Kubrador (Jeffrey Jeturian, 2006)

Jueteng, as Kubrador reminds us, is a numbers game that is as common and popular in the Philippines as lotto is to the Americans. Everybody plays it and a kubrador (bet collector) talking up potential customers is a common sight in villages and neighborhoods across the country. Its ubiquity would have been reason for avoiding it as a movie’s focal point, if not for the fact that it is also illegal in the country and the irony that results creates much tragedy or an illustration thereof. But unlike things illegal in the West, jueteng isn’t sexy. There’s no edgy appeal to playing jueteng. It’s associated less with celebrities than it is with bored grandmothers and corrupt politicians. This lack of mystique allows Jeturian to bare the game naked and use it as an allegory to the contemporary Filipino condition. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but by and large it does well in injecting new blood into the art of Tagalog filmmaking.

Gina Pareño is Amy, a cautious yet bet collector whose desperation drives her to push her luck despite the chances of getting caught by the police. Everyone knows her—everyone calls out her name as she passes by, gives her the latest gossip, and of course, gives her their numbers (and money). As an agent of the popular jueteng, her character traverses the different levels of the hierarchy of Filipino society, from the slums to the local jueteng bosses to the regional cashier, and to the police, who gives her their bets right in their station. She gets very little for her work, and she suffers through long days and stubborn customers unwilling to part with their money. But she still does it, from desperation or some illogical sense of adventure we are never really sure (she’s poor, yes, that in itself never seem to be the only reason for being a bet collector; simply manning their house-front store and devoting her life only on that seems like a boring life relegated to daytime TV and disintegration).

The film is most effective when it “merely” observes. As a digital production, the resulting image could not help but have a very deep depth of focus. However, this is not to the movie’s detriment, as it lends a depth of meaning in allowing the eyes to wander through the milieu that Jeturian records. By avoiding close-ups and blurred backgrounds—and thus shot counter shots and heavy action-reaction editing—Kubrador successfully becomes never a “mere story,” but rather a depiction of a condition and a reality. In addition, the movie’s numerous long takes, especially the opening scene (which felt like a journey to the depths of hell guided by our Virgil-kubrador, appropriately followed by a chase scene filmed atop the tin roofs of the shantytown as if Dante just dug himself out of Hell only to be kicked back into it) and the last scene, adds to the sense of reality merely recorded, and thus the expectant complications that comes therewith. Instead of an “issue”—as it has been treated in popular Filipino media especially during the last seven or eight years—jueteng becomes a tool in sketching experiences and realities, and the intersecting motives and rationales that drive these experiences and realities to come about.

The movie however fails when Jeturian moves away from neorealism to moralism. Amy works because she has a lazy husband. Jeturian never expands the husband’s character to allow us an insight in why he does not work. Simply, he is a Juan Tamad (Lazy John) archetype, and the invocation of that is enough for his marginalization. Worse off, he watches Filipino television. Never mind that he must have reasons for watching this mindless piece of diversion. But all we see is of him in extreme close-up, obviously enjoying the stupid game shows and gyrating half-clad women on “Wowowee” (a local noon-time game show, which recently got involved in a cheating “scandal”). Only that for Jeturian, he abhorrently does. Also, in two potentially effective scenes, Kubrador merely becomes polemic. In one, Amy, busy writing numbers down, wanders off into unknown alleys and becomes lost. Instead of increasing Amy’s—and our—confusion, we are instead reminded of the hopelessness of the slums: “confusion” in air quotes. In another, when Amy goes to a gambling cashier’s house to collect winnings, the cashier (played by Johnny Manahan) goes off into a rant about buwayas (literally alligators, corrupt politicians) and the church, and how they hypocritically benefit from jueteng while they condemn it. The cashier’s speech could have been easily inserted into the narrative, but is instead turned into a lecture on the inner workings of illegal gambling and political corruption. True as these concerns may be, the movie becomes issue-oriented, thus losing the complexity of reality.

I think this same issue is what ultimately made Jeturian’s Tuhog (2001) equally unsatisfying despite being compelling. In Tuhog, where two filmmakers adapt a rape victim’s story only to turn it into a skin flick, Jeturian explores the “divide” between fiction and reality and how maintaining and transgressing this divide fuel Filipino cinephilia. The movie could have been effective, if only Jeturian could have kept himself from being too excited. Once he gets worked up, he acts just like anyone who gets a pulpit. In Tuhog, even though he balances “reality” and the two filmmakers’ rendition of this “reality” quite well, he slips into a condemnation of “fiction,” over-dramatizing the filmmakers’ version of reality to over-emphasize its falsity. The movie thus went from an exploration of the Filipino film industry to a didactic piece about the evils of it.

Despite all these, Tuhog and Kubrador are not bad movies. They are very thoughtful films, and made with an original and irrepressible vision of truth and reality. But if Jeturian doesn't watch it, he might just become the new Gil M. Portes, another Filipino movie maker who makes great films hampered by an inability to resist grandstanding. (His Homecoming (2003), for example, was a great film crippled in the last minute by Portes’ main character’s need to “educate” her fellow Filipinos.) However, unlike Portes, Jeturian at least shows an ability to grow, to develop a trust in his audience’s ability to perceive the reality he submits. In a recent “Maalaala mo kaya?” (Would you remember?) Jeturian-directed episode (which aired on TFC here in Los Angeles on 01 SEP 2007), issues of poverty, family, and international identity are treated to a rendition that both kept the gravity of these issues intact, while at the same time keeping the rendition squarely populist (but not condescending either, using melodrama but not histrionics). This goes to show that Jeturian has the makings of a Vidor or de Sica if only he realizes the inherent intelligence of his “masa.”