Courtesy of An Errand Film
Courtesy of An Errand Film
A short story about a driver being ordered to pick up a T-shirt for his boss might seem an unlikely source material for a feature film, but An Errand, which premieres at the 2024 Cinemalaya Film Festival, takes this simple plot line as the basis for a movie with as many bends as the road that the driver traverses.
Written by Sarge Lacuesta, the short story was originally published in his collection Coral Cove and Other Stories and was later included in the anthology The Art and Craft of Asian Stories. He met the music video director Dominic Bekaert at the Film Development Council of the Philippines, where Bekaert was heading the National Film Archive, working on restoring Filipino classics. Bekaert and his wife and co-producer, Clementine Comoy, agreed to work on a film project with Lacuesta, choosing to adapt his story An Errand.
“I think he was looking for something very Filipino, and the class message, the micro differences in class, were so clear in that story,” Lacuesta says. Bekaert, who is Filipino-Belgian, grew up between Manila and Europe and got his master’s degree at the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel in Paris. “He and his wife have an outside view of our situation, so it was interesting to them.”
The story takes the point of view of a chauffeur named Moroy, whose employer is holed up in the Baguio Country Club with his mistress, a young woman who works in his office. The boss, only known as Ser, gives 3 A.M. instructions to Moroy to drive all the way back to Makati to pick up a Givenchy T-shirt with the Mona Lisa, and while he’s at it, his medicines (not a spoiler, but it’s Viagra), a task Moroy personally thinks is wasteful and unnecessary.
As Moroy (played by Sid Lucero) makes the long drive, his thoughts meander around his boss, his mistress, and other memories triggered on the road. The film expands on the text by adding more depth to the characters, which, in the words of actor Art Acuña, “untropes the tropes.” Brenda, the girlfriend (Elora Escano) is a smart and empowered woman, while Ser (Art Acuña) is himself is at the whims of Mrs. Makiling (portrayed by the real-life ELF), a rich older lady beset with lawsuits.
Lacuesta believes that short stories make for the best films. Novels tend to be unfilmable, he says. Indeed, epic movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Brokeback Mountain, and The Shawshank Redemption all originated from short fiction. “But in this case, the director pointed out that we needed some action, where it’s not just thinking and hearing and listening and talking,” he says. To that end, Lacuesta developed another narrative thread that weaves in and out of Moroy’s storyline, that of a legendary bodyguard named Rex (Eric Kelly), whose story is recounted by Mrs. Makiling’s own driver to the other drivers as they wait in sheds and lounges and dish about their employers.
While the driver/employer dynamic brings to mind Parasite, a film that also comments on class, An Errand offers a more nuanced and realist take on the relationships, both real and imagined, between the players. Centering on Moroy as a literal and figurative driving force, it’s a psychological slow burn that blurs memory, fantasy, and personal myth like the fog over Baguio. The filmmakers’ approach to directing and editing what is essentially a road movie is, for lack of a better word, “European,” in that it moves deliberately, contemplatively. The scenery is often breathtaking, taking you from winding
mountain roads down to the coastline and seashore. Lacuesta shares that the film crew was lucky to have been able to shut down Kennon Road during the crisp month of January.
The ending may leave audiences with more questions than answers, which the writer says is intentional because “we never want to spoon feed the viewer.” It’s a work of integrity, he says, “in the sense that this is how we want it to be, and this is how we meant it.”
