When we screened Vincent Sandoval's excellent short Señorita last year, we noted that he was already at work on a feature-length remake. Here it is: the full orchestration of a theme previously picked out on the keyboard with one finger, as Jean Cocteau put it. The director himself still plays a transsexual (now named Sofia) who is surrogate mother to teenager Tomas in Talisay (his real mother is working in Dubai) but moonlights every so often as an expensive hooker in Manila. Now, though, there's a political dimension.
In an upcoming mayoral election, Sofia actively supports Holganza, a doctor standing on a broadly left-wing ticket, against the incumbent Tiongson, who is under the thumb of crimelord-industrialist Ricky Verano. And Sofia has a history with Verano, although she hasn't seen him in the seven years since she came to hide in Talisay. Once she discovers that Verano is involved, Sofia decides to confront the monster in his lair... Splendidly acted, paced and scored, Señorita is essentially a modern film noir: a crime movie with a sexual twist in which “the last romantic couple” are an aging transsexual and a teenaged boy. “Inner beauty is what counts,” as Sofia muses to herself rehearsing a speech for an imaginary beauty pageant prize, and the film has inner beauty in spades.