'About Us But Not About Us': Conversation as compelling cinema

Directed by Jun Robles Lana, “About Us But Not About Us” is an unlikely tour de force.

It stars just two actors and is set in a drab Makati restaurant where the gay and insecure UP literature professor played by veteran Romnick Sarmenta meets up with his ambitious student, an aspiring novelist portrayed by the versatile young actor Elijah Canlas.

The movie lasts only as long as their abbreviated brunch, but the stories in this taut and compact film stretch back to childhood and unfold the way most stories do, through conversations and oral history that are colored by biases and traumas. It is in recalling decisive encounters with a dead character that both actors demonstrate their prodigious dramatic chops.

Tackling themes of suicide, closet queerness, clerical abuse, power relations, online sex, and even the convoluted meanings of happiness, their low-volume pyrotechnic dialogue turns a prosaic dining room location into a tableau for startling, even appalling revelations. Who needs action?

By creating compelling cinema out of a mealtime chat, Lana’s oeuvre reminds cineastes of a similar treatment in “My Dinner With Andre,” a 1981 film by the French auteur Louis Malle, then regarded as ground-breaking work.

Lana breaks ground too in a movie-going culture that prizes histrionics over subtlety. By daring to limit the physical action to two men of different generations trying to figure out each other’s intentions over steak and mashed potatoes, Lana juxtaposes distressing disclosures with bedroom voices.

Like Malle, Lana employs the conversation-as-cinema technique to produce an enduring portrait of a zeitgeist. In Malle’s film, the cosmopolitan New York of the time; in Lana’s, it’s our pandemic-fatigued world, with its references to protocols and quarantines and unexpected deaths.

If I have any quibbles, it’s the mind-numbing abundance of leaps from one disturbing revelation to another, with each one exposing a fresh facet of Canlas’ disingenuous character. The audience has barely absorbed the implications of the last sordid tale when we’re punched with another.

Each story from the mouth of this babe adds to a profound transformation before our eyes, enabling Lana to explore Canlas’s extensive acting range without him even getting out of his seat except to go to the restroom, which sets the stage – spoiler alert – for a final act of betrayal. — LA, GMA Integrated News