I was more than a little excited when I caught Mga Batang Yagit on cable television. It had already started, but I stayed to watch it anyway. A bucketful of tears and laughter later, I’m glad I did. It was a refreshing tearjerker that brought me back to my idyllic (and not so idyllic) days as a child of the eighties.
Leroy Salvador’s Mga Batang Yagit (1984) is one of the first Filipino films I saw as a child. I don’t know if it’s because of that that the film is also one of the few Filipino eighties films that made a lasting impact on me. To this day, I still think about Elisa, Tomtom, Jocelyn and Ding and what may have happened to them after that final scene at the port.
Branded rightfully so as a drama film, Mga Batang Yagit is nevertheless more than just about poor children scavenging for garbage and the twists and turns of their lives. It’s about the sort of friendship, pure and beautiful, that somehow paves the rocky and pothole-filled roads of life. I thought then, as I still think now, that with the kind of friendship Elisa, Tomtom, Jocelyn and Ding had, you could never lose hope in life.
For those who no longer remember or never knew of this film, the plot seems like that of your typical telenovela: The four children find each other after Elisa and her mother, a beautiful Charo Santos, were thrown out of the house by the evil mother-in-law. Left to fend for themselves — Elisa’s father, Dindo Fernando, is in Japan for work — they end up living with Charo’s friend, the bar girl Amy Austria, in an informal settlement. Amy lives with her common-law husband Jay Ilagan.
Soon, the four children are helping each other out by scavenging garbage to sell to Amay Bisaya. They develop a three-musketeers-kind of friendship: “Apat para sa isa, isa para sa apat!” they would say, and go off to their little adventures and misadventures on the streets of Manila. Sometimes they would encounter bullies; sometimes, a nice cop, like Rowell Santiago, who instantly took a liking to them.
Unfortunately for Charo, Jay has also taken a liking to her. One day, after she failed in her attempt to make easy money as a bar girl, Charo is accosted by Jay — and they are caught by Amy, who immediately throws Charo and Elisa out of her house, accusing her friend of stealing her husband.
Tomtom and Jocelyn then bring them to their own house, to live with their father, the balut vendor Bembol Roco. He turns out to be a nice and responsible guy, and for a while, it seems as if they would only have poverty to contend with. Their happy existence, however, is interrupted by Charo’s illness. She falls ill, pushing Bembol to desperate measures in order to find money. When old friend Deborah Sun refuses to lend him money for his “woman,” he turns to crime.
Charo dies; Bembol goes to jail. The four children stay in the streets — until Rowell Santiago decides to bring them to his house to live with his manipulative stepmother (yes, another bad “grandmother”) played by Bella Flores, who abuses the children physically and verbally. There doesn’t seem to be an end to the foursome’s suffering, but there is!
This story has what I call happy open endings: The children learn to fight against Bella Flores and she leaves; Dindo comes home from Japan, so Rowell easily finds him for Elisa after he finds out what his mother did; and Rowell brings Tomtom and Jocelyn with him to his new life in Davao.
Even Bembol himself finds a flower in the muddy pavement: his old friend Deborah visits him almost every day in jail and brings him food. He has a renewed sense of hope in people, he tells Rowell, when he and the children come to tell him they are moving to Davao. Not everyone is bad, after all, he says.
Mga Batang Yagit leaves viewers with a hopeful note that life can turn out well for the good. This kind of thinking may be not easy to sell now, but I’m glad I bought it when I could.
Email your comments to alricardo@yahoo.com. You can also visit my personal blog at http://althearicardo.blogspot.com. You can text your comments again to (63)917-9164421.