CULTURE: Filipino’s Hooked on the Tale of a Mexican Girl

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Johanna Son

MANILA, Jul 23 1996 (IPS) - Policemen disappear from the city’s congested streets to watch it every evening, office workers rush home to catch it on time, and some teachers reportedly give bonus points to pupils who know the latest twists in it.

More and more Filipino viewers are getting hooked on a television programme that has taken local viewers by storm: a Mexican telenovela on the melodramatic life and times of a pretty young heroine named ‘Mari Mar’.

“I symphathise with Mari Mar because we have all been duped by our boyfriends,” said one addicted female viewer. A male fan had a different perspective: “I like watching it because she’s pretty and sexy.”

“We like her because she fights back,” a schoolteacher said. Others find the telenovela refreshingly fast-paced, unlike local soaps that drag on and on for years without resolution.

‘Mari Mar’, dubbed into the Filipino language and shown every evening in 30-minute episodes, has zoomed to the top of TV ratings only four months after it was first shown. Its ratings have surpassed even the staple TV diet of many Filipinos – the country’s professional basketball league.

The popularity of ‘Mari Mar’ highlights the growing popularity of Latin American telenovelas exported to Asia. In recent years, telenovelas from Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, and Argentina have developed popular followings in countries like Indonesia and Malaysia, where they are dubbed into local languages.

Telenovelas have been standard TV fare in Latin America for decades. Asian audiences identify keenly with the convoluted tales of love and betrayal, often set amid economic and social conditions in Latin America that are similar to those in Asia, unlike the settings of Western soaps available on cable TV.

For instance, Mari Mar, played by 25-year-old actress-singer Thalia (whose real name is Ariadna Sodi Miranda), is a poor lass who marries rich Sergio but whose life is made miserable by his parents. It later turns out that Mari Mar herself is the daughter of a rich landowner.

It’s not that the Latin soaps are particularly profound, or revolve around unique plots. “People know how it will end, but they want to see how she suffers and triumphs,” said Georgina Encanto, a professor of mass communication.

Besides, she quipped, “I’m a sucker for romance and many other people are too.” The telenovela’s success lies in the fact that “everyone in the audience relates to someone there”, said Tony Carreon, who voices over one character in ‘Mari Mar’.

Conrad de Quiros, writing in a local newspaper, says he finds the acting in Mari Mar inferior to that in local soap operas but says its success is “yet one more proof that the Filipino’s heart is closer to Latin America than to Asia”. The Philippines has been a Spanish colony from the 16th century until 1898.

The soap’s episodes are thickly laden with support for the underdog and devout, nearly fatalistic trust in divine providence, a trait that is probably tied to the fact that like many Latin Americans, more than 80 percent of Filipinos are Roman Catholic.

The success of ‘Mari Mar’ is no doubt aided by the fact it features good-looking actors and actresses that are white, allowing viewers to identify with characters that don’t look like them but grapple with the same problems anyway.

De Quiros said: “The Filipino’s deepest fantasy, man or women, remains to look like a mestizo. It’s written everywhere in the popular culture,” where fair-skinned models and actors often have a ticket to fame.

“Soaps do not just allow audiences to identify, they allow audiences to identify with what they are not. It’s a trip to Fantasy Island, and it’s free,” De Quiros explained.

And because Tagalog has imbibed a number of Spanish words, phrases and expressions, the flavour of the Latin American soaps is easier for Filipinos to grasp.

For many TV stations in Asia, buying telenovelas at 2,500 dollars an episode is cheaper than producing their own soaps.

The deal was even better for the Philippines’ RPN 9, which shows ‘Mari Mar’. The network did not pay any franchise fee at first. Instead the station entered into a co-production agreement with the series owner, a New York-based production firm named Protele.

Under the agreement, the local channel spends for dubbing costs but Protele helps in promoting the series “because it was also a risk for Channel 9 to embark on these shows”, network executives say.

Protele, one of the largest telenovela distributors, has also sold rights to stations in China, Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Sri Lanka and India.

The gamble paid off. Jose Mari Gonzalez, the former RPN 9 boss who chose four telenovelas for screening, said: “I felt it in my bones. I knew that at the beginning I would be laughed at. But I said, ‘let’s experiment’.”

Carreon says that at least the telenovelas are not filled with sex and violence that are staples in American and Western shows. Local soaps, on the other hand, “have to have a lot of screaming, slapping, crying or stabbing.”

Likewise, Carreon added, “It shows that after 400 years of Spanish colonisation, our Spanish background is still there somehow despite the more recent Hollywood invasion during the American time (colonisation).”

Meantime, ‘Mari Mar’ mania rages on: Tabloids are running Miranda’s biodata with everything from her zodiac sign to her dress size, a Thalia-Mari Mar fan club is growing by the day, and plans are said to be in the works for the Mexican actress to star in a movie with a local matinee idol.

Channel 9 is arranging to get for her to visit the Philippines within the year — so she can personally pick the winners of a look-alike contest the station is running for her and her male lead in ‘Mari Mar’.