『Between Love and Reality – The Taste of Emotion and Choice』
🎥 Film Overview
🎬 Title: Unang Tikim (English Title: First Taste) (2024)
🌍 Country: 🇵🇭 Philippines
🎞️ Genre: Romance / Drama / LGBTQ+ Theme
🗓️ Production and Release: Roman Perez Jr., 2021, Feature Film
⏳ Runtime: 90 minutes
📢 Director: Roman Perez Jr.
🖋️ Screenplay: Roman Perez Jr.
📺 Platform: Screened at selected film festivals, with VOD release to follow
👩💼 Cast: Angeli Khang – Yuna
Robb Guinto – Becca
🧩 Story Deep Dive (Spoilers)
💫 The Sacredness of the “First Taste (Unang Tikim)”
The relationship between Yuna and Becca, as the title “First Taste” suggests, holds an absolute meaning — it represents the purest and most intense emotional and sexual awakening for both of them.
- Emotional Origin: Becca was the person who gave Yuna her first kiss and first sexual experience, marking the awakening of Yuna’s bisexual/queer identity. Their love existed outside any social constraint — it was a true expression of self.
- The Realm of Ideals: Becca, a photographer, is portrayed as artistic and idealistic. Their early relationship belongs to a world dominated by pure passion and dreams — the realm of “love for the sake of love.”
🌿 Survival and Economic Instability
What ultimately drives their relationship to collapse is not homophobia or social restriction, but rather the crushing weight of reality that bears down on Yuna.
- Economic Stress and Psychological Turmoil: Yuna begins to falter emotionally due to her family’s financial problems. No matter how strong her love for Becca is, it cannot solve the problem of survival. Her anxiety and loneliness gradually create internal cracks in their relationship.
- The Formation of the Relationship with Nico: When Yuna gets drunk and sleeps with Nico, and later becomes his partner, it’s implied that their relationship began more as a survival strategy than genuine love. Nico offers Yuna financial stability, social legitimacy, and the comfort of a “normal” heterosexual life. For Yuna, the relationship with Nico becomes a safe zone chosen by reason rather than passion.
The responsibility for their breakup lies in Yuna’s psychological instability and Nico’s sweet intrusion. Yuna’s decision to sacrifice her queer identity and first love for the sake of economic safety reflects a tragic retreat into the social safety net.
🍓 The Return of “First Love” and the Hypocrisy of the Present
Four years later, Becca’s return acts as a force of fate that shakes the foundations of Yuna’s seemingly stable life.
- The Immortality of First Love: Even though Yuna is now engaged to Nico, the moment she reunites with Becca, she feels the fierce resurgence of that buried first love. Through the familiar trope that “first love never dies,” the film symbolizes how Yuna’s authentic queer self remains bound to that original passion.
- Control and Anger: When Yuna sees Becca with Trisha (Becca’s current lover), her reaction of anger becomes the story’s emotional breaking point. This anger is not just jealousy — it’s the realization: “The part of myself I abandoned for survival — you still get to live it freely.” It’s a complex mix of resentment, regret, and self-reproach.
- The Photo Session: When Yuna becomes Becca’s model for a photo shoot, it becomes an emotional ritual of self-reclamation. Through her lens, Becca seeks to capture Yuna’s truest, hidden self, and in that process, Yuna rediscovers the passion she had buried beneath her “stable” life with Nico.
👩❤️👩 Fear vs. Truth
The entangled relationships among Yuna, Becca, Nico, and Trisha amplify the core dilemma of love and identity.
- Love vs. Love: Yuna must now choose between Nico’s stable, perhaps pragmatic love — born from survival and social conformity — and Becca’s explosive, uncertain, but deeply truthful love.
- Breaking the Boundaries and Collapse: The scene where Yuna and Becca argue and ultimately make love signifies the collapse of the “stable” life Yuna had built for four years. Their physical reunion reaffirms the strength of their emotional bond, but it also triggers the unraveling of their surroundings, bringing pain to Nico and Trisha in its wake.
Yuna and Becca’s relationship powerfully dramatizes how Yuna’s bisexual identity, once suppressed by economic pressure and social norms, resurfaces with the return of her first love. Their story becomes a mirror of how economic hardship and social conformity in Filipino society can hold personal happiness and queer identity hostage.
The Completion of “First Love”: Yuna’s final choice affirms that the intensity and purity of the “First Taste” Becca gave her never truly died — not through four years of distance, nor under the weight of reality.
🎯 Personal Rating
💕 Love Scene Intensity: ♥♥♥♥♥
⭐ Rating: ★★★★
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