‘Ma’ Rosa’: A flawed plea for remaindered lives

Because of the acclaim accorded its primary actor Jaclyn Jose at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Brillante Mendoza’s Ma’ Rosa has become the exception to the generally “non-commercial” rule governing indie cinema hereabouts: it is currently enjoying a limited run in select movie houses in Metro Manila.

This, of course, is a good thing: more independent and small-budget cinematic works that don’t selfishly hew to any of the tried and tested box-office formulas should really be given the opportunity to be shown in as many commercial venues as possible.

Not that there are no existing or emergent formulas for local indie films, for indeed there are, the more one watches them. We can easily invoke films of the neorealist sort that the late great filmmaker Lino Brocka had a hand in establishing for our national cinematic tradition. By now, in recent times especially, Brockan neorealism—devoted to scenes of unmitigated squalor that often do border on poverty porn—is a “niche” that has proven to be particularly successful in the international film festival scene.  

Miserabilism is how this cinematic manner has been called, and the auto-focusing, verite-loving, and jerkily handheld camerawork of Ma’ Rosa—whose setting is the teeming slums of a nonspecific corner of the megacity nightmare that is Metro Manila—easily qualifies as the latest exemplification of it. Offhand we can say that it’s a generally well-made and competently scored feature (despite being deliberately visually unfinessed and “raw”), with very good ensemble acting all around—including the bit actors, especially the one playing the part of the pubescent bakla Dahlia, who loiters in the narcotics division of Police Station 3 as a girl Friday, comic relief, and all-around maid.   

The story itself is not entirely unfamiliar, even as it’s become especially germane given the current turn in national events. Ma’ Rosa (Jose) and Nestor (Julio Diaz) head a family whose livelihood is a sari-sari store in a particularly unlovely district of the monsoon-wet city. To augment their income they have agreed to discreetly sell drugs, which are supplied to them by a motorcycle-driving pusher whose boss, as it turns out, is a military officer. Their store is raided by the local police, who are interested not in stamping out the drug trade but in extorting money from it. In the main, it’s this family’s frenzied search for the required cash—as well as the exposition of systemic corruption in local law enforcement—that the film’s narrative arc describes.  

The initial fifth of the film is its exposition, that grittily “worlds” this story and introduces its cast of morally ambivalent characters (incidentally another mainstay of Brockan neorealism: family-loving wrongdoers). This is not enough time to lend effective drama to them, with whose plight—and humanity—the film enjoins the viewer to sympathize. This might explain the complaint voiced by certain members of the Cannes audience regarding the “non-centrality” of Jose’s character in the film: it may be named after her, but its focalization dissipates after twenty minutes or so, her children basically becoming the heroes of their own quests to scrape together the bribe money, so that their parents can be released by the greedily sticky-fingered police.

The daughter, a college student, goes from relative to belligerent relative to borrow cash; the youngest, a teenage boy, asks his much older gay lover and benefactor for more than the usual amount, after their short time at a motel; and the eldest, a tattooed and long-haired bum, hawks whatever appliances he can drag out of their ramshackle home. While the film begins and ends with Ma’ Rosa, the fact that it’s not really her but rather this unavailing part of the ugly and unevenly developed metropolis that is this film’s central character does confound the “leading actress” description that is the condition for Jose’s acclamation in Cannes.  

This “asymmetry” is not necessarily a flaw, come to think of it: an analogous example we may cite is the variegated career that the novelistic form has enjoyed in the Global South, whose formal elements are not reducible to modernist categories and standards (for instance, in regard to protagonists in many of these allegorical and non-Western texts, who are sometimes not even individuals but rather communities).

The problem is that Mendoza’s intent doesn’t seem to be to question and reimagine alternative possibilities for filmic focalization; instead, the disappearance of Jose’s character in this film’s greater part simply points to Mendoza’s half-hearted dramatic agenda that’s superseded (and supplanted) by his rather heavy-handed polemic against corruption. As it is, this film is less interested in lending “rondure” to the drug-running couple who are arrested by crooked cops than in driving home the point of this world’s cognitive and ethical dissonances, as reflected in the egregious contradictions that bedevil its social systems and actors.

What comes to mind at this point is a comparable film, also about a woman who engages in an unlawful trade to make a living: Jeffrey Jeturian’s Kubrador (2006), in which the wonderful Gina Pareño plays a slum-dwelling, cumbrous, and lonesome middle-aged woman who collects bets for the local jueteng operated by corrupt government officials. The difference is that she is clearly the focus and center of the film, which provides her an inner life, a history, and a “belief system” that make her come alive as a dramatic persona, and give her some kind of precarious agency, despite the enormous odds.

Jeturian also succeeds in grounding Kubrador’s vision in our own spiritual tradition, rendering it culturally valid and poignantly resonant. Sadly, it is this kind of deep cultural understanding—or at least, as is the case with many of Jeturian’s works, an earnest attempt to arrive at such—that seems to be lacking in many of Mendoza’s films. 

Ma’ Rosa is shown having her epiphany right at the end when, in tears, she sees an even poorer family making what is presumably a modest but honest living in the same desperate corner of the same unforgiving city. This human moment is about regret and despair all at once, and at last it elevates the film’s comfortably grim vision, making a plea for the lives of abjects that the iniquitous system remainders and renders dispensable, again and again. (An especially urgent plea, as we cannot help but know, given the mounting terror of these vigilante times).  

That such marginal lives are morally ambiguous—and antiheroic—is supposed to complicate this filmic perspective, and it does, to a certain extent. What this film could’ve done a better job accomplishing is dramatizing their human complexity and “livability”—an objective that could’ve been better met had its script given more (and deeper) cinematic time for their unfolding. — BM, GMA News

"Ma' Rosa" is now showing in cinemas.