Ngayon Kaya ‘REVIEW’: Hugot-core Redux
‘Ngayon Kaya’ REVIEW: Hugot-core Redux
AM (Janine Gutierrez) attends a wedding and encounters a familiar face off-screen.
Minor spoilers for Ngayon Kaya ahead.
The characters of a Prime Cruz feature often make up working elements of Filipino society not often covered. In Sleepless, we saw Dominic Roco and Glaiza de Castro play two down-and-out call center agents trying to get by in the hustle and bustle of Metro Manila. In Isa Pa with Feelings, the characters are slightly more affluent, but one of them is deaf while the other is a struggling fresh grad trying to pass her boards for Architecture. This is in large part thanks to Prime’s frequent collaboration with Jen Chuansu, who pens the script of all these films. Thus, it’s a little surprising to find that in their latest work together, “Ngayon Kaya” enters into a territory that is extremely familiar, with elements that border on pastiche and even in reference to. The product is nonetheless interesting, but it begs the question of what this film aimed to do beyond acting as a recap to the past decade’s best and worst of the so-called local “hugot-core” / “indie-core” category.
Ngayon Kaya is a romance-drama film centered around the story of two reunited friends, alternating between their present condition as distant memories and their past life as musically-motivated college students. Starring Paulo Avelino and Janine Gutierrez as Harold and AM, respectively, the pair display this push-and-pull of a relationship differentiated between the present period’s more shaky (literally, the camera is handheld throughout these sequences) situation and the past’s more stable, grounded one. In their time together as college friends, their bond is sealed when they first share a moment over a Mayonnaise track and decide to make it a dream to become successful musicians after graduation. This is in spite of their socioeconomic differences, with Harold being a working student and AM being a free-spirited rich girl with a circle of musician friends. Shades of distance and longing a-la “Alone Together” come into play here considering Harold’s motivations to migrate abroad after college, and talks of fate, what-ifs and physical separation become involved. But more than anything, it is a film that attempts to define its core values around the beauty of making music together.
AM and Harold hold their first recording session together in AM’s loft.
That last part may sound familiar to some people, because this film makes itself eventually known to be a love story partly centered around making music. In the spirit of 2011’s “Rakenrol”, the film pushes its narrative forward through the use of musical scores, soundtracks, and characters building music together. Even the film knows this because there is practically one scene where the film’s poster is just hoisted in the background, perhaps to acknowledge the levels of awareness this film has when it comes to cribbing or pulling from its influences. Funnily enough even the campy “100 Tula Para Kay Stella” comes up because the film, while thankfully boasting a larger soundtrack here, makes central to its plot the development of one particular song, despite the pair wanting to make an EP or album from the onset.
Ngayon Kaya’s inspirations are what define its core, especially in asking about what could’ve been. As a film that simultaneously honors and imitates, these are the elements which make the film suffer compared to some of Prime and Jen’s previous works. Where the normally wonderful musings of “Sleepless” and the tender slowness of “Isa Pa With Feelings” are involved, this film is a far less effective version of these moments by becoming a film that seems lazily constructed. From the onset, the introduction of both characters surprisingly feels dry, everything from the silence as AM wakes up in the beginning to the period when she and Harold are first interacting with each other over a popular Mayonnaise track. It doesn’t help that as the film progresses, motivations and ideas that circle around each character are defined in words and sentences that have already been conveyed in better ways from previous works and other films.
The pair of friends are seen having a conversation in the present.
Nonetheless, it’s important to still appreciate the DNA of this film. Even as a movie that is as referential and familiar to the genre as this one, the soppy and romantic aspects associated with such works are still easy to grasp. While the relationship between Harold and AM aren’t introduced quite well, the film ends up developing this connection into something that is more than passable for a piece of hugot culture, especially considering the genre hasn’t seen much activity thanks to the pandemic. There’s a certain amount of longing and connection between the audience that still rests in the film’s best moments, in spite of the feeling that sometimes they sound forced. For example, a crucial moment that is only made important at the film’s closing minutes is the feeling of destiny, yet it’s passively introduced and only built upon near the end in a way that feels forced than natural. While it seemed forced, sections of that realization can still hit and shock people. These sentiments best describe the messiness which is tied to the film’s character: spates of tenderness, but also muddled in a state of confusion and uncertainty.
What’s important to observe with Ngayon Kaya by the end of this is that it is a film constructed around familiar ideas, executed with varying degrees of success. There is no what if scenario to consider where this film could’ve been better executed though, because for as imperfect as it is, it is still capable of hitting close to the heart. Not Prime’s best, but still decently effective.
Ngayon Kaya is now showing at cinemas nationwide.
