By Anna Valmero

IF you only have 100 days left, what will you do to spend it?

This is the bomb question that independent, successful career woman Joyce (played by Mylene Dizon) faced after being diagnosed twice with inoperable cancer and that she has three months to live.

Learning this, Joyce resigned from work and embarked on a mission to accomplish 100 things she has never done within the time left to her. Helping her in the mission is long-time pal Ruby (played by Eugene Domingo), while Joyce’s mother (played by Tessie Tomas) added several tasks to the list in hopes of helping find a cure and make her final days memorable.

Some would say the plot of the Cinemalaya film “100” is similar to that of “The Bucket List” starred by Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman. At some point, yes, but the local film hits it closer to home and takes a youthful stance on how to approach death.
100 takes on the simplicity of Filipino daily life and finds both humor and tragedy in it.

The movie shows how one can start prioritizing “must-do’s” postponed for hundreds of reasons until time is almost over.

At the onset of her mission: Joyce prepared for her funeral by picking her funeral dress, creating a song playlist for her wake and haggling for a white casket that fitted her budget. She toured Hong Kong with Ruby and even visited Europe and the Paris Louvre Museum in a very practical way.

Ultimately, the biggest challenges for Joyce involved closures, confrontations and goodbyes with the persons dearest to her.

As with breaking up, the hardest part of death is when your heart says no goodbyes but you must–to a friend who stood by you always, to a mom who loved you unconditionally, to a lover and friend and to someone you carried the torch forever.

The movie also tackles the question on life after death, which the movie tries to answer in the final scene where Joyce walks to her family and sees them go about life.

The movie starts and ends with Joyce walking silently along the shore and the hill overlooking Pinatubo — a nice transition of moving from life to death.

The movie was effective in taking a light approach to a matter as serious as death, but the director could have been pruned the Hong Kong tour.

The movie also appears to be a high-budget film as the production was able to shoot scenes on high-rise buildings in Makati and get support from several commercial establishments.

As for the cast, Mylene and Eugene were able to play their roles with joy and seriousness.

Even Tessie did something different in the movie which I think is a first time. Indeed, movies like 100 shows that Filipinos can still watch quality local films. Sadly, only a few people lined up to buy tickets and the cinema was barely a quarter-full when I saw it last weekend.

In the end, the film manages to convey that people should take every opportunity to live and make the most out of life — you will never know when your time is up.