‘Pamilya Ordinaryo’: The most dramatically powerful film at Cinemalaya 2016

Offhand, there’s something “poverty-pornographic” about Eduardo Roy Jr.’s Pamilya Ordinaryo, whose story was waiting to be written and filmically told, come to think of it: two street kids living on Manila’s grimy sidewalks have themselves a baby that promptly gets stolen from them (here, by a smooth-talking and oily-faced cross-dresser, who conceivably sells it); the pubescent couple search for their missing child, and their search, while becoming a veritable tour around this city’s erroneous if amoral conscience, is predictably enough in vain.

For commuters and pedestrians in our nightmarish metropolis, this is not an unlikely tale at all, going by the daily evidence: just anywhere it seems, rugby-sniffing juveniles teem, curse, and steal in street corners, on avenue islands, around marketplaces, and outside churches.

The astonishing thing is that somehow, while rubbing elbows with the more fortunate of us, they hardly ever occur in our consciousness. Intercutting the narrative with CCTV footage—that already does register glimpses of this “other” reality that magically coexists with our own—this film’s power lies chiefly in letting us realize this entirely disturbing fact.

We can’t help but compare this film to the recently screened and critically acclaimed Ma’ Rosa, which traffics in a comparably miserable and morally ambiguous world. The difference is that unlike Mendoza’s heavily polemical work, Roy’s feature is more consistently focalized, its protagonists dramatized to the fullest possible extent.

The couple, Jane and Aries, are shown in all their grubby unloveliness: cursing, pickpocketing, having sex, crying, screaming, sleeping, sniffing glue, quarreling, running, and through and despite it all, loving and being at once “other” and recognizably human. There is allegory and social commentary in this film as well, but they are tempered in favor of the overall dramatic project. Throughout the two-hour-long feature—and despite the “obligatory” scenes about the inefficacy, hypocrisy, and even downright iniquity of the social and governmental institutions that supposedly exist to help the poor and unfortunate in our midst—we never really lose sight of this impoverished teenaged couple, which is most unnerving, because sometimes we wish we would.

Like other intensely focalized neorealist films, Pamilya Ordinaryo implicates the viewer in a shamelessly voyeuristic spectacle—one that’s so crafted as to elicit a kind of distressing, guilty, but also undeniably scopophilic pleasure, from which it seeks to be somewhat absolved, because at least it knowingly carries this project out. Other than the surveillance of “found footage” from a random sampling of CCTV’s (with which it unceremoniously opens, actually), there’s a mise en abyme in this film, a little “docudrama” that implicates the role that broadcast media plays in exploiting the lives of the powerless and downtrodden for the sake of ratings. It’s bewildering how callous and downright predatory radio and television producers can be, who routinely feature stories of destitutes, and yet do nothing more to help them, really, other than giving them lunch and a little pocket money, after which they may be seen to smugly pat themselves on the back for a job well done.

Indeed, quite often, the line dividing public service and market-driven sustainability proves to be uncomfortably thin: the information-giving and “consciousness-raising” rationale of mass media is what justifies its standard decision to carry out the most mercenary projects with blissfully self-righteous impunity.

Given its self-reflexive gestures, Roy’s film would seem to at once identify and exculpate itself as one such work, especially since it also bothers to show just how ineffectual and useless such middle-class displays of mass-media concern are, for the people who are supposed to be its beneficiaries. In one scene, we see the couple and their fellow street kids pausing on the sidewalk to watch their televised docudrama at a food stall; the dramatized piety falls short, and whatever well-meaning or even pathos-inducing message this television program contains flies past their rugby- and hunger-addled heads, as the business of surviving the city promptly swallows them up again.

It may be germane at this point to say that for a filmmaker with a conscience who wishes to register a social critique in his or her work there may be no need for such “meta” moments, which in the history of this independent film festival are admittedly losing their charm and getting old fast. As long as it’s clear that his or her objective isn’t just to represent but also to illuminate the subject of suffering, the project can conceivably stand on its integrity as a work of art. Of course, integral to this illuminative task isn’t just his or her interpretation of why the suffering exists, but also of how it is borne by the humanity that has no choice but to bear it. To our mind Roy’s feature accomplishes this task earnestly enough, by closely observing—actually, dramatizing—the ruthlessness of the structure within which the precarious agency of these lives struggles to exist.

In other words, there’s conceptual “rondure” in this filmic vision. On one hand, the scene at the police station is particularly harrowing: the superintendent offers to help the visibly harried mother only if she would indulge his perverse curiosity (by answering his inappropriate and probing questions, and showing him her lactating breasts); on the other this mother isn’t defined entirely by the brutality of her situation. At the end of the film, she refuses to take someone else’s infant, and as against her husband’s exhausted and unthinking desire, returns it to its rightful home.

Victimized by her family, agents of the police, media, local government, heartless pranksters, the indifference of the urban human traffic that daily passes her by, even by her fellow indigents, she is still and all a person. It is this film’s great accomplishment that it successfully eschews didacticism, and arrives at this insight plainly and cogently. There are “feeling minds” behind these thoughtlessly cursing, thieving, copulating, glue-sniffing, aimlessly wandering, and teeming subaltern bodies. As voyeuristic audience to this neorealist spectacle it’s always deeply embarrassing and discomfiting to have to put things this way; but it’s to this film’s singular credit that this is an embarrassment and a discomfiture that it all too willingly—all too guiltily—shares.

Finally, what softens the allegorical “hard-sell” of Pamilya Ordinaryo—announced by its eponymous title—are the entirely credible performances of its young leads, who hardly waver out of what must be difficult character, given its brute alterity. The astonishing Hasmine Killip and Ronwaldo Martin look set on taking their acting places in the independent cinema movement, although we can only wish the handsome and very promising Martin a different trajectory from that taken by his famous older brother, who started out doing indie films, but is now routinely mouthing (still with his characteristic and endearing lisp) the most contrived lines in a slew of escapist primetime teleseryes. This promising new actor also appears in a minor role in Tuos, but even there he proves to be more than competent.

Props, then, to Roy, his staff and crew, and the actors of Pamilya Ordinaryo. This may not be the most visually—and given the plenitude of unprintable expletives and cuss words, aurally—pleasing film in this year’s festival, but it’s certainly the most complex and dramatically powerful one.

Bravo. — BM, GMA News

The Cinemalaya Philippine Independent Film Festival runs until August 14, 2016. Go here for the screening schedule.