This
story is an expanded and updated version, which was originally publised in
100
Women of the Philippines by Joy Buensalido and Abe Florendo,
available
in all National Book Store branches.
Source: Mega - March 2000
100 WOMEN OF THE PHILIPPINES
Celebrating Filipina Womanhood in the New Millennium
By
(Joy
Buensalido & Abe Florendo, 1999)
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NORA AUNOR
By
Gerard Ramos
In a society still governed by traditional
concepts --- of gender roles, of family, of motherhood and so on --- Nora
Aunor, actor would be an odd entry in a list of woman role models. Her marriage
not only was short-lived but also has been dissolved. Her life has been marked
with the most sordid of rumors, ranging from lesbianism to alcohol and
substance abuse to neglect of her children.
And yet, notwithstanding all this, no such list
would be complete without the entry “Nora Aunor” --- for simply being, well,
Nora Aunor, the dark-skinned teenager from Iriga in the southern province of
Bicol who went on to not only represent what is the finest in Filipino popular
art but also embody the ideals and ideology of the nameless, faceless and
voiceless in Philippine society.
That no other showbusiness life has been as much
chronicled as hers, the story of Nora Aunor has assumed the status of myth over
every wondrous retelling, and I believe, does need yet another retelling here
but for the broadest strokes. About how the dusky “provinciana” went the
circuitous path to astonishing, awesome fame from the dusty railroad tracks
where she sold cold glasses of water to thirsty, disembarking passengers. In between
this early attempt at enterprise and family chores, she joined local singing
contests that ultimately brought her to Manila and on television as a finalist
of “Tawag ng Tanghalan.” Not long after she was proclaimed champion --- for
several months running --- of the national amateur singing competition, she
made the foray into films singing with, alternately, dwarves and Tirso Cruz
IIl.
The rest, as the cliché goes, is history.
It has been said, on occasion, that Nora Aunor
achieved greatness in her art only late in her career, in the hands of such
skilled film directors as Lino Brocka and Ishmael Bernal, as if the time frame
should diminish one’s extraordinary accomplishments. And hers, indeed, have
been exactly that, extraordinary --- unquestionably precious, and well before
people had even heard of either Brocka or Bernal. As the National Artist Nick
Joaquin himself once wrote, there was nothing mediocre about Nora Aunor even
when she was singing with dwarves.
The voice, still heralded as golden for its
clarity and timbre, is actually of limited range, scaling only up to two
octaves at best. No matter, no other music artist has enthralled and continuous
to enthrall an audience with a song as completely as Nora Aunor, whether she is
doing a cover of Florante’s “Handog” of George or Ira Gershwin’s “Embraceable
You.” There is an intelligence, a purity in her reading, in the way she tugs at
a note or a phrase with the despair of many a lovelorn night. And, always, she
is true to the spirit with which the song was written, always investing her
soul to the emotional force of the musical ode. Thus, to say that her singing
recalls the most venerable ladies in American music --- Billie Holiday, Judy
Garland, Dinah Washington --- is not an exercise in hyperbole. The great
American jazz artist Miles Davis once said, “Sometimes you can sing words every
night for years, and all of a sudden it dawns on you what the song means.”
Listening to Nora Aunor’s recordings is akin to this: an epiphanous moment that
quickly becomes a shared experience of the breadth of human emotion.
Her genius as a music artist is, perhaps,
surpassed only by her magnificence as an actor, which nobody saw as forthcoming
--- surely, not even Nora Aunor herself --- given her early works. Mostly
brainless popcorn musicals like “Blue Hawaii”, not a few maudlin melodramas
like “Ang Munting Santa.” And yet, in hindsight, one could already see a glint
of the promise now fulfilled even in as cheesy a melodrama as “Nasaan Ka, Inay”
- in those almond-shaped eyes whose expressiveness has achieved the status of
legend. They are eyes that have seen and not forgotten the hurt, the pain of
not only material deprivation but the emotional variety as well --- a treasure
trove for any actor.
And indeed, Nora Aunor has raided this trove on
more than a few occasions, yielding extraordinary performances onstage --- in
"DH" (Domestic Helper) and “Minsa’y Isang Gamu-gamo” --- and in films
now regarded as modern classics in Philippine Cinema: “Tatlong Taong Walang Diyos,”
“Minsa’y Isang Gamu-gamo,” “Atsay,” “Ina Ka ng Anak Mo,” “Bona,” “Bakit Bughaw
ang Langit,” “Bulaklak ng City Jail,” “Ang Totoong Buhay ni Pacita M.,” and
“Andrea…Paano Ba ang Maging Isang Ina?,” to name only a few. Surely, it is no
small measure of her astonishing skills as an actor that while some of these
films have dated --- to wit, “Minsa’y Isang Gamu-gamo” --- her performances
have remained absorbing, incendiary.
In this exhilarating body of work which remains
unsurpassed by any Filipino actor, bar none, the one that is perhaps the most
definitive of her genius is her awesome turn in Ishmael Bernal’s “Himala,” a
bleak, rancid portrait of our collective psychosis of religious and political
fanaticism. As the faith healer Elsa, Nora gives a performance so daring in the
ambiguity of her character strokes: by turns unprepossessing, self-possessed,
guileless, scheming, imploring, contemptuous --- as if challenging us to reject
her, all the while unshakable in her confidence that we cannot. In her performance
alone, Bernal brings home his indictment of our penchant for fanatical worship.
In one of the few conversations I had with
Bernal before his death in 1997, he confirmed that Nora was heavily favored to
win as Best Actress at the Berlin International Film festival in 1982, when
“Himala” was among the competing entries, and that she lost voting favor due to
her absence at the festivities. Most people, disheartened, that it was a
once-in-a-lifetime opportunity forever lost --- but, really, could this ever be
the case with an artist as brilliantly as Nora Aunor? More than a decade later,
in 1995, she scored yet another feat by winning the Best Actress for the
powerful “the Flor Contemplacion Story” at the Cairo International Film
Festival.
It has been assumed that, being unschooled
formally as an actor, Nora Aunor has gotten by on sheer intuition and pure
luck. The irony in this observation is that some film critics have, at one time
or another, cited her as being too intelligent to play this role or that role
--- for example, the naïve, subservient title character in Brocka’s acclaimed
“Bona,” the original copy of which is in the hands of the French, from which
the actor, who also produced the film, is working various channels to reclaim.
But I digress. That Nora is an actor who trusts her gut is true, as it is for
all other great actors, but she is fully cognizant and appreciative of the
craft involved in creating great drama.
Indeed, through much of the filming of the
award-winning Bakit May Kahapon Pa>, a riveting drama about the ravages of
Martial Law's dirty war in the countryside, I witnessed a peerless craftsman at
work: confining herself to her private room on the set, script in hand, her
focus unyielding, oblivious of the few people that were allowed into her
sanctuary. Asked about her process of character creation, Nora will only give
the barest of details, almost embarrassed to do so -- and it becomes
immediately apparent that this is not some affectation of humility but, quite
simply, because of her innate understanding that, along with the craft, there
is magic and mystery in the creation that should remain inviolable.
Of course, not everybody is a believer, and
recently Nora Aunor has seen herself attacked for her latest performances that
were supposedly too mannered, too studied to the point of remoteness, almost
routine and therefore ordinary. One tabloid entertainment writer even went so
far as to dismiss her portrayal of the speech-impaired Anna in last year's
absorbing Sidhi as being bereft of either craft or magic -- but at the same
time failed to provide an argument, even one remotely resembling, to shore up
his attack.
Are Nora Aunor's feathers still ruffled by such
biting criticism of her work? While she would be inclined to publicly shrug
this off as one of the hazards of being an actor, one can only imagine how it
impacts on an artist's emotional psyche given the intimacy involved in the
process of character creation, the repeated rape to which the craft submits the
heart and mind.
The dispassionate observer, however, is perhaps
no longer surprised by such unqualified disparagement, which is often more
telling of human foibles than the object of the attack herself. Indeed, one
need only to remember the callous dismissal of Meryl Streep's post-Sophie
Choice performances (Out of Africa in 1985, Heartburn in 1986, A Cry in the
Dark in 1988, Postcards from the Edge in 1990, The House of the Spirits in
1993) as being cold and calculated, only to have film critics lavishing praiser
on her similarly unquestionably and resolutely studied portrayals of the
forlorn Italian-born Iowa housewife in 1995's The Bridges of Madison County. Go
figure. History, as it often is, turns out to be the better judge. Consider how
all the film award-giving bodies routinely ignored Himala, and how Bernal's
masterpiece is now universally regarded as the finest film of that decade, and
this particular Nora Aunor performance as the most galvanizing ever recorded on
film.
An artist “assoluta” indeed Nora Aunor is. And
in the current landscape of an acting community all too eager to sink to
commercial vulgarity for the sake of box-office bankability, her resolute
refusal to take easy routes, even at the expense of her celebrity, is worthy of
the highest admiration. “I’ve reached point when it doesn’t matter whether I
make one film in a year as long as it’s a good project and it says something
about the human condition,” she says. “Otherwise, I’d rather go back to
theater.”
No doubt to the chagrin of her critics, Nora Aunor
has become the standard by which great performances are measured -- and, given
the dearth of her heir apparents, will remain so for so many years. even at
this period of her career that is blighted, they say, by dissipation and
eroding celebrity, Nora Aunor has become the standard by which great
performances are measured, and given, the dearth of heir apparents, will remain
so for many years.
To the masses that have worshipped her through
decades, however, Nora Aunor will forever remain emblematic of not only their
dreams but also their possibilities. From the muddy railroad tracks of Iriga
she had risen to triumph in aworld painfully indicative of our colonial
history--and triumph, indeed, in a fashion never seen before or since. In doing
so, she jolted us, perhaps more than any political figure in the last century,
from a decades-long inferiority over the skin which we were born. Nora's
unprecedented achievements since her rise to the nosebleed heights of celebrity
stardom have only reinforced our potential for greatness.
Even in this period of diminished celebrity, as
her critics like to call it, the brown-skinned former water vendor turned
Superstar continues to define the times in which we live, these days not so
much through her professional choices bu in our regard for the same. In the
same way that Nora Aunor represents the infinite possibilities before us
people, she now also reflects, in our unfortunate reaction to her ever-questing
artistry, the moral bankruptcy to which we seem inexorably headed.
For this, Nora Aunor, the finest artist in
Philippine entertainment, cannot be regarded simply as a role model. She is a
woman continually essential --- to our dreams, to our conscience.
