The bubble has since burst, and no amount of laughter can ignore the grim reality of life along ‘da riles’, if indeed there is life worth living, there.
Multi-talented movie director, painter, poet, writer, artist, world traveler and linguist Briccio Santos studied and spent life in Europe, but always found himself drifting back to his roots in the Philippines.
The shadow of widespread poverty in his land of birth never stopped trailing his wakefulness, an unrelenting spectre that haunted his privileged upbringing. After years of grappling with the idea of exploring the issues of poverty, deprivation, moral degeneration and social apathy on film, ‘Direk’ Briccio took a long hard look at the railway communities.
There, he found the crystallization of everything he had been looking for, a microcosm of life that seemed to resonate with the myriad elements of the Philippines in macrocosm. He began his screenplay and the story and the characters simply flowed together. He scoured local movielandia and the theater for people to breathe life into his characters. "With good actors and actresses, half of the director’s job is finished," he simply stated.
Briccio found Ana Capri, a sensitive performer who always turned in sterling performances, regardless of the films she starred in. Quiet and laid back, she is not the quintessential sparkling movie star, but an intelligent actress at 25, with a number of awards and nominations behind her.
" How did I choose her? Synchronicity…what you’re looking for simply presents itself," he shrugged.
Ana plays Jessica, and another thespic find, Ebong Joson, plays Manuel, her significant other. Together with Bo Vicencio, they make up the only real life actors, the rest of the cast come from either side of the twisted tracks where lives collide, as Briccio’s film captures it.
Manuel, a former communist rebel finds work as janitor in a recruitment agency while Jessica is a former ‘japayuki,’ a term soon found disgusting even by those who work in Japan, that they have since began calling themselves "Overseas Performing Artists," or OPAs.
Boss Dik owns the agency managed by Monica, his woman and a tough bitch of a manager. It is a situation tolerated by Dik’s wife, as long as money keeps coming in. Surely, the agency employees know it, including Manuel.
Things began to go downhill when Jessica becomes pregnant, as she deals drugs to augment Manuel’s small earnings, and decides to become a ‘japayuki’ again. Various struggles pit the various characters around the couple, inevitably entwining with their lives, making victims out of the couple. Events culminate in a drug raid, where Manuel is sickeningly betrayed and Jessica escapes in a harrowing, tragic scene.
Briccio evokes images of Francis Ford Coppola, and of New York schools of filmmaking which utilize a patina of leaden gray on film to create the moods of pathos, tragedy, despair, death and painful redemption, if there is one at all. The director edited the film himself in tandem with a gifted Indian movie editor.
"A la Verde" refers to movie tickets in the 1950s which are given to those who have only watched half of a film so they can see it in whole and "A la Pobre" is doing it poor. At the end, what Briccio unfolds before us is half a life worth living and Jessica blessedly lives it behind for something simple but infinitely better.
