Brilliant Melody

Juan is a musician, but earns money doing lousy jobs. When he is offered the chance to live in Paris, he’s not exactly ecstatic, unlike his parents who see this as a golden opportunity. The deal is simple: he has to take part in a bogus Filipino choir with a dozen young performers to secure a visa and then work for the Frenchman financing the operation named Mark. After the Paris gig, Juan has a friendly rendezvous with his comrades in misery, Gelo and Ana. Messages from his mother alternate between weirdly affectionate and pressing demands for cash, leaving him utterly perplexed. The trio is subjected to increasingly absurd tasks from Marc, from singing naked at a wild party to serving as living furniture in a museum. The whole thing becomes too much for Ana, who hatches an escape plan that results in a possible lethal accident. Juan suspects that Mark is involved, and Gelo’s vanishing only fuels his paranoia and causes him to hallucinate. A big blob starts to haunt him, as images of him being transported back to Ana or his homeland with bloodied chickens shake his core. On the brink of a breakdown, Juan devices a drastic plan: fake his own death. He watches his own funeral unfold online. When their words turn out to be generic and distant, Juan decides to reinvent himself once and for all.