‘Love and Videotapes’ is a dreamy coming-of-age film
In Love and Videotapes, reality and fantasy blur together casually. The mysteries of adulthood and sexuality manifest through surreal moments of passion. Director and screenwriter Ryan Machado weaves an ethereal coming-of-age tale set in Romblon, Philippines in his feature directorial debut.
Protagonist Andoy (Shun Mark Gomez) is a wallflower with a troubled home life living with his aunt and uncle and in his final year of high school. He finds escape through the films he watches with his friend Pido (Bon Andrew Lentejas). The boys obsess over VHS tapes – playing "rent" to theorize which films they would buy if they could – and watch films in nightly showings at community member Mr. Rufon's (Glen Sevilla Mas) house.
Andoy is at heart a film lover and escapes the dreariness that plagues him through imagined worlds. He never knew his father, and his aunt's husband Julio is a terror in his home: a poor parental surrogate. After a screening of a Robin Padilla film, Andoy imagines Julio as a cocky gangster like Padilla plays – filtering his world through the language of cinema is both a coping mechanism and an exercise in imagination.
Viewers are firmly planted in Andoy's perspective, and scenes such as the previous interaction with his uncle are loosely fantastical, as though we are peering inside his mind. "Did I tell you I've been dreaming of my dad?" Andoy tells Pido at one point "He was insanely tall...and said his loneliness kept making him taller." Several sequences in the film feel more like dreams than reality but are not explicitly distinguished as one or the other. This decision offers a heightened intimacy with Andoy and the emotional peaks he experiences on the verge of adulthood.
The scattered magical realism coheres with a playful, distinct visual tone. The entire film carries a warm tint that will heat you from the inside out, placing you directly in the summer of 2001 in Romblon, Philippines. There's an affectionate focus on the beauty of minutiae in the community – like the pile of flip-flops that accumulate outside the door when people gather for movie night – but also a recognition of how restricted our young protagonist feels. Andoy and Pido bike through dirt roads, past swaying green trees, jutting mountains, and endless expanses of water. Standing on the back of Pido's bike, Andoy always looks into the distance, searching for something out of sight.
His world finally expands when he meets trans woman Ariel (Serena Magiliw) – a sex worker and a hairdresser – and later, her friend Isidro – a property owner in the village with an absent father, like Andoy. He senses like-minded people, who've lived and breathed the world he's been searching for. He finds himself growing apart from Pido – who is pursuing a girl named Luna (Charliene Bae Evangelio) – and finds a friend and mentor in Ariel, and Isidro, an adolescent crush. When he stumbles on Isidro sunbathing, he bikes home in a flurry and commits the image to memory on charcoal and paper, tenderly pressing the paper to his chest and surrendering to desire.
This moment, and several others, are familiar in the coming-of-age canon – but Love and Videotapes distinguish itself with the depth of detail it lends to its characters and environment. Motion is captured at its rawest, its most ugly and pretty: the dark splash of urine on a wall, a lightbulb diffused through swaying colored streamers. When Andoy and Pido reconcile, the joy of their mutual embrace is tactile. Machado's direction is steady and confident, guiding viewers through the dreamy haze of the film.
Machado's intentionality is most clear in the nuance he brings toward queerness. Sexuality and identity are never explicitly discussed, instead visually captured through longing and awakening. It's also evident in the way Isidro and Ariel carry themselves – akin to "mythical beings" Andoy and Pido discuss living in far-off mountains – and the world they expose him to. Andoy is stirred to action by their support and takes control of his life in surprising manners. His journey is one strikingly captured, lovingly told and not to be missed.
