Dissecting a slum-dweller’s life

Dissecting a slum-dweller’s life

2016 Cannes Best Actress Jaclyn Jose

TIFF Film Review: Ma’ Rosa

By Pet G. Cleto

Some three decades after Filipino auteur Lino Brocka put his close examinations of the life of the urban poor  up on screen and into global fame with two Cannes Film Festival nominations for the Palme d’Or, another Filipino artist seems to be treading the same exploratory path.

The director’s touch of Brillante Mendoza – especially in his latest, “Ma’ Rosa” – feels different from Brocka’s, however.  It comes down with a bit cooler, more distant quality.  It can take you into a more inner perspective of characters, and – with just a little dose- lets you taste the anguish that exists in the life of a slum dweller. The anguish has to be just so, for with that you get the over-all feeling that the whole situation is hopeless.

But you can have second thoughts. Is that quality of coolness and distance delivered more by the screenwriter’s storyline? Or are both director and screenwriter reacting in the same way to a horror that has been there too long, and without hope of change, and why is that? Thoughts to ponder. Yet also, you may choose not to ponder.

There are two main characters in the film – the mother, Rosa, and the slums in which Rosa and family have to make out a life.  The two reflect each other. Or shall we say, muddy pools into which each just drops into, then is gone? Rosa is no hardened, tough and almost soulless character like Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage who, in a war-torn country, will do almost anything to survive.  Neither is she like Brocka’s slum women who fight for their dignity through all the obstacles and hardships of their lives. Rosa is no hero, except, in a low-toned way, to her family, and neither are the slums a magical place where a hero can emerge and bring to your life a moment of tragedy and show you the noble splendor of the soul.

In Brocka’s films, there is always hope – people protest the injustices they suffer, the workers stage strikes although employers hire goons to terrorize them, and activists march out in the  streets despite violent dispersal by police and the killing of activist priests. People act together in the hope of changing something. “Acting together” is the operative phrase. With Brocka, you realize that individual and desperate acts are doomed to failure, “collateral damage” in the larger context of the “fight”.  “Fighting” is for a big cause, and is a big thing because it involves many people. Brocka’s “fight” heads directly for your heart in a very dramatic way.

Rosa fights – from the very opening of the film, she is fighting for the 25 centavos (there are 100 centavos in a peso) that is her change from the total price of her groceries. But she’s a short-term fighter- she does not stay on the fight with the cashier too long, nor does she with the taxi driver who won’t take Rosa and son to their doorstep. Her son seems always ready to fight, but ends up just complaining. Later, her other son displays a similar short-term “fight” with Rosa’s betrayer.

It seems Rosa’s the only doer in a family that survives because of her energy for business. Quickly you find that her husband is an addict of “ice” or “shabu” which are popular terms for crack cocaine. When you learn she also runs a little string of drug dealing along with her sari-sari store, it doesn’t really deliver a strong note of danger or tell you a tragedy is about to astound you. It’s just one of the gamut (sari-sari) of things on sale.

When she and husband get arrested by the police, Rosa also doesn’t put up too much of a fight.

As the vile underbelly of the police shows its extortionist mode, and with Brillante’s very matter of fact presentation of how a police precinct gathers its loot from the drug trade, Rosa continues to show the practical manner in which small bit-players of the trade “fight” out their parts. Unable to give the amount the police demand, she quickly accedes to the alternative of betraying her closest “source”.

Along the way with her captors to trap her “source”, she has a brief glimpse of another poor family scrounging for bottles they can resell. Actor Jaclyn Jose, who isn’t known to have theatrical experience (on the legitimate stage), here gives just a hint of the despair and dehumanization that she – mother and a very small-scale businesswoman – is starting to realize. Hope in the slums? More an elusive flicker, an illusion in the desert.

The investigation of the “source” only leads to more and bigger, competing extortionists-cum-players in the trade. Finally, the police demand that Rosa produce the rest of their targeted “loot” of the day, and Rosa’s family members try to do that.  Their efforts show how those in the borderline between the poor and the next social class also, in their way, extort from the poor.  Moneylending sharks and gays who pay for “love” are shown in their specialized “glory”. Even relatives who nurse long-standing grudges extort emotional loot before “helping”.

Finally, Rosa has to close the deal herself by getting the last amount the cops insist on. Rosa only fights the cops just enough to give protection to her husband. Outside again in her world, Rosa encounters the slums, which shows her the same unrelenting dog-eat-dog face. As Rosa hungrily chews on “fish balls” on a barbecue stick, a final scene of a poor family carefully folding up their sari-sari store for the night unfolds before her. Is their hope also a fragile dream, like hers? Another mirage in a desert of this cruelty and that injustice? For some moments, some tears gather in Jose’s eyes.

The cool dissection of this film achieves what seems to be its purpose – to show you, without too much emotional cost to you, the hopeless anguish of the urban poor in one of the drug-torn slums of a Third-World country.

It must be said that for this film-lover, this Brillantes film necessarily evokes a deep nostalgia for Brocka’s sharp and heart-wrenching drama. Hope is still a necessary angel in film.