'Yesterday Today Tomorrow': How the soap opera killed the melodrama

The powerful woman TV executive in fabulous clothes is contemporary stereotypical: strict and impatient, walking swiftly from one end of a corridor to the next, quick to shame subordinates, speaking in an almost always scream. Her young executive assistant is in the tiniest of skirts and highest of heels, yet defies gravity as she keeps up with her boss, who turns out to be her half-sister. Her half-brother, next in line at the TV network, is in an unhappy because neglected marriage, with a woman whose major crisis is she wants to sing in her band instead of being stuck caring for child and home. Their father, the patriarch of the network, is paraplegic and married to a second wife, the age of his eldest daughter, the TV executive. 

 

The tension is thick and we are only talking about the family crises here. There's so much more that "Yesterday Today Tomorrow," a film by Jun Lana, wants to say, and in the mode of the melodrama it actually has the time – and excuse – to make things more complex because these are more real. This mode of storytelling after all is one that we’ve missed, in light of the Pinoy commercial film landscape that in the past decade has lived off of romances and comedies, or the sure hit combo of both. And where there have been heavy dramas, these have been few and far between, and have tended to be either an OFW narrative or a franchise of Regal Films' "Mano Po" series or a religious story cloaked in the narrative of family. But the melodrama as the genre that makes public the travails of the more powerful or the more downtrodden among us has ceased to be interesting in and by itself, where relationships familial and romantic is reason enough for compelling stories.

 

In "Yesterday Today Tomorrow" it became clear why: the soap opera has killed the melodrama.

 

Because the first half of this film was epilogue, where it is established that Mariel (Maricel Soriano), while powerful TV executive is not only friendless, but also without love: she uses as pawn her only daughter against her ex-husband Gary (Gabby Concepcion) and his new wife Charlotte (Carla Abellana), and she’s unforgiving of her father in her refusal to treat her half-sister Celine (Solenn Heussaff) better. The latter meanwhile is ambitious about her career but suffers in the hands of her older half-sister and boss; she is also bored with her boyfriend – that is the extent of her crisis. Maybe because it is her mother Agnes (Agot Isidro) who’s in a crisis all her own, with her kept man, the trainer Derek (Dennis Trillo) wanting love instead of just money. The extent of Jacob’s (Jericho Rosales) crisis is also limited to his being overworked, and his wife Lory (Lovi Poe) being unhappy with being only wife and mother. 

 

It might be said that they're all trapped in the humdrum of their wealthy corporate and familial lives. But the better assessment is that we were all trapped in a long epilogue that was really setting up for the beginning of the story’s unraveling. In the case of "Yesterday Today Tomorrow," this can only be brought on by major manna from soap opera heaven: an earthquake.

 

The family then comes undone: Mariel and Gary lose their daughter and begin an illicit affair under Charlotte's nose; Jacob is angry at Lory for having lied about where she was when the earthquake happened; Agnes is forced onto a wheelchair by broken legs that render her as immobile as the paraplegic patriarch; and Derek and Celine fall in love. That this tragedy came with requisite breakdown scenes one after the other, that this forced us to watch this family through a microscope, with its every member's secret and emotion for us to see, was uncomfortable to say the least. And it was so because even as the first part of the film was about establishing these characters' inner struggles, even as we were supposed to be building empathy for these characters in that first half, by the time we see them being tested by tragedy, we find that we aren’t emotionally invested in these characters. At all.

 

Which could easily be the fault of characterization of course, where motivations are unclear, relationships with each other even less so. But for "Yesterday Today Tomorrow" there’s also the truth of really bad acting. Concepcion’s portrayal of the married man who re-falls-in-love with his ex-wife is one that's empty of all struggle, and might be the most pa-cute one can see in one melodrama; Isidro's young wife portrayal lacks the fire needed, the glint in the eye, if not just the discontent for her illicit affair to make sense.

 

Yet most these portrayals suffer because the staging of the scenes here lacked control: everything was always highly-charged, with characters screaming in anger or bawling in grief or demanding an explanation, just always doing some over the top acting lest we do not get what they’re going through. Now maybe this was something that Heussaff was able to take advantage of, newbie – and more than that, too malumanay for comfort that she is; maybe this worked too for Poe, who’s practically voiceless – if not speaking and singing in a monotone – in this narrative. 

 

It would be for Soriano and Rosales though, they who were holding the acting fort, that these highly charged scenes elicited laughter in the theater. Such is the effect of a lack of buildup for their breakdowns, such is the problem with failing to establish what it is the corporate world robs a person of: his time, yes, but also his humanity. It’s in light of the latter that the quieter scenes of both Soriano and Rosales, which is to say the last ones they had, actually work: here their humanity is revealed in the form of forgiveness. 

 

Though if we are to talk humanity and believability, then it would be Trillo and Abellana who do their best here. Trillo as the only one here who's off the working class also holds the most layered portrayal, and it’s not just about the fact that he goes from gym instructor, to kept man, to boyfriend, to callboy (oh what a revelation!). It's also the fact that he is the only one here who declares love and stands by it, the only one who suffers for it in the end, and Trillo holds onto the forlorn with those eyes like no one can. Abellana as the new wife up against the power of Soriano's ex-wife, is surprisingly stable in her portrayal, consistently believable as the independent thinking executive and caring wife, with nary a moment of uncertainty or contradiction. Maybe it was pure luck that she didn't (need to) do the over-the-top acting in the face of a Soriano ready to slap her; so instead Abellana revealed a portrayal that was no weakling as it was one of strength without the screaming, power in quiet calm and tearful collectedness. 

 

That it would be Trillo and Abellana who would shine here is surprising for sure, products as they are of the soap opera industry that is this movie’s enemy. Because "Yesterday Today Tomorrow" had everything going for it as melodrama, but had one thing going against it: the soap opera. The extreme performances, the lack of a buildup, the screaming and bawling, the unbelievable characterizations, the presumption that the audience will understand the archetypes, are things familiar because we’ve seen these in our local soaps the past decade or so. But that we have makes the film unwieldy and funny, a realization that while we will watch soaps, we demand for something more believable – more real – in our movies. That the reality might be found in romantic comedies instead of in movies like “Yesterday Today Tomorrow” and its subject of familial struggle is truly a sad sign of the times for the melodrama. 

 

Its one bright light? There was no happy ending here. But then again, how could anyone walk into the sunset of such a tragedy? The earthquake and this movie, both. –KG, GMA News