There's no way you'd mistake the large, middle-aged Filipino woman shuffling through The Bet Collector for some classic Hollywood glamour queen in her prime. And yet The Bet Collector is more than a little like the sort of "woman's picture" that flourished in Hollywood in the '40s and '50s — and Amy (Gina Pareno), the movie's long-suffering heroine, is clearly the spiritual kin of Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Susan Hayward, Barbara Stanwyck and all the other female icons who starred in those glorious Tinsel Town tear-jerkers of yore.
"What's her problem?" Amy's husband is constantly asking about his short-fused wife, but the truth is she's got a million of 'em, hubby being right at the top of the list. Amy (pronounced Ah-Mee) has money problems, husband problems (he's a lazy TV addict), health problems, freeloading daughter problems, even police problems. The cops are a constant source of angst because Amy supplements her meager income by collecting bets for Jueteng, an illegal but immensely popular numbers game with deep roots in every corner of society in the Philippines, particularly among the poor.
Shot in a no-frills, semidocumentary style, with handheld digital cameras following a mix of actors and non-actors through the labyrinthine streets of Manila's slums, The Bet Collector (Kubrador) covers three days in the life of its strong-willed but mightily vexed heroine. This is one of those films where environment looms as large as the characters themselves, and director Jeffrey Jeturian wastes no time making sure we're thoroughly acquainted with how Amy's world operates before he even gets around to introducing her to us.
The minor Jueteng player the film follows during its first few minutes is never even heard from again after the opening sequence, but he serves a critical function while rushing toward his own vanishing point, leading us through the vibrant maze of the city's back streets as bets are placed, cash exchanged, warnings communicated and receipts tallied — before the cops show up at a game in progress and the whole thing goes to hell.
Although not nearly as precise an indication of time and place as the famous tracking shots in Goodfellas and Boogie Nights, The Bet Collector's colorful opening sequence works in a similar way, illustrating both the intricacy of a vast shadowy network and the disposability of the human cogs who make it work. By the time we're finally introduced to Amy, deep in prayer in the little bedroom above the convenience store she runs, we're all too aware that this is a woman running on borrowed time, just another cog in a wheel so big she can hardly comprehend it.
As devout as she is pragmatic, Amy gazes into the eyes of her statue of the Madonna, ending her prayer as she probably does every day: "I hope I don't get caught today," she whispers, crossing herself with conviction before leaving the house.
The Bet Collector's slice-of-life narrative rambles and weaves much like the twisty passageways of Amy's neighborhood, following the woman as she makes her rounds, a little umbrella barely shielding her big body from the blazing sun as she pauses to shoot the breeze with her regulars, gently bullying them into making bets they can barely afford. "If I win, we eat out," says one local whose lottery numbers have been picked for his pet rooster's birthday. "If I lose, we cook him."
The rooster guy's words pretty much sum up a movie's embracing of what some might take to be contradictory attitudes. Starkly fatalistic on the surface but resolutely life-affirming at its core, The Bet Collector covers some tragic territory, but with too much vitality to descend into depression. And so Amy plugs along, hustling door to door to make her puny dollar-a-day commission, hacking out her lungs from the endless string of cheap cigarettes dangling from her mouth, and periodically looking down to find that she has once again stepped in shit, both literally and otherwise. If Arthur Miller had been Filipino, and maybe a woman, Death of a Salesman might have looked something like this.
The cops wind up nabbing her (and then line up to secretly place bets with her!), hubby screws up their lives with a potentially devastating blunder, and we begin counting the beats between those racking coughs as they escalate with operatic urgency, doing the terrible math that determines when we'll get the grand tragedy every self-respecting woman's picture eventually hauls out. But when that inevitable tragedy does finally strike, it's so arbitrary and awful it just underscores the movie's central thesis that life is really just a crapshoot — an American saying that must surely have an equivalent in Tagalog, as well as most other languages.
Despite the occasional overly melodramatic flourish — Amy's dead son periodically hovering over her like some beloved guardian angel is particularly cheesy — it's easy to get drawn into The Bet Collector's reality, particularly in the life teeming at the edges of the story's frame (so much life, in fact, that the subtitles don't always seem capable of translating everything going on).
It's a small but surprisingly strong film, and one that might never have been made — much less seen in areas like Florida — were it not for Global Lens 2008, an acclaimed series of international films that's making the rounds in some 40 U.S. cities. Thanks to the support of the Gasparilla Film Festival, the University of Tampa, St Pete's Studio@620 and Sarasota's Burns Court, we're on the Global Lens circuit this year, and The Bet Collector is a fine place to start.
This article appears in Jun 4-10, 2008.