I’ve seen this before, but it’s been years and it just came across my Twitter in its dying days. The words are from a favorite author of mine, Maggie Stiefvater, and they are the words I most need to hear when it comes to dealing with chronic pain and illness. I didn’t need this the first time I saw it, six years ago. I need it now. Maybe you do, too.
Seeing as I enjoyed Samantha Lee’s previous and her first film “Baka Bukas”, I decided to check out her second one, entitled “Billie & Emma.” I watched the trailer first and it looks interesting so I said to myself if I got some time to spare out of my busy adulting life, I’d watch it and I finally did! Woohoo!
( spoilers ahead! )
Okay so first off, it’s definitely a teenage coming of age movie, it’s also a sapphic romance but it’s definitely so much more.
So this movie is set in the remote provincial town of San Isidro (St. Isidro) in the Philippines in the 90’s and as a Filipino born and living in one of the provinces in the Philippines and a 90’s baby myself, I can vouch that the movie accurately got the general vibes of the province life in the 90’s in its cinematography. It has that soft and warm tone. if you’ve seen “Baka Bukas” you’d know how good Samantha Lee is at capturing integral moments, setting up the scenes, and how slow and steady the pacings are in each subplots.
But let me tell ya, it definitely got the 90’s Filipino provincial culture among the general population and the teenage population. From the outfits, to the hairstyles, to gushing over celebrities and social standing in the local public schools with the teens, then to having gossipy, judgmental, misogynistic, secretly and overtly homophobic people with close-minded thinking around you, yep it’s all on point. I actually got annoyed at some of the homophobic dialogues lol, not because it’s badly written but because of how good and so damn accurate it was. I heard some of those dialogues said by real people around me at some point in my closeted lesbian life before and oh boy, it got my now proudly out lesbian ass lowkey hot-headed and ready to verbally fight lol
Going back, we start off seeing Billie arrive in this remote provincial town. Now this is a pretty common trope in Filipino movies, I don’t know why but it is lol. It’s the city girl/boy who did something bad gets exiled by their parents to some province where relatives live to take care of them and “set them straight” (I’d say no pun intended but this time, it’s intended lol)
Okay so we got city girl Billie who’s now going to live with her aunt and continue her schooling in the province, clearly against her will but she still followed orders from her parents because she’s still a teenager and is in fact, broke so she can’t live her own life right now but she did try her best to vibe with others especially at school. Her aunt, (her mother’s sister to be specific) welcomes her as best and as cold as she could. I don’t blame her for the coldness at first though, I mean she’s single and living her best(?) life as a religion teacher in the local all girls’ school and now she suddenly has a “delinquent” teenager to look after so I wouldn’t be thrilled about it either but hey, she eventually warms up to her niece, Billie, which is quite a warming thing to see progress throughout the film.
As Billie starts her first day at the local catholic all girls’ school, in the middle of the semester, she’s welcomed by the school’s most popular star student, you guessed it, Emma. Like she literally welcomes her on stage in front of the entire student body and it didn’t go as friendly as you’d expect. The gossiping student body and Emma’s two gossipy friends isn’t helping them either but they eventually do connect and fall in love. its not “enemies to friends to lovers” but more of a “slight inconvenience classmates to lovers” which is fine by me.
Anyhoo, we then get to see Emma’s world as her life gets entangled with Billie’s. I’m gonna say it now but Emma is the first one who got smitten she just didn’t realize it at first but she eventually did and I can’t blame her, Billie does look cool, walking around with her disc man and earphones on. Billie is the angsty music lesbian to Emma’s bubbly scholarly bicurious girl so of course Emma’s gonna be smitten, and seeing how cute Emma can be, its not surprising that Billie easily liked her back. yay for our girls!
but things has to get extra complicated at some point right? so Emma, the girl who has big dreams of becoming a lawyer, in the midst of discovering she’s very much capable of falling in love with another girl, eventually learns she’s also pregnant because she’s still in a relationship with a guy unfortunately and they did the dirty just before Emma got close to Billie. Sometimes timing just fucking sucks.
tbh i’m not a fan of throwing a pregnancy plot in a sapphic couple but for this one i’ll let it slide mainly because of how Emma handled the whole thing. She didn’t let it define her life or her decisions, i love how she put herself first and that’s one of Emma’s traits that i love the most. more importantly, even though she got knocked up by her knucklehead boyfriend, Emma’s relationship with Billie continued to blossom in the midst of all of it.
Honestly speaking, there’s more to love about this movie. Besides the sapphic romance and the coming of age and all the complexities that comes with it, it also deals with women’s agency over their own bodies which is rarely shown in Filipino sapphic films, because well, we don’t have much locally made sapphic films going around (someone needs to fix that), and because this is also set in a very catholic school in a very traditional, patriarchial and heteronormative town, it also scratches the surface of the hypocrisy religion has over matters like homosexuality, pre-marital sex and teenage pregnancy, so I’m glad this movie was able to show those things in the realest way during the time the film was set in some of which still happens to some parts of this country today I’m guessing.
Billie and Emma are complex on their own but also complementary with each other, and that to me is a good combination. The side characters all brought things that contributed to the general plot but for me, besides the romance plot which is so adorably shown btw, I also loved the relationship Emma has with her mother, and Billie has with her aunt. It shows a loving familial relationship in their own unique ways. no family drama around coming out so that’s a plus for me.
Good to mention to those cautious about watching sapphic films out of fear of someone dying or the sapphic couple not ending up together, I’m happy to report that this one has just the right amount of drama and fluff, no one dies, and it does have a happy ending for Billie and Emma as individuals and as a couple!
All in all, I’m confident to say that this is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a while, and it being locally-made makes it even sweeter.
