The Bet Collector

Much like man’s best friend, the rough-hewn Filipino movie “The Bet Collector” chases its protagonist from step to step, misery to misery, all but nipping at her heels. Though you never see her sell anything, Amy (Gina Pareño) operates a tiny store out of the front of her ramshackle Manila house with her husband and tries to make ends meet by illegally running numbers. It’s a living (if barely), though there are moments in this aggressive, predictably sympathetic excursion into miserablism when it seems a lot more like dying.
Filled with minor incidents and naturalistic chatter, Ralston Jover’s screenplay sets Amy on a well-worn, deterministic course. (One influence here may be Bresson’s “Mouchette,” though without any of that film’s terrible beauty.) Over the course of a few days and nights this big, nervous woman with a barrel chest and a cough like Camille’s, bustles and hustles through a maze of streets, trying to cajole other slum dwellers into throwing away their hard-earned pesos. She’s an affable presence — haunted by her dead son, who, on occasion, pops up to soothe her brow — so much so that you may resent the filmmakers for not giving her even a faint ray of hope, for rubbing our faces (and her shoe) so insistently in the muck.
Directed by Jeffrey Jeturian (this is his seventh feature), “The Bet Collector” will be familiar to anyone who spends time trolling the film-festival circuit. Shot hand-held in smudgy digital video, the movie borrows the wavering, no-frills, fly-on-the-wall visual style (and make no mistake, it is a style) that, partly because of those influential Dogma-ticians Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, has become a tiresome cliché in fiction as well as in nonfiction film. In truth, few documentaries actually look like this, at least the good ones, because talented filmmakers, whether working in nonfiction or not, never mistake the absence of beauty and thoughtful framing for the truth. (For proof, take another look at D. A. Pennebaker’s impeccably shot 1967 Dylan documentary, “Don’t Look Back.”)
“The Bet Collector” has its moments, including Amy’s quirkily charming habit of translating certain word combinations (“a frog and a scared boy,” “a child and testicles”) into numbers. (It’s about the only time that she lights up.) What is particularly frustrating about the movie is that this character actually has the makings of a memorable subject, someone who — like Mouchette and the Dardenne brothers’ similarly desperate heroine, Rosetta, in the film of the same title — could successfully guide you into her world. The trouble is that Mr. Jeturian and Mr. Jover are far too busy guiding us into their story, their ghetto, their world, with its wretched poverty and despair, its police corruption and sudden, horrifying violence, to allow Amy either to flower fully or to wither on her own personal, individual terms.
Da The New York Times, 10 gennaio 2008