Service (film)

• Gina Pareño as Nanay Flor
• Jaclyn Jose as Nayda
• Julio Diaz as Lando
• Kristoffer King as Ronald
• Mercedes Cabral as Merly
• Coco Martin as Alan
• Dan Alvaro as Jerome

The film was shot in just 12 days.

Brillante Mendoza recounted how difficult it was to find the actress for the role of Merly, partly because of the scene in which she had to have explicit sex on camera: "I couldn't think of a young actress from mainstream movies who can do what the role required, so I held an audition for the role of Merly. I wanted someone who's not interested in becoming a "movie star," I wanted a real artist who can give justice to the role, and I saw that in Mercedes Cabral. The first thing I asked is if she would trust me to shoot this somewhat graphic love scene with Coco. She said it wasn't a problem."

Brillante Mendoza said the scene in which Jewel (played by teenage actress Roxanne Jordan), is naked in front of a mirror, was not in the script.

Service caused a stir in the Philippines with its loud ambient noise and its graphic depiction of sex and nudity. Submitted to the Movie and Television Review and Classification Board for public exhibition in 2008, the movie survived with two major cuts to sex scenes and was rated an R18.

Such was the advance international buzz of the film that it was invited to compete at the 61st Annual Cannes Film Festival, being the 3rd overall entry from the Philippines (following the films of director Lino Brocka, Jaguar and Bayan Ko: Kapit sa Patalim). Its premiere at the festival was marked by the walking out of several veteran film critics who protested Mendoza's version of "misery porn."

On 30 January 2009, the film premiered in New York.

Critical response

The film garnered mixed-to-positive reviews. On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 79% of 29 critics' reviews are positive. The website's consensus reads: "This darkly comic family drama finds ways of being viscerally graphic and intellectually stimulating at the same time." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 76 out of 100, based on 11 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.

Writing for The New York Times, its chief film critic Manohla Dargis described the film: "The heavenly bodies that populate our films bring their own pleasures ... alighting onscreen as if from a dream. But the bodies in [‘Serbis’], which received little love at the 2008 Cannes, are not heaven-sent, but neither are they puppets in a contrived nightmare. Rather, they lust, sweat, desire and struggle with the ferocious truth." Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave Service two and a half out of four stars, stating that "[i]f you see only one art film this month, this shouldn't be the one. If you see one every week, you might admire it."