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Today in anthropology we tackle a film from the early oeuvre of Sharon Cuneta: P.S. I Love You, her second team-up with Gabby Concepcion, directed by Eddie Garcia, yes, the actor.

Look, up in the sky, it’s a bird! It’s a plane! A private plane bearing businessman Eddie Garcia in a white suit. He has come to Boots Anson Roa’s hacienda to personally remind her that her P50 million loan is due. Boots Anson Roa suspects that he is tormenting her out of revenge: they used to be a couple, but she dumped him for the richer man that her parents approved of. Since then he has gotten fabulously wealthy. This is a common theme in Filipino movies: the person you reject goes on to become hysterically rich. I call it the Beh, Buti Nga. The ex-lovers are both widowed, a state that the movie wisely declines to exploit.

Boots Anson Roa discusses her financial troubles with her friend Barbara Perez, who reminds her that she and her husband are good friends of Eddie Garcia’s, especially before his wife died in a plane crass. In fact they are hoping that Eddie Garcia’s son and their daughter will end up together. Barbara Perez offers to negotiate terms with Eddie Garcia on Boots Anson Roa’s behalf.

Meanwhile Boots Anson Roa’s daughter Sharon Cuneta meets Gabby Concepcion after his polo match, and she immediately falls in hate at first sight. In Tagalog movies this means she is really mad about him. Also, if someone throw up in a Tagalog movie it means she is pregnant. No one ever has food poisoning or nausea. Fortunately no one onscreen throws up. Of course Gabby Concepcion turns out to be the son of Eddie Garcia. What a coincidence! If you think about it, 96.4 percent of movie plots rely on stunning coincidence.

But Sharon’s friend Lampel Luis, the daughter of Barbara Perez, is kind of interested in Gabby. She invites him to the den to watch Deep Throat, the Betamax copy of which she has mislabeled as The Deep. Attention young readers: Betamax is a video format that only caught on in the Philippines and Cuba, Deep Throat is a famous porn flick, and The Deep is a movie with sharks and wet T-shirts.

Gabby does not get it: he thinks they are viewing the porno out of a shared interest in the cinema. He’s like my gay friend who was working out at a gym when a trainer approached him and said, “Sir, paano ba makipag-relasyon sa bakla?” (How do you have a relationship with a gay man?) “Was he coming on to me?” my friend asked.

“No,” we assured him, “He was doing research for his sociology dissertation.”

“Then he started telling me about his five children.”

“Then he was not looking for a relationship, he was looking for an ATM.”

Lampel, Gabby, and Sharon go to Matabungkay Beach, where everyone’s running around in a swimsuit but Sharon is always completely covered up in a T-shirt and jeans. This may seem unnatural and risible, but I contend that this is one of the reasons that Sharon became a megastar. She knew she was not the hottest girl on the screen, she was insecure about her weight, it showed, and the audience responded to that because face it, We are all insecure about our looks and weight. Everyone, especially the gorgeous, because they know that their beauty could vanish in an instant.

(I just saw the weirdest poster: Irresistible Injectables! It was for a sale on botox, glutathione and other cosmetic treatments, and there was an accompanying photo of a needle approaching someone’s face. Clearly targeting the masochist market.)

So Gabby proceeds to fall for Sharon, which seems unlikely until you consider that she’s the only female in the place who isn’t drooling all over him. (This is an excellent stratagem, write it down.) Lampel snatches away the flower that Gabby has presented to Sharon, raising our hopes that she will be the Bella Flores/Zeny Zabala contravida in the equation. However, Lampel’s character disappoints us by turning out to be a decent human being. When Joel Alano appears she goes off with him, completely forgetting Gabby.

(Joel Alano was my classmate in UP. He suddenly died in second or third year. Continuing the Sharon connection, Francis Pangilinan was my classmate in UP. I would answer the teacher’s question, then he would reframe my answer, and the teacher would like his answer better.)

Back in Manila, Sharon and Gabby start going out. They go to the Aviary in Greenbelt Park where she sketches birds. For young readers: the Aviary in Greenbelt Park housed a collection of exotic birds. After walking around the Aviary we would go to the nearby Shakey’s which had the piano and banjo players and put on those silly cork hats.

Next: There are no poor people in the early Sharon movies.