female experience (every category coded as feminine: women, trans women, effeminate men, etc.) and the agenda of A Very Good Girl is presenting women as aggressive and ambitious, it remains important to rethink the place of rape in our supposedly female-driven narratives. In this case, it is Molly (Dolly de Leon) who has ruined Mercy’s life. Showing Mercy being violated by a man for the sake of throwing bigger rocks into her path trivialises both her femininity and humanity. That said, this attention given to the rape and its instinctive treatment by the film reveals its rickety design. It can barely walk as a narrative. If I enumerate all the bits I find unnecessary or lousily executed, I might not have much room for introspection.
Here’s where I think it goes wrong: A Very Good Girl is burdened by the need to be morally upright, exemplified by Mercy’s inability to commit to her revenge. She is made to look like a wimp. Whatever ostentatious display of boldness the film is boasting—an out-of-the-box role for Kathryn Bernardo, the motherhood or mothership of Dolly de Leon—the outcome is flimsy because the inspiration is a series of Bible quotes. Already maligned and degraded, Mercy is subjected to more suffering. It’s not even in her hands that Molly dies. Does the film really want us to root for the character it also debases?
Exacerbating this moral righteousness is how the film goads Mercy—I am using “goad” here intentionally; Mercy is like an animal being urged with a rod to move forward—through flashback, inciting incidents, all sorts of deus ex machina. The whole story could just be Mercy and Molly trying to kill each other, no extraneous details, no sloppy motivations, no ideological bullshit, an actual square off instead of a shabby morality tale. Mercy cannot even choke Molly believably. I would love to be offended by the film but I only ended up seeing it as harmless. An insect to shoo away, not to run away from or stomp to death.
Calling a piece of culture Camp to stand in for something enjoyably bad has been customary these days, revealing an audience that lacks vocabulary and tends to use a fashionable word to explain away anything it cannot quite put its finger on. I do not claim to understand Camp fully—guess what, even Sontag herself can’t make up her mind—but let me try: It’s not always Camp when it merely works on multiple levels. Camp requires specificity. A Very Good Girl hardly knows how an office setting or an upscale party or an artwork bidding works. Camp is seldom ascribed to anything recent, as Camp requires the passage of time, a revisit sharpened by temporal and cultural distance. Temptation Island (1980) has only become a Camp classic decades after its release. And there has never been a film like it since. Camp, actual Camp, is hard to reproduce.
The lines, “Justice is expensive, my dear, and poor people like you can’t afford it“ and “I’m sick of being poor,” are not Camp. They are simply. . . lines. They are not even what we’d call critique. Quoting them excessively, turning them into a meme, does not make them Camp. The scene where Mercy exclaims “That face took my breath away” is funny, nothing else. There’s no scale, there’s no committed theatricality. Getting hit by a car unexpectedly is not Camp; it’s an allusion to Mean Girls (obviously), or perhaps even Meet Joe Black (why not). The lesbian artist Tillie Walden also has a short comic with a girl getting hit by a car too and it’s not Camp. (It’s in the collection Alone in Space, which I highly recommend.) It’s not Camp when it simply makes you think of something else.
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Obviously, Camp is not about being realistic; it’s about being insane and excessive to the point that we scream. And as much as it has made me scream, this screenshot is also not Camp:
Let’s use words to mean something. That’s the point of words.
Yes, it’s exciting to see Kathryn in a different role, although her dramatic inflections are similar to her work in her earlier movies. After the breakup, she’s so promising—every producer or writer must now be thinking of ways to use her talent wisely. Put her in a movie with Nadine Lustre. Remake Ikaw ay Akin (1978). Make her spar with another veteran actor: Nora Aunor, Vilma Santos, Sharon Cuneta, Maricel Soriano. Put her on their level. Give her sinful roles. Remember a horny Vilma falling in love with her hot cousin Christopher de Leon in Tag-ulan sa Tag-araw (1975) and she gets pregnant? That’s what “out of the box” means. Not yelling putang ina.
It’s also fantastic to see Dolly top-billing a big movie and having fun with an unapologetically evil character. She kisses a young woman. She looks wicked in her close-ups. She belongs in a Werner Herzog film. If the point of producing A Very Good Girl is to gather these two actors and showcase the scale of their talent, then the material requires scale as well. If we really want to see Kathryn pursue a different path and liberate her from the constraints of her love team movies, as much as I’m a KathNiel fan, then stop giving her these moralistic scripts. Now that we’ve put them through this mess, let’s reward them with range. Stop looking at Twitter/X for inspiration.
Confused about Camp? Then get confused more: here’s the foundational essay on the subject, Notes on ‘Camp,’ by Susan Sontag from 1964, where sometimes she was confused about it herself. (I am confusion!! America, explain!!!) But no explication of Camp can ever match or has ever matched the depth and insight of her bullet points. You might think Sontag has never crossed your life, but you’re likely wrong. You certainly have come across her ideas; you just don’t know they’re hers. When I met Richard Dyer months ago, I brought up Sontag and he said: “great writer, but what a human being.” I gagged.
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If there’s a Pinoy film on Netflix you’d like me to watch, do let me know in the comments! (I won’t take heed; I just want comments, lol.)
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