review from the New York Times
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Mourners for Hire
By A. O. SCOTT
Published: February 20, 2004
A hit in the Philippines, where it won six awards at the 2003 Manila Metro Film Festival, Mark Meily's "Crying Ladies" is a loose and genial soap opera about three working-class Manila women who are hired as mourners for a funeral in the city's Chinese community.
According to the movie, the Chinese practice of employing women to wail for the dead, once common, is on the wane, but the Chua family nonetheless insists on a traditional send-off for its patriarch, a philanderer and possible gangster named Washington. His son, Wilson (Eric Quizon), hires Stella (Sharon Cuneta), a sometime petty thief who has lost custody of her young son after serving a year in prison, as a crier.
Stella, a second-generation crier, recruits two of her friends: Choleng (Angel Aquino), a pious Roman Catholic who is nonetheless having a guilty affair with another woman's husband, and Aling (Hilda Koronel), a shopkeeper who clings to the fading memory of her movie career, whose high point was a bit part in a picture called "Darna and the Giants."
In the easygoing, unembarrassed world of "Crying Ladies," it seems perfectly natural that a stranger should recognize Aling from her decades-old role as a villager crushed by a marauding monster. This may also be a sly joke by Mr. Meily, since Ms. Koronel, like Ms. Cuneta, is a major Philippine movie star. With a refreshing lack of vanity or pretension, these actresses play their ordinary, hard-luck characters with generosity and grace.
Mr. Meily, who directed the film from his own screenplay, gives the audience quite a few plot lines to keep track of. Some, especially those involving Choleng and Aling, are handled in a fairly perfunctory manner, yielding little emotional payoff.
The main axis of the film is Stella's relationship with her son, Bong, who is staying with her for a few weeks before moving to a faraway city with his father and stepmother. His presence causes her, not unpredictably, to shed some of her irresponsibility. Meanwhile, Wilson, who had been estranged from his father, trudges toward an equally predictable therapeutic denouement of "closure," healing and reconciliation.
The movie wears its many clichés lightly and without embarrassment. If it were more tightly constructed, "Crying Ladies" would probably also be more relentlessly melodramatic.
But a movie about people who cry fake tears for money, and for complete strangers, would be ill advised to indulge in displays of overwrought emotion. Its most winning attribute is a kind of sloppy, unassuming friendliness, a likability aptly reflected in its characters.
"Crying Ladies" opens today in New York, New Jersey, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego and Honolulu.
Directed by Mark Meily
In Filipino, with English subtitles
Not rated, 110 minutes
