Idols are not absolute since it is their fans who made their profiles godly. Fantasy and factuality are interchangeable spheres in "Fan Girl." Jane (Charlie Dizon) is a teenage girl obsessed with her favorite actor Paulo Avelino (a fiction-based version of himself). The film introduces her in the jeepney on the way to school. En route she gushes over her phone watching the trailer of Paulo and Bea Alonzo's new release, "If We Fall in Love." Skip to the school, Jane neglects the class, still swiping on her device for updates about her idol — the adolescent has spiraled into media overdose. Stalking, creepy or so, is an offshoot of escapism from the prison that is the economic hierarchy.
This fan girl is blistering, the crippling pricks of her excitement contorting Jane's face. Newcomer Dizon is frightfully rabid whether swooning over Paulo or cursing him to unforgiving damnation. At the mall, Jane attends a promotional event where Paulo and Bea are on stage. Similarly overweening fans infest the venue, so Jane bypasses the monster loyalists and hops on the trunk of Paulo's truck. The actor drives to the countryside; along the road he rants about the pestilent parts of being a celebrity, seeming whelmed by the continuous work schedules and the pressure of his prejudged flawless public persona: a caricature that undermines his ragged authenticity. Manning the wheel, Paulo paws a skin care patch on his face, angrily complaining, "Ginagawa niyo kong bakla." That is screenplay rendezvous by writer-director Antoinette Jadaone. Already a veteran in filmmaking, she swerves comic into sedate to determine an even contexture to "Fan Girl," a secret comedy in its depressingly didactic capsule; psychedlic within reach of substinence. The filmmaker has shed the flakes of studio blockbusters ("Love You to the Stars and Back," 2017; "Never Not Love You," 2018) and gets herself the creative license to helm "Fan Girl."
Jane rouses on the truck parked outside an abandoned, hoary mansion. Its gate is chained, but Jane envisions Paulo winking at her, like at the mall event, motioning her to ascend the steel fence through the house. What she sees from the media dictates her ritual — her idol becoming so inviting in the midst of a doubtful situation. The projection becomes an injection to her reality, erasing fiction. Darkness is the only fluorescence in the unsettling residence; cinematographer Neil Daza trails the blindness through machinating the camera along the glints, so Jane could explore the uncharted halls. Above the staircase, she locates Paulo — undressed, his back turned from her; the frame crawls up, studying the tattoo of a naked woman fashioned as a penis — then Jane calls his name and startles the actor into chasing her out. She runs on the street, fantasy becomes nightmare as the photo flashes and spotlights recede in the dark — only the stark evening beaming upon the bareness of Paulo. He is a meth-snorting, foul-mouthed alcoholic whom Jane defines as a good kisser and magaling magpakilig, having starred in "100 Days to Heaven" and "Black Jewel in the Palace" as his debut teleseryes. Dizon's irises are deranged as if hypnotized — grisly, pitiful, and admirable is her loyalty. Paulo cannot shake this creeping ivy off, and Jane lays out her seismic idolatry as the stalker approach has driven her to obsession towards a crumbling human beautified and coated with glossy shellac.
Independent of the cutesy fan girling that spores crushes and plain inspiration, "Fan Girl" is Jadaone's commentary (having imagined the twisted fairytale proves she is at the apex of her artistic foray) on media dependency versus media bias. Jane is prejudiced on Paulo being a good kisser, though relies on his fiction through her addictive consumption of his content that it has destroyed her mortal restraint. Her dependence descended from worshipping the celebrity for recreation. Idolatry, if very much decadence is let in the system, mutates into toxicity as a drug. She worships Paulo generously; despite his irritated mores, there is just the fairytale sunshine showering him in the mansion's alarming shadows, discontinued by her murmur of "Babe" as the snobbish actor nurses her wounds from the previous altercation. Progressing the fantastical intoxication, Jadaone puts Jane and Paulo in an extended take. The lengthened sequence is Jane's enamoring for the actor being non-stop. Amid the beclouded house, which has an antique sofa for it's only furniture in the common area, the teenager sees Paulo in a glittery moonbeam of golden royalty as they dance like Belle and the Beast, darkly. Jane has had her first sip of beer from him, declaring their outlandish trust. Jadaone interrupts her dreaming with a kiss that Paulo shuns as he becomes berserk and abusive anew, berating his fan girl. When he cries, there is concern in his teardrops that mixes sadness and wrath in his maniacal presence as Avelino remains confoundingly metrical.
Misogynistic, though there are motivations for both the admirer and the admired. Their integers are putrid, with the addictive filter of media being a diversion which sadly becomes abusive for them. Heaving blunt, they bond over the haze of their traumas. "Iba-iba..." Paulo refers to the impact of smoking and drugs, explaining to his fan girl, being a newbie. Media also has varying hits on the person depending on their viewpoint and requisite as the sender, channel, and the receiver's relations are founded. Jane relapses — during the car getaway sequence punctuated with the fan girl pushing herself out of the speeding vehicle driven by her idol, scaldingly screeching, "Putang ina mo." Dizon, prodigious as she is horrifically crazed, tramples male domination, overcoming it. Her lunacy is snapped back into coherence having fallen forehead straight on the concrete, escaping escapism. A bus ride to the Metro later, she walks back to the tenement where her mother is physically and emotionally abused by her adulterous lover Benjo. The man verbally decimates Jane, having been bloodied and soggy with sweat, saliva, beer, dirty pool water, snot, and tears from the days she were away. Benjo is the aggravating chatter of society dictating how women should be, cementing his dominance by ushering Jane to buy him cigarette; she does at her mother's permission. At the sari-sari store, the saleslady verbally decimates her again with the same judgmental societal profile they fantasize as much as Jane has constructed a fairytale prince in Paulo. The teenager prods from the store, as the camera is pictured stagnant with a "Du30" tarpaulin on its upper quadrant, a sobriquet that has fans of its own.
Jadaone's "Fan Girl" is the exemplification of an administration often abusive and nauseously fanatical albeit its war on drugs that prompts the addiction anyway; the hangover being its loyalists. Pauperism necessitates escapism, then residents turn to their twisted "drugs" — in Jane's case, Paulo and media. As they relapse, they become unforgiving themselves. The government demolishes morale by arresting the irreversible consequences of destitution instead of preempting the cause which is exactly it. A cyclical desperation that none must not be made a fan of.
Director: Antoinette Jadaone Images and trailer ©️ Black Sheep Productions, Globe Studios, et al.; YouTube.com
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