"Die Beautiful: the Highs and Lows of Life"
a film review by curioshittii
As
a project for one of my subjects in school, I watched Die Beautiful, a film
directed by Jun Robles Lana, and was screened on the Metro Manila Film Fest
(MMFF) for the year 2016. Die Beautiful is a story that centers on the life of
Trisha Echevarria— a transwoman who've seen the highs and lows of
life— a story about being true to one’s self, and
loving it in return.
The
film uses the literary device called a flashback as a method to tell the story.
It starts out by looking into the present; the audience is greeted with Barbs,
a fellow transwoman and is Trisha's bestfriend, who is currently giving the
corpse of Trisha a makeover. It was explicitly mentioned that Trisha wanted to
be painted as a different person for every day during her funeral. The various
artists that were emulated signifies or represents the course of her life— it is a foreshadowing of what would unfold in
the flashback, a slight hint of what she experienced during that time.
The
story itself is pretty cliché, it's a typical portrayal of queer people in
films, but what makes Trisha's character and her story is that it does not just
portray the stereotypical cultures that most can be seen in Vice Ganda's films,
but rather, Die Beautiful has depth— it shows every
struggle of being different from everybody else without any imposition that
every queer person is a horny, and hilarious individual who knows nothing but
to procreate and make people laugh. It's a sublime mixture of comedy and
tragedy; a perfect concoction of being put into a corner, falling apart, and
then finding a new path to take on, a path with lots of people that will be
behind you, that will propel you whilst you walk on it.
