MANILA, PHILIPPINES — There’s something pseudo-touching and conditioned around most commercial adverts featuring maternal bonds, often depicting sacrifices on the mom’s part in montage backed by heart-tugging melodies. But Max’s Restaurant’s latest endorsement features real-life mother and daughter Gloria Diaz and Isabelle Daza-Semblat in a scenario taken from the page of almost every interaction with Filipino relatives.
Setting the course for a harmless lunch out, the pair share some of Max’s best-known dishes. Gloria adds heaps of food to Belle’s plate as mothers are wont to do, building the conversation on Belle’s part until her snapping point: when Gloria off-handedly comments about Belle’s weight. As in a choose-your-own-adventure game, the camera tightens to present three ways the situation can go down.
In Belle’s caption, she said it all depends on how you respond.
Far be it for Max’s to virtue signal, the ad created enough buzz online for how it stirred the topic of toxic vocalization of unsolicited criticism. So much so that it warranted a flip side take for Belle to be the toxic factor in the dynamic.
Whether it was the high-road or the practical one, the two took a slapstick juxtaposition on Max’s’ foundation of its food bringing people together and reflective of the restaurant’s history of development by family over generations.
Timely to the conversation of parenting flaws among mothers of celebrities and athletes, the advert is quite the refresher that topples the emotional tug and manicured stereotypes of mothers in traditional ads.
More than an insider look inside a daughter’s (and a mom’s) inner workings in her mind, Max’s’ feel-good and stunt-packed films leave its audience to their own devices with laughs that are boisterous and thoughts a tad bit intrusive.
