Adela, by the Filipino director Adolfo Alix, Jr., is a quietly dignified but ultimately disappointing slog of a movie. I suspect it’s partly because I’m a bit tired of Filipino films set amidst the squalor of garbage dumps — there, I’ve said it — though I hasten to add that there’s hardly a hint of exploitation in Alix’s film. This slum movie in particular — no studio trickery here — is set in the real-life Bernardo Dumpsite in Las Pinas. The movie’s namesake is an elderly woman played by the veteran actress Anita Linda. It’s also her 80th birthday, and the film chronicles the day from sunrise to sunset.
The movie all belongs to Anita Linda, really. There’s a scene that provides an excellent glimpse of her amazing acting skills when she listens to a radio drama — she’s revealed to be a former radio voice talent — and does both the voices of an arguing mother and child simultaneously. But this isn’t much of a stretch, in a way; she’s surrounded, first of all, by actors way less experienced than she — and who also look way too healthy to have been living in a garbage dump all their lives. She’s not necessarily given much to work with in terms of material — much of the film simply follows her, in exacting neorealist fashion, as she goes through her daily routine, much like Alexander Sokurov’s Alexandra (see my notes here) — but what is there reveals hidden depths. But not that much.
One of the problems I have with the film is that Anita Linda looks and acts practically patrician. It’s not clear why she’s living in the dumpsite in the first place, though one can imagine the terrible chain of events that led her there. She alludes, for instance, to a government-ordered housing relocation in the recent past. We hear this information delivered — and if you saw this scene coming, I can’t blame you — in a monologue she delivers at her husband’s grave. Conversations with the deceased are always great for exposition. (To underscore the hypocrisy of the Philippine government’s policies, the slum residents are recruited, with financial incentives, to a clearly useless politician prayer rally, much like in Brillante Mendoza’s Tirador.)
What strains believability is her apparent stoicism that doesn’t quite fit the circumstances. One would think she’d be sunburned from all that walking, but no — it’s the look of someone who moved to the dumpsite recently. And yet it’s already, inexplicably, home to her. Adela has the patience and wisdom of the aged, you might say, but her friendliness with avowed thieves doesn’t ring true. It’s also hard to imagine that she’d choose a house with a huge pile of garbage right in front of it, but there it is. The camera makes damn sure we notice the contradiction: Adela in a white dress, feeding birds in a cage, trash in the foreground.
The ending, where Adela takes a boat ride to a garbage-strewn beach to watch the sunset, is nonetheless lovely — about 7 static shots in 7 minutes — but it proceeds just about how I’d expected it to: a lingering shot of her weeping face, then a shot of the undergrowth as Adela passes out of the frame and out of the movie. (Though Alix has some indelible images here: the plastic bags half-buried in the ground, the wind making them flutter like flowers, while the surf and the raucous sounds of cicadas fill the soundtrack.)
I guess what I’m trying to get at here is that even the film’s rare emotional restraint seems to be played out in cliches. (I should point out though that melodrama is a real staple of conventional Philippine filmmaking, and so this restraint is admirable nonetheless.) The scene at Adela’s birthday party — where she’s surrounded pretty much by strangers, intent on having her join in singing karaoke to a song she doesn’t know — is awfully reminiscent of a similar sequence in Mike Leigh’s High Hopes, for instance.
One might well point to the opening sequence, seen right after shots of the burning Philippine sun rising over rotting garbage. It involves the old Filipino acting cliche of a pregnant woman delivering her baby (and in high heels, even), suddenly attacked by labor pains right after an argument with her husband. (That’s when they always happen.) There’s no time, apparently, to even bring her inside any of the neighboring houses a few feet away, despite the few dozen onlookers encircling the mother, and so the baby has to be delivered right there, surrounded by garbage.
And that’s when we first see Adela to the rescue, emerging slowly out of a tricycle and straight to the crowd to deliver the baby. And, oh, how great it is when all the symbols fall into place: a child, brought to life on the cold dead ground, delivered into the world by Adela, the very vision of white-haired saintly purity. If only we weren’t hit over the head with it.
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