How would Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love look like if it were a comedy shot in the Philippines? Probably kind of like this.
On Friday, Manila-based online thrift shop Banquetta posted photos of their first collection on Facebook. But instead of going for a run-of-the-mill lookbook, theirs is a Filipinized parody of the modern classic Hong Kong film.
https://www.facebook.com/banquettaph/photos/pcb.460929824325213/460924070992455/?type=3&theater
If this sounds like an idea thought up by a drunk person, that’s because it was.
“We came up with the idea of recreating movies at a bar, one drunk, the other sober, and we thought of ‘movie parody’ titles for the films we can potentially base our lookbook from,” Balentino Bonifacio and John David Montesa, the duo behind Banquetta told Coconuts Manila in an email interview.
Their version is titled In the Mood for Lugaw (rice porridge) and tells the story of a hungry woman desperately searching for lugaw in the streets of Binondo, Manila’s Chinatown.
While they aren’t a perfect replication of specific scenes, the photos successfully captured the film’s lighting and overall mood.
What makes the photos, though, are the subtitles written in beki (gay linggo) that are just so “extra.”
They aren’t as funny in English but here’s a rough translation.
“[Someone’s being mugged on the side] Oh no, where’s my wallet tho?”
“Jk, I forgot it at home the same way you forgot about me.”
According to Bonifacio and Montesa, they didn’t even really spend that much time coming up with the jokes.
“We just based the caption on the expression of our model and the overall vibe of the photo. We then decided to sleep on it, and if we still find it funny the next day, then that must be the perfect caption. We didn’t have to change anything though, as we still find them hilarious. We didn’t overthink it that much,” they said.
And their ideas were just crazy enough to work.
Banquetta’s Facebook album now has more than 4,000 reactions, more than 3,000 shares, and close to 1,000 comments.
Bonifacio and Montesa didn’t reveal what their next collection will be, but said that people can definitely look forward to more film-inspired photo shoots.
“Yes, all of our collections will be inspired by movies that we love. We will be exploring more films by other great directors from different genres and decades for our future collections,” the said.
For now, we’ll keep LOL-ing at these.
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