PINOY Sunday, the 2010-released Filipino-language Taiwanese film directed by Malaysia-born Taiwanese director Ho Wi Ding, just got launched on Netflix Philippines last 8 June. Hooray!
  This is the debut feature-length film of Ho, which he co-wrote with Ajay Balakrishnan. Ho went on to win the Panorama prize at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2018 with his third feature film, Cities of Last Things, but even before helming Pinoy Sunday, two of his short films, Respire and Summer Afternoon, were already selected to appear at the Cannes Film Festival, where the former won in 2015 both the Kodak Discovery Award and the Young Critics Award during International Critics' Week. Pinoy Sunday itself won Ho the Best Director plum at the 47th Golden Horse Awards and the Best Picture award at the 2010 Comedy Cluj Festival in Romania.
  Ok. For those who don't know it yet, Pinoy Sunday, starring Filipino actors Epy Quizon and Bayani Agbayani with support from Alessandra De Rossi and Meryll Soriano, is not a Filipino film in the usual Netflix sense. It is, as we said above, a Filipino-language Taiwanese film with Taiwanese-Japanese producers (except for now-California-based Filipino Mark Meily, who is a co-producer).
  Pinoy Sunday is a comedy-drama film that could also be read as a tragicomedy, depending on where your politics lie (bourgeois or anti-bourgeois?).
  We'd like to confess that we prefer tragicomedy to dramedy as a type, if only because it's where the comedy would actually become just the filmmaker's development-communication vehicle for a serious message, in the same way that magic realism had been the development-communication tool of many LatAm writers with very important political agendas to impart within their storytelling. The difference is really just in the context, dependent on the contextualizing viewer (or critic) who decides what to tag his comic-dramatic product as: dramedy or tragicomedy.
  You see, in comedy drama, drama stuff progresses in the story, but lightened up with entertaining comedy; or, conversely put, there's comic stuff going on around the developing drama.
  Tragicomedy is a slightly different animal, or rather, an entirely different point of view: it recognizes a tragic flaw underneath all the intermittently appearing comedy. At the film's ending, a tragicomic view would not necessarily be harder on the chest with the protagonist's realization of something, but it would certainly offer a deeper understanding. This is certainly the case with Italian neorealist (or Italian social realist) films like Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves, which, incidentally, Pinoy Sunday may just be Ho's colorful (pink socialist) variation on.
  (WARNING: OUTSIDE OF THE PLOT TEXT YOU CAN READ ON WIKIPEDIA, THERE ARE SPOILERS HERE BELOW)
  A film on migrant workers, Pinoy Sunday focuses on two friends from the Philippines (Manuel and Dado) who travel to Taiwan to work at a Giant Bicycles factory. The film implies that many foreign blue-collar workers in Taiwan (and, by extension, in other countries) live in dormitories owned by the companies that hire them, and that compliance to dormitory rules such as curfew may be as strict as the discouraging of tardiness at work. This situation makes it hard for migrant laborers to separate their work life and home life. However, this is still deemed by many as a better situation than being in their country of origin where they might be enjoying the freedom to do anything in their own homes, going out and coming in at whatever time they please, but without jobs to gain money from, unemployed.
  Manuel de la Cruz (Quizon) is a sort of dreamy person who can't adhere to strict rules. But being naturally imaginative, he can find ways to soften the factory-compound guard's heart and get away with his tardiness, unlike his friend Carros (who was with him and Dado when they arrived at the train station from the airport) who would later be dismissed from work and then go on hiding to escape deportation. It is later revealed that Manuel used to be a musician in a band that obviously got him nowhere, thus his decision to join the Filipino workforce in Taiwan. Although resourceful and ambitious, his character is also revealed to be a bit unlucky with women, even though he is always enamored with someone (who, it often turns out, would not be enamored with him).
  Dado Tagalog (Agbayani) is Manuel's best friend and erstwhile bandmate who tagged along with Manuel because, like Manuel, nothing was happening to him in their hometown. Unlike Manuel, however, he is not unlucky in love and, in fact, soon falls into a relationship with a fellow Filipino worker in Taiwan, even though he is also revealed to be quite the family man who also misses his wife and daughter. When he is informed that his wife was rushed to the hospital after a minor accident involving a motorized tricycle, he worries. (The Philippine motorized tricycle here becomes a symbol of Dado's family―Dado, his wife, and their daughter, after the vehicle's three wheels―and is a motif that might also remind people this early in the film of one of the most affordable family vehicles in the Philippines; in the film's end scene, however, the motorized tricycle becomes a symbol of something else).
  In the opening railway station scene, Dado goes to the restroom where he meets a countryman in handcuffs due out in a deportation procedure. When Dado witnesses situations like this, which Manuel doesn't, is it to signify Dado's being the realist one between the two?
  Manuel is the optimistic fantasist, a stand-in for a part of the Filipino populace that continues to dream of having one of the best-looking women or men there is for a girlfriend/wife or boyfriend/husband (a showbiz-inspired tragicomedy by itself). Those fantasists would also endlessly be dreaming of a luxurious life as if all you need to display is hard work (sipag), perseverance (tiyaga), and a bit of strategy (diskarte) to get it. At their Taiwan dormitory's roof deck, Manuel expresses a desire to get a soft couch for that deck spot where they drink their beer, instead of just being content to sit on wooden chairs. Dado ignores him. Manuel's delusionary attitude is also portrayed as extending to his perceptions over blossoming relationships (or what he imagines are blossoming relationships) between him and some women, as in the present case with nightclub girl Cecilia (De Rossi) in Taiwan. Because he is delusional, it's only natural that he would also be confident. On a bus heading for Taipei Manuel tells Dado, "Siyempre, pagdating sa babae, dapat tayo ang nagdadala" (Of course, when it comes to women, we should be the ones taking the lead). This is one statement that points us to Manuel's overconfidence as a tragic flaw.
  One Sunday Manuel and Dado take the bus to leave their city (we assume they're coming from Dajia, Taichung, where the Giant Bicycles factory is), heading out for the Catholic church in Danshui in Taipei to hear mass. In Danshui they are also supposed to meet Dado's girlfriend, personal care assistant Anna (Soriano), and possibly also Manuel's crush, Cecilia. However, the priest at the church preaches about everyone's going back to their respective families "in a faithful way," which may have pushed Dado, apart from his wife's little accident, to end his fling with Anna (during this Sunday, Anna's birthday) and buy presents instead for a balikbayan box to send to his family. Thereafter, Dado witnesses their friend Carros' apprehension by the police (again not witnessed by Manuel).
  Meanwhile, Manuel experiences his first harsh realization in the film: he's been a fool toward Cecilia, who―without telling Manuel―turns out to be not in any bit interested in him (or in men of his financial stature).
  Then we come to the ultimate motif in the film, the sofa left by an arguing couple, which Manuel embraces as a gift from God. We won't tell you the bunch of things that happen next. Suffice to be told that the two struggle to bring the couch to their dormitory roof deck in the rest of the movie, functioning as a trope for their class' desire to reach a certain level of luxury usually reserved for the propertied classes to enjoy. (Their journey back to Dajia, Taichung by foot gets some poetic license, considering that Taichung is 139 km. from Danshui, Taipei.)
  In the end, the dramedy turns into precisely what we prefer you to think of it as: a neorealist tragicomedy. The struggle doesn't reach a fulfillment of the desired end, and Manuel's fantasies turn into realizations now in the level of Dado's pragmatic kind of relatively realist vision, drifting away in the river water like a dreamy song by Christina (the name of their defunct band, which somehow rhymes with Christianity, that poor-loving theology around God's tests and graces).
  Dado calls Anna, who earlier expressed anger toward Dado's relationship-ending news during her birthday, and she promptly tells Dado she completely understands him, telling us how similar she and Dado are.
  The comedy doesn't end with a "tragedy" for the two's Taiwan "gig," however (which makes it more of a Chaplin product than a De Sica one―incidentally, Quizon's father Dolphy used to play a Philippine version of Chaplin). In the end scene, after drinking at a beach hut (with a wooden bench and table) back in their hometown, the two go home on their motorized tricycle (likely bought from the meager money one of them was able to save―the tricycle now as symbol of realistic thriftiness as well as of contentment, as well as Dado and his wife's semi-adoption of still-reeling-from-disillusionment Manuel). On the tricycle the two joke about what they should cook for lunch. They start by mentioning the squid adobada, then the pork adobada, then finally the kangkong adobada, presumably as the healthier option, although we suspect/know this last was really what they already settled for from the start because it's the most affordable of the three adobada types.
  So Manuel is going to be joining Dado (Diosdado, which means God-given, God's real gift to Manuel?) and his wife and daughter for lunch. Presumably because Manuel is still going through the pangs of having lived the life of an unlucky dreamer. But now we know that Manuel is a different person, or on his way to completely becoming one. His next life as a more mature figure (a new Manuel Quizon, get it?) could be written as this film's possible sequel.