Title: The
Bit Player
Country: The
Philippines
Score: 7
The Bit Player is a day in the
life of an extra on a popular Filipino soap opera. The film is surprising for
the detail, dignity and compassion it holds for Loida, a single mother struggling
to earn enough to pay for her daughter’s schooling. She wouldn’t mind a little
bit of local stardom either.
However
the majority of her job is excruciatingly dull and routinely thankless. As she
says herself, crowds are important: they lend life and realism to an otherwise
empty artificial fictional world. You can’t do without them. And yet extras are
treated like talentless, brainless dirt. They are served lousy food and little
of it. They are barely listened to, and then mostly to make sure their accents aren’t
off. Even the very space they take up is resented, as demonstrated in an early
scene where the extras are sent packing from every shred of shade as they mill
about waiting for their scene. When it comes, they are faking farm work in the
back of a cheesy bucolic romance; figures so small and out of focus that they
can’t be recognized.
It’s humbling, but Loida and her
friends are good-humored about it all. Their fundamental likability and
fathomless energy helps keep the movie upbeat even as the story makes it clear
that they will never be stars. Loida has what she would probably think of as
her ‘big break,’ but it doesn’t amount to much. Her celebration of this
middling just-enough-to-get-by success, tainted by an almost overwhelmed by
disappointment that she bottles up inside, is what makes the film resonate as
profoundly real.
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