Riveting 'Rosario': Melodrama with restraint

In the course of watching the movie Rosario, it became less and less clear why it didn’t get Best Picture (but only 2nd Best Picture, a category that’s a travesty in itself) at the 36th Metro Manila Film Festival 2010. I do see where it could have used better direction. At the same time, I wonder how much creative freedom there was since the film’s producer actually appears in the beginning and end of the film, to establish in the most simplistic of ways that this is a true story. I am giving Albert Martinez more credit than that. Because Dolphy’s character Jesus’ narration was enough, it didn’t need a literal audience in a long-lost nephew aka the movie’s producer, nor the angle of destitution that brought him to the point of writing this nephew a letter. He could have, as a matter of passing on family history, just wanted to speak of the lost members of the clan, the connections that remain missing, the sadness of the silence about his mother Rosario’s life. Since this is ultimately what this story’s about, a passing on, a passing forward, of one woman’s silenced life from the 1920s to pre-war, from a provincial hacienda to a convent, to Manila, to exile in Hong Kong and back. This is the story of a woman named Rosario, who comes home from America -- Nueva York, as they say in the movie -- and is changed. Her closest friend Carmen is her counterpoint: she has never tried smoking a cigarette, dresses conservatively, barely wears make-up. The province and the hacienda are also her counterpoint: it is everything that she wants to leave, to study in the State University, she asks her father, who of course refuses. She is to study in America. Soon enough, things get out of control, and the real story of Rosario unfolds. She falls in love with the manager of the hacienda Vicente and, after much suffering, they find themselves together in Manila, raising a family of three children, the silences on their past in the province deafening. While her husband is sick, Rosario commits adultery with Alberto (Carmen’s former boyfriend) and she is exiled to Hong Kong . She loses custody of her three children with Vicente, but she has a new child to take care of, a new life to forge. Of course this is difficult in itself, reason enough for Alberto to abandon her, and she is broken. Yet it seems like all of this was only out of control, and at this point broken, in so far as the audience was concerned. But Rosario herself barely speaks about this in the movie, despite the fact that she is its main protagonist. In fact, as she moves from one space to another, one man to another, from her father to the oppressive landlord she is in the end left to contend with, Rosario’s words are far from substantial. Instead she acts on her life, in ways that are telling of her time, of the kind of women we were then. We might not have been speaking a lot, but we sure knew how to deal with hardship. She takes control of the ritual of courtship with Vicente, as well as the extra-marital affair with Alberto. She is one to feel pleasure and speak of it, she is one to want pleasure and act on it. She is given an offer to pay the rent with her body, and she lets her hair down. She removed the pins that hold her short flapper curls and almost looked like a new woman. In fact, by the time she does this, Rosario is a different woman altogether. One who has been rejected four times over from her father, to her husband, to her lover, to her grown daughter. At this point as audience, I could only empathize and imagine a major breakdown scene, a moment of kicking and screaming, the kind that our local dramas are riddled with. But there was none of it. Here was a woman whose life had fallen apart, but who possessed a courage to live that’s about getting up every day, playing the piano when it's there, as if her freedom(s) relied on it. There is an amount of strength in that quiet, in the calm voice, the eyes that were always bright even when they spoke of sadness and happiness, even when they were closed as she played the piano. There was restraint in Rosario, as there was in the rest of this movie. There were no grand declarations of what life is about, no Church and religiosity to fall back on, no statements on feminism and womanhood. Instead there was Rosario and the various men she dealt with, these versions of men that we know of in this country as archetypes. Instead there was history, and how this woman lived through it given its changes, its poverty, its irrationality. And there was Rosario as woman, without the histrionics, without the self-pity. Right here are the reasons for a nomination -- at the very least -- for Jennylyn Mercado in the role of Rosario. She would have given Aiai de las Alas a real race for the best actress award, had she been given that chance. MMFF juror Butch Francisco has tried to explain why Jennylyn didn’t deserve a nomination. One, because the role of Rosario required her to be “flirtatious and coquettish" and two, she didn’t even know how to hold a cigarette in her hand. It’s easy to see now where things might have gone wrong in deliberations for nominations. Rosario’s character was only about flirtation in the beginning of the story; to imagine she needed to be such halfway through would’ve missed the point of her subservience to her evolving roles in the spaces she moved in. As regards the cigarette in her hand, well if only to humor them jurors, I did a Google search of the 1920s woman holding a cigarette. Lo and behold, they were holding that cig in exactly the same way Jennylyn was, not with the air and confidence of the woman in the present, but with the uncertainty of a loose hand and a limp wrist. I have a sinking feeling though, that more than the best actress nomination, MMFF failed the film Rosario because it didn’t understand it. Or maybe it was just ready to go for the more simple narrative instead of the historically affected one; the one with in-your-face values that were nothing but conventional instead of the one with deep-seated unexplainable sorrows; the one that was about heart-wrenching family drama instead of the one with real stories of family and the ways in which they break apart in the face of illness and tragedy and history. Maybe, for all the time and money spent telling us that the Metro Manila Film Festival this year will be different from the past, it has proven to be exactly the same. At least in the past, movies like Baler (2008) and Blue Moon (2005) could win Best Picture. At least in the past, we didn’t expect much from it and we weren’t made to imagine it better or new or different. MMFF 2010? Such a sign of the times. - GMANews.TV