Wonderfully offbeat film!

Truly Dreadful Film

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

"naglalayag" is a very well made movie, especially considering its humble budget. the cinematography is excellent, the characters are well written and the director paced the story perfectly.the cast, a mixture of veterans and neophytes in philippine cinema , performed quite well. stand-out performances were given by the two leads, yul servo and nora aunor. both of them (and especially nora aunor ) do make this May-December drama fresh and believable.aunor shines here, not through histrionic acting,but in the quiet dramatic scenes. her genius is obvious even in the lighter scenes like when they parted after their first date.without being overly preachy,the movie also succeeds in showing the evils of poverty.

It might be a bit unusual for an American to comment on a Filipino movie, but this one is a lot better than the usual shoot-em-up or bad-special-effects films that are overly done by film makers in the Philippines. The first thing I noted about Naglalayag is the excellent cinematography. Next was the terrific casting of Nora Aunor in the lead role. And, Yul Servo is excellent as her youthful and positive thinking lover! The story was well handled and, except for a couple of points, was realistically played out by the cast. Aleck Bovick played the young girl who Yul Servo's character was supposed to love, tho her actions unknowingly played into the direction the story took.Locales were good.Naglalayag took it's time in giving us the characters' backgrounds, but did not provide the needed resolution to one of the two main problems created by the story. Thus, I can only give it a solid 8 out of 10, but I do recommend it. I saw it with English captioning.