Early on in “Yellow Rose,” a drama about a Filipina teenager named Rosario “Rose” Garcia, Rose (Eva Noblezada) is browsing the jukebox at the Broken Spoke, an old-school Texan country music bar. An older, white man approaches her and points out something about the Willie Nelson song she’s eyeing. Rose, a hard-core country fan herself, promptly schools him on his trivia.
“That’s impressive,” the man answers. “From someone like you.”
Rose smiles. “Well, there are all kinds of fans.”
The man is Dale Watson (as himself), an icon of the Austin country scene. As the events of “Yellow Rose” unfold, Watson, along with a cast of white allies, helps Rose find her voice. Watson even becomes a father figure to Rose. Yet this exchange, where Watson is amused that “someone like her” – i.e., a brown girl – could ever possibly know things about country music, never comes up again.
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Such is the befuddling logic of this first narrative feature from documentarian Diane Paragas. On its face, it is a drama about a girl battling racism and navigating her identity: She and her mother (Princess Punzalan) are undocumented immigrants, and she must decide whether to continue dodging ICE in small-town Texas or return to the Philippines. Yet “Yellow Rose” has its protagonist blindly rely on white people to an extent that stretches credulity.
Her love interest – and the only other substantial teenage character in the film – is Elliot (Liam Booth), the inoffensively cute white boy who works at the music shop. Her mentor is Watson, who kicked off their relationship by saying something racist. When she is run out of her home, Rose quickly gives up on staying with her mother’s childhood friend (Lea Salonga), instead turning to Jolene (Libby Villari), the owner of the Broken Spoke, for help. Rose has never spoken to this white, proud Texan woman before, yet she immediately tells her that she is undocumented.
Rose is even spared, in one particularly galling scene, by an ambivalent, white ICE agent.
The white savior trope is hardly a new concept in film criticism, but white savior films typically focus on white protagonists swooping in on downtrodden, black and brown sidekicks – Sandra Bullock in “The Blind Side,” Hilary Swank in “Freedom Writers,” Viggo Mortensen in “Green Book.” “Yellow Rose” feels like an especially troubling addition to the trope because its Filipina protagonist actively seeks out white, mostly male help, and because no other options are made available to her in the world of the film.
Imagine how much more nuanced Rose’s story could be if her love interest was a person of color, or even if that ICE agent scene – if it must exist – took place between two non-white characters. The film would even feel more three-dimensional if her country mentor was simply a woman, or a white outsider of any kind. It would certainly feel less insulting to see our protagonist – again, an undocumented woman being actively pursued by ICE – sing songs with lines like, “The skin I’m livin’ in don’t feel at home to me,” in harmony with said mentor.
Despite the way some of them are staged, the film’s musical performances are by far its greatest asset. (And despite the problem he poses as a character in the film, its outstanding original songs were nearly all written or co-written by Dale Watson.) Lead Eva Noblezada, best known for scoring two Tony nominations before the age of 24, is an astounding singer, and she lends her voice a charming, Partonesque warble for this role. Though she isn’t the best choice for this quiet film’s protagonist – her dramatic choices in its more serious scenes would undoubtedly play better on stage – she is clearly most at home when she sings.
“Yellow Rose” sounds and looks beautiful. Cinematographer August Thurmer lights each shot expertly, and scales the film’s many intimate moments down for maximum tenderness. The soundtrack will be a must-stream when it debuts. But the content at its heart does a disservice to the viewers and, most importantly, to its protagonist. As the script flattens Rose out through a series of bizarre, feel-good narrative choices, she becomes less and less comprehensible. [C]