Will the presumed substantial fan base amassed by Maris Racal through her recently concluded love team performance with Anthony Jennings on ABS-CBN Netflix Philippines series Can’t Buy Me Love swarm the cinemas starting today, 10 July, to watch her in Marupok A+? It is shown alongside That Kind of Love, starring the on-screen (only, not real-life) love team of Barbie Fortaleza and David Licauco.

It’s the same dark comedy-thriller shown at last year’s Cinemalaya indie film fest as the opening event, not as an entry, as it is a Cinemalaya tradition that the opening and closing films are non-entries. Its title at that time ended with “AF+ -- not “A+.”

Jennings is not in Marupok. Racal has no leading man in the film directed by Quark Henares, whose movies are almost always liked by critics. And they liked Marupok last year, though they were alarmed by how Henares managed to turn the story of a transwoman who was deceived by a full-blooded woman, very cutely portrayed by Racal, into a riotous comedy.

She has no love interest in the story since her main interest is to ruin a transwoman looking for a (male) lover through a matchmaking app company where the Racal character, Beany, works as a very charming supervisor. Some reviews of the film pointed out that it was implied in some scenes that Beany was bullied by trans people in her younger years, so she’s getting back at them by making life miserable for a transwoman desperately desiring a lover.

Initial plan

What Beany does is create a non-existent person she named Theo and order a male employee to be Theo’s voice when the transwoman demanded to hear his voice. The same employee was persuaded by Beany to meet the transwoman in person eventually, and one of those meetings ended with intimacies between them.

Beany has other sinister plans to ruin the transwoman with the male employee as her accomplice. Royce Cabrera portrays the male employee who could not say “no” to Beany as he was afraid of losing his job. (In the office, Theo is actually Dennis.)

The transwoman is played by real-life transwoman actor EJ Fallorina, who began his acting career as a child actor on ABS-CBN’s weekly comedy Goin’ Bulilit, where some of ABS-CBN’s big adult stars began their careers, too, since 2005, such as Kathryn Bernardo, Nash Aguas, Alexa Ilacad, Belle Mariano and Julia Montes.

If you are not well-versed in Tagalog, we will tell you now that for those with sexual minds, the word connotes the inability to resist carnal temptations. If taken just denotatively, marupok simply means “weak” (as in “not durable”). It simply means “fragile.”

The “A+” in the film’s title could mean “extraordinarily weak.” In college (we were academics for more than 10 years plus graduate school study for two years at Ateneo de Manila), the highest grade is “A+,” followed by “A” and “A-.”

The film’s original title actually had “AF,” but the Movie and Television Review and Classification Board (MTRCB) seemed to have suspected something highly sexual in those letters, which gave them enough reason to X-rate the film.

Henares and the producers, Anima Studios, petitioned for a reconsideration and were given an R-18 classification, which means it can be viewed only by people 18 years old and above. Also, “AF” was changed to “A+” and all marketing posters were changed to presumably less carnal ones in terms of texts and pictures. All this is according to Henares’ posting on Facebook in April 2024 when the MTRCB finally approved the film’s theatrical release.