A ‘Fabulous,’ funny slice of Filipino life
In Hollywood, Asian Americans are rarely afforded the opportunity to play themselves on the big screen. In fact, studies have shown that they get less than 5% of total film roles. It’s far less common, still, to see a film that is for and by Filipino Americans, despite the fact that the population has nearly doubled nationwide in the past 20 years.
There is a balm for this: “The Fabulous Filipino Brothers,” a raucous directorial debut from Bay Area native Dante Basco, available to stream starting Tuesday, Feb. 8. Centered on four brothers tied up in misadventures in the lead-up to a wedding, the film is set mainly in Basco’s hometown of Pittsburg. It even stars his family and friends, bolstering a warmth and intimacy that permeates the film.
Romance and comedy are part and parcel, and both are done with aplomb. But what gives the work its distinction are its intersections. To be Filipino in America is to have an everchanging relationship with otherness. The otherness of being one ethnicity among many in a national melting pot. The otherness even among other Asian Americans. And the otherness of being American in nationality but of another culture and history at heart.
The full thrust of this plays out after the opening scene, as the four brothers discuss wedding plans over breakfast
(whose wedding is saved, delightfully, until the end). Here, we learn that none of them actually speaks Tagalog fluently, yet lola and “grandma” are interchangeably used. While the family jostles over how to cover the cost of catering, eldest son Dayo (Derek Basco) eventually steps up to foot the bill, fulfilling a cultural expectation many elder Filipino American siblings have in taking care of the whole family.
In a later scene, we see that Dayo cannot actually afford it. So, to obtain the money, he does a favor for his friend in a campy scene involving an illegal cockfighting ring. It’s in these frenetic moments that the film subverts Hollywood’s expectations of Asian characters in which they are soft-spoken, submissive or otherwise one-dimensional. In this new territory, Filipino Americans can be a cultural mosaic — and incredibly funny.
But the movie has its shortcomings. In failing the Bechdel test, it somewhat clumsily reinforces traditional gender dynamics inherent in Filipino culture, where men have the privilege of being messier and in the foreground, while
women are the unsung heroes who pick up the pieces.
The exception to this is Teresa, who is a blind date for one of the brothers, Danny Boy (Darion Basco). Played by Liza Lapira (“The Equalizer”), Teresa shines in a studied vivacity that is so fully realized that you lose sight of what little screen time she has.
What should supply trepidatious readers with the resolve to watch “The Fabulous Filipino Brothers,” which has made the rounds of the festival circuit since its world premiere at South by Southwest last year, is the chance to experience its dexterous pauses. One of these is set in the Philippines, where Duke (Dante Basco) sits in a dimly lit garden with his high school ex, conveying to her the awe he has during his first visit to a country he had only heard stories of as a child. Here, viewers are met with an important reality of diaspora, in which part of your experience is loving what you have never seen as much as what you know.
“It’s beautiful here. I mean, everything is so new — at least to me. The people and scents in the air. The air itself,” he says. And then, a poetic contradiction that, perhaps, many Filipino Americans like myself can relate to. “But then again it’s not. It’s like something I don’t know. It’s like coming home.”