Child actors shouldn’t be made to go on extended crying jags
As “Ikaw ay Pag-Ibig” headed for its big denouement, the popular kiddie drama series revved up its action to keep viewers watching. The extra-dramatic ploy was understandable, but sometimes also disturbing, especially when it tended to run roughshod over its young actors’ and viewers’ delicate sensibilities.
One of the sore points was the show’s proclivity for putting its child actors in scenes that had goons and guns figuring prominently in them. Yes, the goons were goony-stupid and thus not really threatening and all that fearsome to see in action, but guns are guns, and very young kids shouldn’t be exposed to them, because of the violence-related issues they stir up.
Note that more enlightened foreign productions for children inhibit themselves from focusing on weapons, because it’s felt that juvenile sensibilities are too unformed to be subjected to totems and intimations of fear and violence.
Suggestive violence
Since kids tend to exaggerate everything and have an unclear sense of context and reality, even suggestive violence can provoke an emotional reaction from them that they may not yet know how to “process.”
But, our bigger objection to the show’s handling of its young actors and the characters they play is over the pressure it exerts on them to go on extended crying jags, especially toward the end of the story, when all sorts of dire things are happening to the characters around them.
Last Monday, for example, it was shown that the character played by Paulo Avelino had died while saving the series’ principal child characters from harm. The tragic mood was sustained through the wake for their dead defender, up to the burial scene, so the kids had to do multiple crying scenes.
These scenes were deemed natural (after all, a person they liked did die, and the demise of a good person should be mourned), but the emotional pressure on the kids to come up with suitably melodramatic reactions were extended and repetitive. It was really much too much.
We pitied the child actors as they heartfully and soulfully tried to do what they were told to. One or two crying scenes would have been OK, but so many in just one telecast? Unacceptable.
The people behind the show may argue that somebody did die, so the kids have to cry. Yes, but why push it so much and so hard, especially for the child talents?
Because they’re the most kawawa and pathetic characters in the show, so their tears will affect viewers most poignantly? But, these actors are children, so their sensibilities have to be handled with special care and judiciousness.
Besides, there are many ways to depict grief, aside from going from one crying scene to yet another. Take Bembol Roco’s performance in the same telecast: He played Paulo’s father, and yet he allowed himself only a couple of breakdown scenes. And he pulled them off without the copious tears and sobs that lesser actors would resort to, in order to emotionally “blackmail” viewers into empathetic reaction. Yet his scenes were deeply moving.
That’s because Bembol is a true, mature and experienced artist. The child actors in the show haven’t reached that level yet, so the director should have mentored them with even greater concern for their delicate artistic sensibilities, instead of requiring them to break down and produce tears on cue, over and over again. Have a heart.
