Mum’s the Word

One artificial couple after another.

In My Life
Director: Olivia Lamasan
Cast: Vilma Santos, Luis Manzano, John Lloyd Cruz
2009

Shirley walks over to a group of four white sculptures. Her son Mark sheepishly stands beside her. “Father and son, mother and daughter,” she says, pointing to the two pairs of figures. She gestures at her and Mark, the third pair: “Mother and son.” Shirley smiles triumphantly at her seemingly clever parallelisms. “Family! Kaya nga gusto ko dito.” Mark’s lover Noel laughs and takes the photo.

The scene is short, almost forgettable, buried somewhere in a touristic sequence where Mark (Luis Manzano), with his boyfriend Noel (John Lloyd Cruz), shows his mother Shirley (Vilma Santos) around New York City. The white sculptures are George Segal’s Gay Liberation, a site-specific installation in Greenwich Village built in 1980 to commemorate the Stonewall riots which catalyzed the gay rights movement in the US. Shirley, however, is unaware of the monument’s nature, recognizing it only as innocent males and females in a “family.”