Coco Martin, the Pinoy Robert Pattinson

MANILA, Philippines - We are hardly what you might call a Robert Pattinson/Edward Cullen fan, much less a Twilight follower. We watched the movie, read the book and agree with the Daily Telegraph reviewer who described it as “Astonishing, mainly, for the ineptitude of Stephenie Meyer’s prose.” As for the movie, we never did care for vampires especially the blanched kind who would mouth such yucky lines as “I don’t have the strength to stay away from you anymore.”

In June this year, our friend Richard Signey now based in Madrid took us to watch a British-Spanish (Catalan) production Sin Limites at an art theater there. It is the story of students in 1922 at the university in Madrid who would make their names in the world — controversial painter Salvador Dali, admired poet Federico Garcia Lorca, and the great Spanish director Luis Buñuel with focus on the friendship between Lorca and Dali that bordered on inordinate intimacy. Richard took us to see the film because playing the star Dali was Richard Pattinson of Twilight which he knew we detested. He was hoping the film would make us change our mind and he was right.

Reminiscing through e-mail, Richard writes: “ I liked the story… a bit like fiction fantasy but based on real people and their lives. The acting was good though not Oscar material. Medyo bothersome lang since it was an English-language film and felt unnatural when I noted people’s accents while parlando en inglés. 

“Robert Pattinson as Dali was good. Maybe he’s not the perfect actor for the role but at least he stepped up to the plate. Siempre he acted like an eccentric person since he was portraying Dali. If the viewer was familiar with how wacko Dali was, baka sabihin nilang ‘kulang’ pa ang pag-kabaliw ng character ni Pattinson. Pero those who don’t know this might think that he was acting crazy (which doesn’t go well with the romantic notion his fans have based his role on Twilight).”

Pattinson, however, must have precisely sought out this contrast between Dali and Cullen so as not to fall into a rut. The film is what would be called an indie, with the Gala-Salvador Dali Foundation controlling the rights to a movie on the flamboyant painter to protect his reputation, and in the process prevented a Dali biopic from reaching Hollywood even as Al Pacino, Antonio Banderas, Johnny Depp, and Peter O’Toole had declared their interest. The result is this small picture full of compromises to the dictates of the British-Spanish producers, to the budget, to the heirs of Dali. It was neither good nor bad. It didn’t get worldwide theatrical nor DVD distribution, was hardly seen in the US.

Pattinson who was already wallowing in Twilight fame needed something to ground him beyond teen hysteria, and found it in Dali whose most daring evidence of homosexuality was the scene when he watches Lorca making love to a woman while he masturbated in the shadows, and a dream-sequence type of kissing during a midnight swim. Otherwise, all insinuations are as ambiguous as perhaps Lust for Life which details the lives and sexuality of Paul Gauguin and Vincent Van Gogh which were even more graphic than the former.

 After Sin Limites (British title — Little Ashes), we gained a new respect and sympathy for Pattinson. We queued along with the thousand others during the opening day of New Moon, second in the Twilight series and quite sincerely enjoyed the ride. It no longer mattered that there were more yucky lines a senior like us wouldn’t appreciate. Or that it would be difficult for one uninitiated by the book and Twilight movie to grasp the context of the second film. We no longer questioned why everyone — vampire, werewolf, and human alike desired Bella Swan played by Kristen Stewart when she was neither raving beauty nor unique star material either. And we sincerely hope that she and Pattinson enjoy their stint at the top, but ready themselves to get out of the stereotype as expertly as Sean Connery got out of the James Bond skin.

We find in this the same dilemma facing fan-driven stars all over the continent. How to make the most of the adulation while preparing for serious stuff that would intensify their legacy. Not quite so oddly enough, we get to think of our own Coco Martin.

We met Coco at the Cannes Film Festival 2008 when we all walked the red carpet for Brillante “Dante” Mendoza’s Serbis where Coco was the guy with the boil on his buttocks which foreign audiences remember most as being strange to their culture. Even then, he seemed mature for his age and grounded as he discussed with co-star Mercedes Cabral the implications of their frontal nudity scenes, and Coco’s own identification with gay roles.

Dante told us that he and Coco started out in indie films at the same time with Masahista in 2005. From then on Coco was a regular on Dante’s films including Foster Child, Tirador, Serbis, and Kinatay where he again walked the red carpet with Dante who won Cannes 2009 Best Director.

It was only a matter of time that he would be rediscovered by mainstream television (where he started in 2007 with GMA 7, and 2008 with ABS-CBN) and given the break in the popular Tayong Dalawa as the third brother to Gerald Anderson and Jake Cuenca. After this came another soap Nagsimula sa Puso with Maja Salvador, and the Ramon Revilla series as Tonyong Bayawak. In the series, he shares top billing with Gerard Anderson, Jake Cuenca, Revilla’s grandson Jolo Revilla, which just shows how fast up the ladder his star has climbed.

Despite the current fame, Coco still looks back to his indie days. Dante himself has told us that Coco often calls him to say how he misses the indie scene. In this, we find similarities with Pattinson whose complaints of continuous working and little sleep on the series sound exactly like working on a Pinoy teleserye. Perhaps that’s why Pattinson has earned the reputation for being suplado to the point of rejecting the hiring of a production assistant or PA and publicist so part of the environment here as well as in Hollywood. Coco is far from being a Pattinson, but there are certainly attributes and problems they both share. Only time will guide him as to how he can happily combine his becoming a popular mainstream star indebted to the mass audience with his out-of-the-box portrayals that are trademarks of a truly independent spirit.

(E-mail me at [email protected])