The Philippines has just voted in a new president, the strongman Rodrigo Duterte who vows to "kill" all criminals in his country. So the film Ma' Rosa, the sole Southeast Asian entry in Cannes competition this year, couldn't have arrived in a timelier fashion. The new work by Brillante Mendoza -- the chronicler of Manila's sordid underbelly -- takes place in the working-class neighbourhood of that sweltering capital, infested by garbage, crime and barefaced corruption. Duterte may flaunt his iron-fistedness to win votes, but the reality as depicted in this film tells a more complex story of people trapped in the rickety state justice system.
Those who're familiar with Mendoza's work have a reason to dismiss this as yet another more-of-the-same exposition of hyperrealistic squalor, with hand-held camerawork weaving in and out of the action, the glistening, rain-soaked slum streets in the background. But still, nobody does this as convincing, and with unexpected humanity, as Mendoza (who won best director at Cannes in 2009 with the abduction tale Kinatay). In Ma' Rosa, the director once again turns his focus to the naked police corruption, so naked, so blatant that it's scary and hilarious. It also feels so real -- and yes, so Southeast Asian -- that you share that absurd horror of being stuck in a police station in the middle of the night while your kids are running around the neighbourhood trying to raise enough money to bribe the lip-licking officers.
Rosa of the title is played by Jaclyn Jose, a middle-aged Filipino actress who looks so convincing as a rough-mannered slum-dweller and petty meth peddler. Early in the film, Rosa's mom-and-pop house in the middle of a working-class quarter is raided by the police. She and her husband are arrested and taken to the station -- and man, what a station. In a place where law enforcers and offenders are separated by a very thin line, the police station is a den of lawlessness, karaoke parties, drinking, a hangout of idle kids, with the captain presiding behind his desk looking for opportunities to make quick bucks. When Rosa is brought in, she's offered a simple deal: pay the police, or give up the name of their supplier. It turns out that even if Rosa chooses to rat her dealer, she still has to pay the bribe. Touché life.
Mendoza's documentary-style visual takes us close to the flurry of action, dialogue, confusion -- it's an old trick, one that we've seen many times from him, and yet it still works. What he captures is the rawness of the place -- the police station and the poor part of Manila -- and also the mundane absurdity of it all. When Rosa's children have to go around asking friends and relatives for money to pay the police, we also take a tour of the slums (again what we've seen in Mendoza's early films such as Slingshot and Serbis), where kindness and sympathy is sometimes indistinguishable from meanness and cruelty.
Cannes is a place associated with glitz, and yet the ritziest festival has a love for the aesthetics rooted in tropical penury. Ma' Rosa is the kind of film that hits the guts and spills them out on the red carpet, which is the colour of luxury and also of blood. Duterte will want to see this, and we'll also look forward to this Sunday's award ceremony, to see if the jury led by George Miller will feel the heat of messy Manila.
