‘Your Mother’s Son’ REVIEW: Good Ass Bomba
‘Your Mother’s Son’ REVIEW: Good Ass Bomba
Sara (Sue Prado) hugs her two children, Emman (Kokoy De Santos) and Oliver (Miggy Jimenez). Still taken from the Your Mother’s Son trailer.
Jun Lana loves to be exhaustive. Take the destitution of Kalel in Kalel, 15, or the running anxiety of About Us But Not About Us. Whether personal or political, there’s a divisiveness that emerges from it. Regardless if meaningful or mediocre, it's an approach that certainly turns heads in discussion circles after all is said and done.
Your Mother’s Son finds itself to be an interesting case in this collection. Shot and produced during the pandemic, this raunchy provincial drama teases itself to be a sex thriller built on psychosexual forces. It proves its trailer right by this, but the resulting work proves to be more than just sex, but an undertaking of political futility. In the realm of Big Night!, it interrogates the state of life under the Duterte regime, though far less adventurous and more torturous. The result? A film that could easily be touted as Jun Lana’s first, impressively well-made, bomba film.
Much of the film can easily be understood as that: an expression of psychological confusion masked in layers of sex and lies. Sue Prado introduces herself as Sara, a single mother to Kokoy De Santos’ Emman. What at first seems like a simple mother-son transient who moved into a provincial town to escape an abusive father turns out to be a lot more twisted. Though this reviewer refuses to dig into spoilers, it's best to say that the film unveils something far more hostile than meets the eye.
The best way to understand Your Mother’s Son is that it is Jun Lana’s more serious attempt to understand the Duterte administration: drugs, abuse, and a plethora of lies. The director even made a note to connect it to his previous examination in Big Night! by tying them together through a shared radio broadcast which appears in both films.
The difference being that Your Mother’s Son feeds more into the glossy, hypersexual fantasies of its audience while restraining itself from too much hedonism by layering its characters with backstories. The stylized sex is on display of course, and those backstories are generously remarked to be unreliable. Amidst these two forces, the film is clear to show that these characters are trying to escape some form of suffering in some way.
Emman (Kokoy De Santos) leaves a vape trail as he hangs his undershirt on a tree. Still taken from the Your Mother’s Son trailer.
Such a narrative method makes the plight of its characters to be quite similar to Kalel, 15, except Your Mother’s Son proves to be a film whose domestic disputes and personal suffering are justly done in service of expressed hysteria. Knowing that this film was shot and produced over the pandemic makes such sentiments even more apparent, given how tight and strict everything felt at the time.
The film works because these things are mostly defined by a slew of great performances from its main cast. Along with the aforementioned Prado and De Santos, Elora Españo and Miggy Jimenez play supporting roles that complement the essence of the film just as well. It’s highly theatrical anyway, considering the film works within an interior so often. Whatever tension exists here happens both because of great acting and because of how claustrophobic the film often feels.
With that, the film is ultimately icy and bleak in its expressions. It's an impressive display of the brutality and savagery of the Duterte administration, presented through a dysfunctional family more used to infidelity and twisted power dynamics than actually getting things done in the house. In Jun Lana’s struggle to make sense of past political conditions, Your Mother’s Son becomes his definitive bomba film: mired deeply in sex, and politically dense in its delirious and lustful desires.
Your Mother’s Son is the opening film for this year’s IdeaFirst Film Festival, which runs from April 12 to 14.
