‘Midnight Girls’ explores lives of Filipina entertainers in Japan
By Joel David
Scholars of intercultural exchange, myself included, might be surprised to realize that the Philippines has had the best film crossover examples with Japan.
Even their severely unpopular occupation of the country during World War II yielded superior propaganda in Dawn of Freedom (1944), codirected by Abe Yutaka and National Artist Gerardo de Leon.
Their postwar soul-searching gave the world Kon Ichikawa’s Fires on the Plain (1959, remade by Tsukamoto Shin’ya in 2014), based on accounts of stragglers stranded in the country by their Emperor’s sudden surrender to invading U.S. forces.
The only other Asian capital with a similar record during the period would be yet another unheralded discovery: Malaysia, where Sir Run Run Shaw decided to hire the Filipino talents he could lure overseas (including Lamberto V. Avellana, Teodorico C. Santos, Eddie Infante, and Rolf Bayer) and lucked out with Ramon A. Estella, whom he persuaded to stay on and finish about a dozen more projects before allowing him to explore other overseas film industries.
Japan nevertheless holds the distinction of having must-watch output, both by Japanese filmmakers and Filipino auteurs, all the way to the current millennium: Miike Takashi’s The Guys from Paradise (2000) may have disappointed his usual fanboys by being far less comically violent than his usual product, but it nevertheless manages to provide discursive insights drawn from the source novel by Hayashi Yōji; only the more recent Korean film, Kim Bong-han’s The Golden Holiday (2020), manages to exceed it as sheer entertainment, given the effervescent proficiencies of contemporary Korean popular culture.
The export of labor as a national survival strategy resulted in the accumulation of mostly working-class Filipinas in nearly every country in the world, with Japanese film culture taking due notice. The still-awaiting-rediscovery of Sai Yōichi’s masterwork All Under the Moon (1993) enlarges on its narrative of Zainichi or Japan-based ethnic Koreans, by allotting its main character, a cab driver, with a Filipina girlfriend (impressively played by Ruby Moreno), who happens to work as an entertainer in his mother’s nightclub.
All this is by way of building up to Midnight Girls (2026), Irene Villamor’s latest of several peaks as director and only her second overseas setting, after 2018’s FACINE grand prize winner Meet Me in St. Gallen. MG might seem remarkable for featuring multiple protagonists, until we remember that another peak achievement by yet another Noypi filmmaker, Lawrence Fajardo’s Imbisibol (2015), an adaptation of a multicharacter play, was also set in Japan.
MG was beset by a perfect storm of climate and political disasters during its initial midyear release in Manila, but has since started to thrive in streaming platforms. The narrative features three omise or hospitality-club veterans, who welcome a newcomer into their fold. Each of the four contends with distinct but complex personal challenges, all premised on supporting family members back home while being driven onward by the attainment of dreams that would have been unavailable to them if they had remained in the home country. The fiction is intercut with real-life documentary interviews that suggest even more complex and tragic (as well as uplifting) narratives that would have weighed down the presentation if these had been pursued. The film judiciously leaves in just enough to affirm that its material would be validatable without much difficulty, before restoring the fictional accounts that manage to earn their bittersweet resolutions.
Villamor confirmed in an email interview that she referred to Marilou Diaz-Abaya’s Moral (1982), a similarly empowering work that featured four young women, as a benchmark for MG. The definitive female sex-work film happened along a few years earlier, with Ishmael Bernal’s Aliw (1979), where a trio of painted ladies plied their trade in one of the then-flourishing “supper clubs” fronting Manila Bay, with Japanese sex tourists among the clientele.
In MG, the women’s mama-san is portrayed by Carmi Martin, who first made a splash as an unapologetic gold-digger in Bernal’s Makati-based Working Girls (1985); for her birthday celebration, her character crows about how Bernal discovered her in the working-class department store Ever Gotesco, and predicted that she would go places, which she takes to mean the spot where she now stands.
The larger property that MG shares with these samples is its use of humor and irony. It may be precipitate to evaluate it in relation to these and the other titles discussed so far, although in terms of Villamor’s still-evolving body of work, one can understand how observers are describing it as her best: where her earlier films expressed a reserve about her characters and how they felt, in MG, as the friends state in several of their conversations, they confront the difficulty of caring for the people they love. We can only be grateful that the director appreciates their predicament, but has decided to embrace them for us without any reservations anyway.
Joel David is a retired Professor of Cultural Studies at Inha University and was given the Art Nurturing Prize at the 2016 FACINE International Film Festival in San Francisco. He has written several books on Philippine cinema; his latest, titled Canon Decampment, is available for free on his blog at Amauteurish.com.
