The film “The Flor Contemplacion Story” focuses on the failed struggle of a family and the Filipinos to prevent the Singapore government from executing Flor Contemplacion, a domestic helper. There a few main themes in this film such as redemption of a husband, redemption of a daughter and mistress, and injustice that happens at the individual level.
The husband in this film is an interesting character because of his simplicity. He knows his obligation to his wife and his family and that it is wrong for him to have a mistress while his wife is in Singapore, and yet he cannot seem to resist being with his mistress. He even brings her into his home which indicates the extent to which he is lonely and his marriage to Flor has become loveless.
In the later half of the movie, he tries to make amends in two ways. He hires a lawyer to go to Singapore and have the execution stayed. That attempt fails because the Singapore government does not let the lawyer do anything. His second attempt was allowing his children to go without him to visit Flor. He had two motives for doing this. The first was that he did not want the visit to be soured by his presence. Being there might have upset Flor and ruined the last few chances for Flor and the children to meet because Flor would have had time to dwell on the fact that she was about to be executed while her husband had a mistress. Secondly, I think he realized his wrong and was supremely embarrassed. Knowing how much Flor sacrificed for him and his family, he could not bear to stand in front of her.
The second interesting character in this film was the mistress. Although the movie does not mention very much about her or how she came to know the family so well, she is apparently well liked by the children except for Flor’s daughter. It appears that she knows the husband has a wife, but because her family does not want her anymore she has to stay with him. She tries to make amends with Flor in two ways as well. She speaks out at the anti-Singapore protests so that the movement to save Flor will gain momentum, but in the end she knows she will have to stop because she is Flor’s husband’s mistress and not Flor’s sister like she claims at the rallies. The second way is that she takes the initiative to leave the husband and return to her family. This is an important step because the husband is too weak to push her out or leave her and because she is actively admitting that she was wrong to her parents by coming home. With this act, she apologizes to Flor, who is dead at this point, for causing her so much grief, to the husband for allowing him to get into trouble, and to her parents for becoming someone’s mistress instead of a wife like a mainstream, good Filipino daughter should be.
The last point is one that I feel the movie is really geared towards, namely that when a government commits an injustice by covering for themselves, they hurt the people on the lowest levels of society. It is sometimes easy to justify unfairly helping one group as something positive, but this movie brings up the point that by doing so, there is always someone else who will suffer. This is a clear criticism of foreign countries and peoples who think that they can trample on the Filipinos’ rights (or anyone’s for that matter), but also I think it could be a criticism of the Philippine government because the same concept of official abuse resulting in the citizenry suffering applies.
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