Tales of crime and poverty have long been a staple of Philippine indie cinema; movies that aim to shed some light on the grim realities of life, along with the inequality and corruption that exists in the milieu that comes with it. Thus, it can be pretty exhausting to see the same things repeatedly portrayed on screen. A resistance is built and those that do cross the “poverty porn” threshold should hold some new DNA strands to leave any sort of effect. Luckily, by a hairline, Ma’ Rosa just has enough the dose to break the vaccine.
Directed by Brillante Mendoza, Ma’ Rosa tells the story of the titular Rosa (Cannes Best Actress winner, Jaclyn Jose) and her husband, Nestor Reyes (Julio Diaz). Their primary source of income is a small sari-sari store in their home, which lies in a poor neighborhood. To make ends meet, the two moonlight as drug dealers selling “ice” right out of their store. The main thrust of the movie comes in when cops raid their home one night and haul them off. Them cops being not the cleanest bunch, they offer to not jail the couple without bail in exchange for 200,000 PHP. The second half of the movie is thus spent following their children (Felix Roco, Andi Eigenmann, and Jomari Angeles) as they find ways to come up with the cash.
To address the elephant in the room, yes, Jaclyn Jose’s portrayal of the world-weary Rosa is definitely commendable. She pulls off her best Nora-esque eye acting to bring Rosa and her school of hard knocks-hardened persona to life. She fights for change (literal change that is, 25 centavos specifically), she haggles for her life, she is a woman as rough around the edges as they come. Every time her face is shown close up, there is a rawness that emanates. She does so much even with so little. It’s subtlety at its finest. Most commendable probably would be the scene by the end wherein she finds some respite, a scene where the environment around slows down even for a just little while, and she is nothing more than a woman and her fish balls forgetting the world for that moment.
Whether Jacklyn Jose acing her role is the script’s plan all along or is simply due to her gravitas as a performer is something I’m not quite sure of, though. Compared to her, the rest of the cast aren’t given much to do due in part to a bare story that rarely substantiates its characters beyond the minimum. Even with a talented ensemble composed of actors like Baron Geisler or Felix Roco, there is not much to leave an impression.
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The raid scene, a good 20 minutes into the movie, works well as a blend of Brillante Mendoza’s signature shaky cam + tracking shots and an action sequence you’d come to expect from a Korean crime film like Oldboy or the first season of “True Detective”. The best way to describe it is with the term “controlled chaos.” There is so much going on: the view swivels and shakes, it’s as if you the audience are the cowboy on top of the bull that is the camera. It tries to shake you off and yet you never lose sight of what’s happening. It’s engaging at the same time disorienting, and oddly it works.
Sadly, though, the excitement that Ma’ Rosa‘s cinematography opens at the start of the film isn’t sustained till the movie’s latter act. By the 1-hour mark, things have pretty much slowed down to a snail’s pace. Many scenes felt long overdrawn and by the end of the film, Brillante’s habit of following characters as they simply walk around felt lacking in terms of pay off. There is actually even a set of these walk and observe scenes involving a cop that up to this point I have no idea what it was trying to achieve.
Overall, Ma’ Rosa could have easily been one of the most forgettable movies from Brillante Mendoza. Yes, I get what it’s trying to do; it wants to show how living is harder when you are at the bottom of the food chain, how grasping at straws is the way of life when you’re poor. It’s just that this kind of story is too antiquated for my tastes. It’s been done before and what this movie does differently is just enough to make it not a mediocre movie. The acting and some sequences salvage it but apart from those, Ma’ Rosa feels like a hollow film with a thin plot and even thinner characters.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wyd31XIB6yM
