Source: http://www.businessmirror.com.ph/index.php/en/lifestyle/show/19877-the-narrow-road-to-perdition-and-redemption-the-story-of-mabuti
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“Bilang
tagapagtaguyod ng realism sa pelikula, ang pangaral ay wala sa estetika
ni de Guzman.”—Bienvenido Lumbera reviewing Mes de Guzman’s Diablo
What Bienvenido
Lumbera, a member of the Manunuri ng Pelikulang Pilipino and National
Artist, is saying is that as a purveyor of a kind of cinematic realism,
being didactic is not part of Mes de Guzman’s aesthetics. The film Diablo from
last year won the Gawad Urian for Best Screenplay and established de
Guzman as a major voice of Philippine cinema, indie or not.
And now, he is the strong and wonderful voice behind a film titled Ang Kwento ni Mabuti.
The film cannot be described merely as a morality tale for that
description would diminish the pungency of this film. That would make
this work of de Guzman common. To read the story of Mabuti is to travel
on the narrow road to sin and salvation without being Catholic or
Christian. For that is not the only route for persons. The film does not
tread on the path of any Biblical passages. What it has is a
confrontation with nature, to cite one example, and what it offers is a
reading of the rumbling or rains from the sky as having meaning more
significant than, well, clouds and rains and hailstorm.
The
film begins with Mabuti trudging on a hilly path, the mountains and sky
and clouds witnesses to her walk. I say witnesses because that is how
we were brought up to divine the divine from things bigger and mightier
than ourselves. The mountains are arid and the sky is silent but we are
free to interpret heavens and transcendence, or even the wrath of the
divine coming from the surroundings.
This is the irony of
the film: that we search for moral lessons and scary warnings from what
have been pushed to the corner as the murmur of metaphysics. We have the
physis here, the matter by which we create our notion of what is
correct or appropriate. If there is something that rises above the
physical, then it is the art of the filmmaker and that of its leading
actor, Nora Aunor. This is enough. This is more than enough than all the
moralizing put together by those who require moral lessons from any
cinematic outing.
The role of Mabuti is
ordinary. She is a woman content with life in an isolated village. Her
world is inhabited by her grandchildren left there by a daughter who, it
seems, falls in love easily. That emotion ends always with the daughter
pregnant again and again.
With a different man
each time. But we cannot judge this daughter because Mabuti, the mother,
does not. Mabuti’s mother, the children’s great-grandmother, does the
judging. But it is no more a moral commentary than a gripe for the
difficulties of life. Mabuti understands her mother and, in fact,
embraces her after discussion with all the care and tenderness of a
loving daughter. This is unconditional love never presented before with
such tremendous silence and grip.
It is, however, the
absence of moral judgment from the perspective of the protagonist,
Mabuti, that burdens us once more to contemplate what Catherine Wheatley
calls the “ethic of image.” Reviewing the cinema of Michael Haneke,
Wheatley talks of the “act of spectatorship as a morally charged act.”
Wheatley, in the same
paper, tells us of the process of this act: “...the position of moral
spectatorship that Haneke creates for the audience has its own rewards.
For it teaches us freedom of consciousness and allows us a position
where we neither impose our own experiences on the film, nor allow film
to impose itself on us.”
Indeed, we are all
spectators in the unfolding of the tale of Mabuti. Indeed, we are aware
of the extraordinarily ordinary spectacle of a woman so poor that her
only wealth is tied to an unmovable property: land—and that land is
about to be confiscated.
De Guzman offers a
concept of good and evil that is historical. The crisis of Mabuti is
linked to something that exists outside but near the village of her
birth. This is the contribution of the film: Mabuti’s trials are common,
regular and real. We can meet them ourselves and grapple with them,
given our own religion, although the director does not say that, or
given our economic statuses, which the film does not underscore.
In the much-honored film Thy Womb,
film readers spoke of cinema as ethnography. The literature of
documentations, however, will remind us that ethnographic accounts are
ahistorical, as if the story is always in that pristine state of
narrative. Thus, the term “ethnographic present.” If that is the kind of
filmmaking that de Guzman engages in, then he is not into the discourse
of realism. But, as we say, he is realistic, the director who,
according to Lumbera, props up realism.
Is this realism about
moral choices? I do not offer any answer. The absence of an answer is
itself an answer. The many answers are also allowed as answers. As with
life, ambiguity is not exotic but given. There are no clear choices for
if there are, the mountains will not stare at Mabuti, the skies will not
give a distant rumble, and the rains will not bring ice to a tropical
village.
The mountains are
almost sacred at the beginning, not because they are but because our own
belief systems have made them holy when contemplated. The hailstorm,
however, that brings about the shower of ice is imagined by the children
as a fitting ingredient for halo-halo. The mundane and the fantastic,
the regular and the uncommon mix in a profusion of magical impressions.
In Diablo a mother who
waits for her children to come and be with her look at the walls at
night. But we are the spectator in that it is us who see the shadows.
The forebodings are for us; the moral quandary is with us. This is the
same feeling one gets when viewing Ang Kuwento ni Mabuti.
Ours is a gift and the shackle of omniscience, a wonderful if not
bothersome treat from a story that is as real as any contemporary
depiction of reality.
In these problems
about reality, we meet characters like the “Kapitan,” the barangay
leader who hides the counting of jueteng bets at the back of his house.
He is assisted by a young man who is startled by the routine. We meet
along the way, for the road seems to be opening and closing always in
Mabuti’s terrain, the two young men. One assists the other who gets
bitten by dogs and snakes. Then there is the mother of Mabuti, a loving
tyrant supported by tradition, and a brother whose long journeys are
bound to become metaphors about fate rather than business trips.
Josephina Estabillo as
Guyang, the great grandma, is a reassuring presence. She is about the
wonder and wisdom of aging. Arnold Reyes drops the gestures and the
facial twitches and disappears with each journey as his character blends
with the practical horizon. Sue Prado, as always, is the master of the
common appearances. One remembers her because her life is short. As with
any event in other people’s lives. Outside of the actors are the
characterizations created by de Guzman. I think of the military men
preparing the bed for a poor peasant. In that image, one is burdened
with the goodness of soldiers caught in the crossfire of violent
stereotypes of the benign versus the malignant.
Still, we cannot talk
of Mabuti, the character so simple and regular, without talking of Nora
Aunor. It is because Nora Aunor is Nora Aunor that a piece of cinema
about the grandeur of the everyday succeeds. I cannot think of any actor
who can perform for us an exercise about how life is sumptuous and
gripping in its familiarity. And, I cannot imagine any other actor who
has reached such maturity than Nora Aunor as Mabuti. This is a different
actor, smiling with all the candor of a common tao, grieving because
there is a loss, no more and no less, derived of a moral compass because
life as real is more complex than any reading of values.
Clutching a bag full
of money the amount of which could save her family from poverty, Nora
Aunor as Mabuti stops at her tracks. She pauses and looks up. That
glance, that ceasing teases us to read signs on the aridity of the
landscape. But there are no signs. There are no symbols. The absence of
commentary makes us want to cry. Have we been abandoned by that we know
as the Almighty? Are we to take care of ourselves? We wait for the light
to shine upon this lone character but de Guzman is virulently
realistic. The narrative moves on. Mabuti goes through the habit of
life. The daily work, the absence of sound, the laxity of
conversations—all this Nora Aunor as Mabuti distills into one astutely
peaceful performance.
That night of the
premiere, the presence of Gil Portes and Joel Lamangan was announced.
This is an interesting footnote to Nora Aunor’s career. The two
directors are poles apart in helping the actor craft a character. The
sublime silence in the character of the nurse played by Aunor in ‘Merika
now stands out when remembered against the theatrically engaged
delineation of the many characters of the films done by Lamangan with
the thespian. Nora Aunor, it seems, has come full circle. She has become
the high priestess of the difficultly prosaic, presiding over tales
that warn and wonder and wail—if need be.
Cesar Hernando does
the effective production design of the film. Mes de Guzman writes the
screenplay and directs. The film was honored with the prizes for Best
Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay for de Guzman in the first
CineFilipino Awards.
In Photo:
The legendary and multiawarded Nora Aunor turns in another
exceptionally sublime performance as the title character in Ang Kwento
ni Mabuti. The Superstar has become the high priestess of the
difficultly prosaic, presiding over tales that warn and wonder and
wail—if need be.
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