Flower Girl Doesn't Want You To Read Between The Legs

The cast and writer-director of this irreverent comedy share what it took to tell a story about what makes a woman a woman.

- By Andrea Panaligan

When actress Sue Ramirez first read the script for Flower Girl, she recalled, "P*cha, napalunok talaga 'ko."

We were in a photo studio in Quezon City. A human-sized vagina mascot was walking around, waiting to be photographed. In the film, Ramirez is Ena, a sanitary napkin endorser who loses her vagina after asking a trans woman to leave the female restroom. To undo the curse, she has to find true love — talk about queering the fairytale.

This came from the whimsical mind of writer and director Fatrick Tabada. Initially in the business as a screenwriter, he has always been telling stories about womanhood and queerness through absurdist comedy. Among his credits are Born Beautiful, the Die Beautiful spin-off; Si Chedeng at si Apple, about a pair of middle-aged women upending their lives, which Tabada co-directed with Rae Red; and the severely underrated The Kangks Show, a miniseries about a sex therapist imparting advice on a midnight talk show.

Flower Girl is his solo directorial debut. "I've been writing for other directors and na-notice ko na these directors are butchering my script. How about I direct again and butcher it myself?" Tabada said with a laugh.

The director took inspiration from a relative who had a double mastectomy in her twenties. "Nagsusuot siya ng fake boobs," he said, "and hindi niya alam if meron pang magkakagusto sa kanya if she doesn't feel like a woman. But the moment na 'di na siya nag-rely sa fake parts (to feel like a woman) was also the moment love poured in. She's now happily in love." Ena, similarly, would find only find the true meaning of womanhood once she lost her vagina.