if these walls could talk 2

That's the name of the movie we watched today for our Lit class. Though for the life of me I cannot think of a reason why we were made to watch said movie... It can't be for the script, I don't think there was anything exceptionally literary about the script, and anyhow one could hardly hear the conversations among the characters because, as you can imagine, there were a lot of howling and eewwwing among the audience, there being several explicit love scenes between women. This is a movie about lesbians, after all.

And so, even if I'm not very fond of watching movies, much less movies like this, I decided to enjoy this film, for whatever it's worth. In Tagalog, this would be "naki-ride-on nalang."

The movie is about the stories of three lesbian couples, at different times (1961, 1972 and 2000), all set in the same house, hence the title.

The first of the trilogy was quite moving and eye opening as well. It was about the tender love between two elderly women, in their mid-sixties. One partner, Abby, accidentally fell off a ladder and was brought to the hospital but the nurse wouldn't allow the uninjured partner, Edith played by Vanessa Redgrave, to see the patient one last time because she was not "next of kin." Abby died during the night and the hospital personnel did not even inform Edith, who was sitting in the waiting room the whole time. I was outraged at this. Is this medical care in America?

What follows next are the legal and practical difficulties of same sex relationships, that is, who gets the house, what happens to the couple's common property? It was so poignant to see Edith watch helplessly as Abby's relatives summarily took the tangible mementos of their relationship, precious tokens that the lesbian couple had so lovingly gathered through their thirty years of being together. Now I get a glimpse of why gay couples want to get married. There were no eewws from this segment. From a classmate at my back I heard "Sweet kaayo sila, sa." Yes, indeed they were sweetness personified.

The second segment drew the most eewws. Maybe because the ages of the characters were exactly the ages of my classmates: late teens. And this is where plenty of lesbian sex scenes were shown. Nothing further.

The third segment starred Ellen de Generes (as Kal) and Sharon Stone (as Fran) and this one made me laugh the loudest. Maybe because it's the story of how this gay couple tries to have a baby and this involves artificial insemination. I always saw AI as a serious medical thing, involving a lot of emotional seesaws and some degree of physical discomfort. In this movie, they showed how hilarious it can be for couples to try to conceive through AI. I just love how they played this segment. The cutest moment for me was when Fran was ovulating and Kal goes, in a frenzy, to the sperm bank to get the sperm which was stored in a small oxygen tank-like container and how she drives home very slowly with her precious cargo, to the consternation of everybody behind her on the road.

Back home, Fran, puts on a special 'conception costume' complete with a feather boa scarf and she lines the path from the doorstep to the bed with little white flowers on a cushion of little green leaves. While doing all these, Fran sterilizes the gadget that will be used to put the sperms into her uterus. She does this by boiling it in a pot of water. Yes, in a pot of boiling water. In her excitement I think she forgot that the instrument was made of plastic and rubber. So at the crucial moment, when they are about to put the sperms inside of her, she proudly takes out said gadget, all wobbled and wrinkly now, and proudly declares, "I boiled it!" Needless to say, that blooper was the beginning of a series of funny antics related to conception misconceptions.

So I would probably say, thank you to the writer of segments one and three, those are my favorite parts of the film.