Terrible beyond belief "Salitan" is one of those messy things that you can experience countless of feelings all at once. It goes from
intriguing to patehtic, slightly exciting and slightly watchable, but the dominating feeling is of lousiness and cringe. It's not that the expected
ideas shown of a doomed love quartet were bad, as it happens in life and a lot more in entertaining stories. But the presentation of it all
killed every chance of this being effective, or at least have some good qualities beyond the great looks from its cast and all the sexy moments they
performed.
Basically, it revolves on a beautiful woman who suspects her lawyer husband is having an affair with his secretary, so she decides to have an
affair of her own. She finds a perfect response to her emotions and sexual needs with a mysterious man, and almost doesn't feel any guilt about
cheating - even though everything is a mere suspicion of hers rather than an actual thing going on. Then, we discover about her lover's exact intentions
and how he's connected with the secretary and the plot thickens. In between each five minutes of dialogues, lots of sex scenes are thrown away, and
breasts show up for no apparent reasons except for audience appeal. That latter device reaches a wildly hilarious peak when a couple's argument
heats up to the point of the girl's boobs pop off her blouse, the boyfriend looks at them and love making is in the progress.
The buzzkill of it all comes from a ridiculously annoying invisible force that narrates the whole story, one of the most intrusive narrators I've
ever seen. Nevermind that the film credits the actress but doesn't credits a character to the voice, so let's assume it's life telling such story. This
dumb film teaches how to NOT use a narration on a visual media (of which films are). The female voice injects a silly humor to everything, describing thoughts
from characters, actions from characters and even her personal inputs on sequences ("Why she's having such boring sex with her husband? Spice things up")
Not to mention that those recent Philippines films have the exact touch of softcore flicks (a little better than the actual stuff, must say), it's outrageous
that the voice over shows up on some of the sex scenes, much to the hilarity of almost everything.
An even bigger buzzkill is the ending. A huge part of me really wanted to discuss it over here, but I won't. If you really feel that you have to
force yourself to watch this bizarre idea of a film, go forward it and see for yourself one of the most painfully dumb endings of all time that just
leaves you back where you started and no reflection can be made about that. What I can predict to you about "Salitan" are: you're destined to have some
laugh. Funny laughs, embarassing laughs, ridiculous laughs over everything about it, all kinds of laughs. Perhaps a feeling of contempt.
This was watched out of curiosity after seeing "Afam", also starring Nico Locco, and done on a similar structure of that nation's current
cinema where you throw some funny story with lots of sex in between, and the man is like a sex god on those stories (with good reasons). That movie
was a guilty pleasure of mine and it wasn't so bad since the idea worked. This one is preposterous with its presentation of everything, and when a dark story
of one of the characters is revealed, it was done in such a tasteless sequence transition that it was disgusting.
Simplistic as hell and hardly ever engaging or entertaining. Might be easy on the eyes because of the girls and the hunky lead, but the film
itself is out of salvation - except for potential writers if wanting to know how to not write a movie. 3/10.
