Turo Turo opens on Maryo (AJ Dee) and his young son Nilo (Albert Silos) selling fishballs on the street. The precocious Nilo attracts customers by singing and dancing. From there, the movie presents a succession of miseries. Maryo, as it turns out, is illiterate, and has trouble telling if people are paying the right amount. His wife soon leaves in order to pursue better work. And then Maryo ends up losing his cart to pay for the medicine of his youngest son. And then when things get even worse, he is forced to rely on his son to keep his family fed.
Turo Turo is somewhat reminiscent of Magnifico. It might be no accident that the main character shares a name with that film's director. If this film is indeed asking to be compared to that film, it is to its detriment. This takes the same framework of a cute, good-hearted kid defying the inherent cruelty of the world with his hard work and indomitable spirit. But it does so with a complete lack of subtlety. It just piles on the misery, begging for tears in a completely artificial manner.
There isn't much structure to the narrative. The movie basically goes from one scene of misery after another, fading in and out of scenes of overtly constructed sadness. It doesn't try to build to anything. There is only one scene with the wife, for example, before the movie shuttles her away to some unknown place. The film plays this scene as a major tragic moment, but it hasn't earned any of those emotions yet. We aren't shown enough of her to make her departure feel like something that matters.
The film relies entirely on the broadest depictions of tragedy. It doesn't actually tell the story of the tragedy, the movie rarely providing enough background detail for these moments to make an impact. It just manufactures these moments, with no real regard for the rules of storytelling. The film is openly begging for sympathy, its characters regularly on the verge of tears as the world assails them with terrible developments. And it just gets tedious. The film doesn’t really have a story to tell. It only has this random assort of miserablist scenes, all adding up to a whole lot of nothing.
On the production side, the film isn’t much better. There’s just no connective tissue holding this film together. And so the film keeps fading to black, dissolving into nothing as the scenes just peter out. The use of music is awkward, and the shots are pretty uninspired. The acting feels like it would be better suited to television. Every performance is broad to the point of being cartoonish. AJ Dee plays his illiteracy as weird incompetence, playing up a slowness that comes off a bit patronizing. Albert Silos feels like a child actor from a different era, though that might be the fault of the direction.
Turo Turo is too desperate for sympathy. In its pursuit of big drama, it doesn’t actually get to build a story. It merely strings together scenes of abject poverty, its characters not people but simply targets of the cruel whims of the movie’s contrivances. For all the seemingly goodhearted elements present within the movie, this is really nothing more than a crass manipulation. Poverty porn has been an overused term in the last decade. But this really is the only way to describe this ugly, desperate picture.
My Rating:
