ALESSANDRA de Rossi (right) plays Dionisia and Buboy Villar (second from right), the young Manny.
Paul Soriano’s new film, “Kid Kulafu,” should be complimented for its perfect sense of timing: It’s showing just before Manny Pacquiao’s long-awaited pugilistic “duel” with Floyd Mayweather Jr.!
Some viewers curious about Manny’s formative years before he ascended to international boxing fame and fabulous fortune will therefore make it a point to watch the how-it-all-began film, to take note of key character and temperament points that “explain” how he developed the heart of a world champion.
“Kid Kulafu” answers that thematic question by detailing Manny’s family’s extreme poverty, due to his father’s lack of ambition. This forced his mother (Alessandra de Rossi) to turn termagant shrew and nag—alas, to no avail.
Another early problem was the lack of peace and order in Kibawe, Bukidnon, where encounters between soldiers and rebel guerrilla forces were frequent and deadly. Quite to the point, it intimated the roots of uncertainty and violence that made young Manny an instinctive fighter.
Other “enablers” included an uncle (Cesar Montano) who loved fisticuffs and became his nephew’s first backer and mentor.
The film’s first half makes its “backwoods” proceedings believable with a lot of effective textural detail, “raw” visualizations that further underscore the allure of boxing as a desperate way out of extreme poverty for countless “palaban” youths and their families.
Visual credibility
This all-important visual credibility’s best suit is Soriano’s savvy decision to cast the supremely “ordinary”-looking Buboy Villar as the adolescent and teen Manny.
We believe and trust Buboy’s spot-on portrayal from the get-go, so the film’s key “empathy factor” is exceedingly well-served.
Midway through the engrossing film, however, it appears to be fumbling for the thematic significance and resonance required for its many telling bits and pieces to add up to more than just a docu-drama about the young pugilist’s formative years.
It tries to add to the movie’s “coagulating” sense of thematic pertinence and gravitas by taking Manny and his young coboxers to the big city, where they are forced to work in a cheap gin factory to earn a pittance so they can train and spar some more.
Penultimate twist
Most decisively of all, the film’s plot is given a penultimate dramatic and tragic twist to show how one of Manny’s friends dies after being brutally knocked out in the ring—a most instructive contrast to Manny’s own, much more triumphant denouement.
Was there indeed such a friend, and did he die in the ring, prompting Manny’s character to loudly and painfully mourn his tragic loss? If so, this would be a fine instance of theme and reality in seamless conjunction.
If, however, this is more a case of “cinematic license,” a created incident to support and bring out a key thematic point, the big, climactic highlight would come off as too “arranged” and “intended” to be truly, deeply moving.
Yes, the film needs it to end up as more than just a montage of tellingly visualized and dramatized bits and pieces, but if it didn’t really happen in the personal context that the film underscores, something is lost—or overwrought.