New back story clutters up TV version of ‘Blusang Itim’

ONE of the biggest hits in the 1980s was the fantasy-romance “Blusang Itim,” starring Snooky Serna and Richard Gomez. Snooky played a sweet girl whose distorted facial features and really busy eyebrows belied the goodness of her soul.

Luckily for her, a magical blouse made her as beautiful outside as she was inside, prompting the handsome Richard to fall in love with her. As long as she wore the black blouse, all was well with her fantasticating world!

Bound to be remade

The Seiko Films production clicked big-time with romance and fantasy buffs—especially, we daresay, with young women who weren’t as inherently lovely as Snooky. That’s because they could dream that they too could overcome their ugliness and make somebody as handsome and unattainable as Richard fall in love with them as well, through the transcendent grace and convenient deus ex machina magic of that all-powerful blouse!

The film was so successful that it was bound to be remade as a TV series—which is now being telecast on GMA 7 with Kylie Padilla assuming Snooky’s iconic role. We caught an early telecast of the show last week, and these are our initial notes:

As is usual with drama series these days, the TV version appends a new “back story” that goes all the way back to the lead character Jessa’s birth. The added complications and convolutions involve one man with two women, each of whom presents him with a new born babe—at approximately the same time! One of the babies is the “ugly” Jessa, while the other, his love child, is a normal-looking boy.

As these “additional” events ensue, we wonder why all these changes were conjured up, and why the people behind the production thought that the new back story would enhance the original tales’ viewability!

In our view, they just clutter up and distend the storytelling, piling up more cliches on an already garish and strident melange of melodramatic excesses.

The telecast we viewed showed poor disfigured Jessa growing up into a girl scorned by her surrogate mother, who had agreed to “switch” her with her own son for a really huge amount. To further tug at viewers’ heartstrings, she was harassed and ridiculed by the entire neighborhood, so even more copious tears were shed.

Simplicity

We understand why the TV series is going down this bathetic path, because bathos rather than genuine pathos is par for the course on TV dramas these days.

But one of the plus points of the original story was its simplicity, so to see it being so overloaded with facile complications this early in the series’ run could end up as a subversion of the tale’s original appeal and hold on viewers.

Our hope is that, as soon as possible, the series restores its proper focus and tells the main tale of the young-adult Jessa—before it’s too late!