MARIS RACAL IN SUNSHINE

ANTOINETTE JADAONE: SUNSHINE (2024) New York Asian Film Festival 2025

TRAILER

An unwanted pregnancy in the Philippines

Maris Racal stars in the film, marking her third collaboration with Jadaone, a director popular on multiple levels in the Philippines. The story follows a young Filapina Olympic aspirant gymnast who discovers she is pregnant on the week of the national team tryouts. On her way to a seller of illegal abortion drugs, she meets a mysterious girl (Annika Co) who eerily talks and thinks like her. The device the director acknowledges is based on Taika Waititi's Jojo Rabbit, but not used as extensively. It provides a kind of wall against coming too close to a sitation that's harsh even though it's idealized.

This is an issue picture with an urgency because this is a conservative and Catholic country where abortion is illegal and there are thousands of unwanted teenage prenancies. Perhaps the film is only as good as the degree to which young women can identify with Maris Racal as Sunshine and the rest of the public can sympathize with her plight and her solution. Ordinary Filapina girls may aspire to being like Sunshine, especially after the gymnast Carlos Yulo became a multi-gold medalist. Not all will directly identify with an elite athlete. Maris Racal is convincing enough. She performs her streamer-swirling routines convincingly and has the fresh, perfect look of a world class gymnist.

Sunshine falls doing her routine and knows something is wrong. Quite soon she guesses, and buys two pregnancy tests of different brands to avoid a wrong result (a tip from someone). Things move fast after that. Her irresponsible teen boyfriend (Elijah Canlas) is a complete asshole. On the street she buys an abortion pill for vaginal insertion; we don't know what it is but when she takes it where she goes to a sleazy sex hotel for a prescribed 12-hour fast, excruciating pain leads her to the hospital. When she wakes up she has lucked out by getting "Dr. Helena," an OB-GYN doctor who clearly runs her own sub rosa abortion clinic on the side, and who treatsher for free. At the end of the film, Sunshine has returned to training and enters competition.

Perhaps this film compromises too much to make its unpalatable topic palatable, even as for many in the country nothing will really achieve that.

For some reason this made me think of the great Brazilian movies about the lives of street kids in the cities and favelas, Pixote, Ciudade de Deus and all the others, so full of life. Perhaps the Philippines isn't much like that in detail, but it seems to have some of the same vibracy and warmth. and we feel that a little bit in one sequence of Sunshine where the protagonist is running with her sister (who has a small baby always in tow), has been talking to her JoJo Rabbit-esque child doppelganger, and has discovered her young lesbian friend is pregnant by her uncle. But most of the time she has it pretty easy, despite the imminent threat to her Olympic career, and we are a little too much protected from the violence and disorder of a world with a lot of poverty, many pregnant unmarried girls, and illegal abortion.

But to be critical of an issue picture that may be something of a voice in the wilderness is, as I've noted before, how Mike D'Angelo described Eiiza Hittman's 2019 Never Rarely Sometimes Always: "A film that offers virtually nothing but compassion, which makes it all but impossible to criticize without seeming downright heartless."

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.