Mga Mumunting Lihim :film Review

 
 http://www.clickthecity.com/movies/?p=15696

Mga Mumunting Lihim is director Jose Javier Reyes’ first real stab at making an independent film. It tells the story of Carla (Iza Calzado), a successful ad executive who discover that her late best friend Mariel (Judy Ann Santos) had left her a box of diaries. Carla reads through the diaries and discovers all sorts of things that her best friend had kept from her. Carla begins to realize that no one in her little circle of friends has been entirely truthful, and they soon confront each other over all these secrets. The film’s great insight is that friendship is often far more complex than simply being nice to each other. Human beings, prone as they are to failure and frailty, can be quite awful to each other. And sometimes friendships are maintained simply by inertia and an unspoken agreement that no one has to hear the awful truth about each other.

It’s a fine effort from one of the consistently capable writers in our industry. But the direction is a little all over the place. The film can’t quite decide on a treatment, and seems to err on the side of aping an “indie” aesthetic. And thus there’s a sequence that’s handheld and too often out of focus, and adventurous, overlapping editing that doesn’t quite serve the material. The film is actually really great when it just settles down and allows the characters to talk. They are, after all, played by some of the finest actresses in the country. The film does find its rhythm, and though there are portions of it that I really didn’t like, the sum ends up being much greater than the parts.