By
Tito Genova Valiente
Reeling
Business
Mirror
May
27, 2015
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Source:
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ON June 16 Nora
Aunor will receive the Natatanging Gawad Urian. The award recognizes and
celebrates the actor’s body of works in cinema.
It has been a long
journey for Nora Aunor from the time she sang with dwarfs at the backyard in a
film that was more about the lack of magic in our life, to essaying the role of
a mother searching for life in the valley of death in the aftermath of a most
terrible storm. It is one huge filmic arc that, despite the lows in personal
life, sustains a high in acting unseen heretofore in this industry.
As always and even
with the expectations by the many, when the award was formally and officially
announced by the Manunuri ng Pelikulang
Pilipino, there were sectors who asked that the recognition be justified. The
question is not impertinent; the question merely demanded an answer.
And there are many
answers.
There is the
social history of cinema. Before Nora, there was the dominant ideology that
required all actresses to be fair-skinned, tall and beautiful in the Caucasian
way. More than the physical appearance, these actresses had to flesh out roles
that conformed to the template of the idealized woman, the one who would do
everything to keep the home intact. The actress/woman’s duty was to maintain
along with the home her virginity, if she was not married, and her purity, if
she was a wife or a mother. The allure of the leading lady was that she was
part of the breathtaking landscape. The force to reckon with was this woman who
was lovely in her fragility because the men around her were robust in
masculinity. When Nora came, even early in those silly musicals, she stood
there passive-aggressive in simplicity and unadorned humility. If she had
purity, it was shrouded in sincerity that bordered on the naive. The Great Unwash, if we may use the term, was
making herself heard. The voice was Nora’s and the body was instinct and
genius.
Came 1976. The
Manunuri ng Pelikulang Pilipino, battling what it perceived to be the lack of
ardent film criticism (and we are not even talking about the absence of an
institutionalized film education), rose to the occasion with a radical choice
and chose Nora Aunor as its very first Best Actress. The film was Tatlong Taong
Walang Diyos. The story was set in the Second World War; the enemy was played
by a matinee idol about to become a multiawarded actor. Nora played Rosario,
leading lady in form but in content a complex person who would sleep with the
enemy and allow the generation of audiences to ask the unsettling question: Was
that our war we died for?
It was the new
world. The country was rushing away from the memories of the Great War. Japan,
the grand nemesis in many war films, was becoming a superpower. It was time to
dilute or question the collective memory. It was time for the leading lady to
question life by embodying all the complexities of love, loyalty and fealty to
a nation. Even if in the end, Nora Aunor’s Rosario dies and the notion of the
nation as a punisher is promoted, we see the audacity of an actress to embrace
what all leading actresses of the period avoided: to die at the end of the
movie.
Nora, already a
phenomenon at the time, became an actor in Tatlong Taong Walang Diyos.
It is often a
question I ask: Are the fans of Nora Aunor aware that in most of her heralded
portrayals, Nora inhabits roles that are duplicitous and convoluted, tortured
and twisted in her understanding of the commonly acceptable valuations of roles
and mores in society? Nora taught us the sins of the world not by denying them
but by displaying the ineptitude and incoherence.
In Bona, Nora
Aunor is this daughter who will never be the ideal member of a Filipino family.
It is thus, the vindication of community values when Bona is mauled by her
brother when she tries to sneak into the house so she could view the remains of
her father. It is our fear and shame that this insensibility will befall upon
us and Nora is the persona to show us all this. The show is not the crass,
sentimental plot about a fallen woman played with flamboyance by Rita Gomez and
Charito Solis, but a quirky ballet about religion, fanaticism and the tragedy
that shuttles between poverty and identity.
For all the
tremendous mystery of the apparition, Elsa in Himala will declare at the end
not only the absence of miracles but the end of transcendence. “Tao ang
gumagawa ng himala.” Man makes miracles. Leave it to Nora Aunor and her amazing
thespic range that each pause, each taking in of the breath brings us to wonder
if we could really believe her Elsa. If we believe in the Virgin Mary appearing
before the simple girl, then we are the accomplice to a church that upholds the
divine vision; if we affirm Elsa’s declaration that there is no miracle, then
we are at the mercy of a cult. It is a baffling situation and Nora is part of
the puzzle, never completing for us the picture because we are ourselves part
of the big picture.
Faith is both
shaken and stirred in Himala. A film that brings out of the closet all the
tricks of apparitions and faith healing is also the film that represents who we
are as people in religion. At the center of this order and peace is this wisp
of a woman—unpredictable as a person but predictably excellent as an actor—who
unfolds her own mysteries before relentless cameras that never seem to get
enough because the actor before the lenses hides and shades her own tremor as a
human being. That is acting, that is incarnation, when the word is made flesh
and is made to dwell among the viewers.
The new
performance and the seeming lack of fear and bias toward any roles enabled
critics to look at the performance than the celebrity, the role rather than the
royalty. It is late 197os and the military rules but the new film criticism is
born, addressing without timidity and this time without question the politics
not only of films but of those who make the films.
The extracinematic
is born. Nora Aunor’s character in the film is judged within the context of the
plot and the resolutions. The same character is investigated following Nora’s
fandom, her personal stories, and her politics that while critiqued for unpredictability
are, otherwise, always sustained by a sense of daring and independence, even
recklessness, rarely seen within the perfumed enclaves of show business. The
lines between the reel and the real are once more blurred, this time not for
the invasion of the actor’s privacy but for an incursion into her politics and
psychology.
If there is a
milestone in the career of Nora as an actor, it was in her gradual shift to
portraying roles that stopped addressing the vagaries and vulgarities of
commerce.
Nora Aunor’s
career swung from those monster box-office hits (that satisfied many) to films
that did not cause lines to form outside theatres but inside the minds of the
enlightened, Nora’s public who care to learn from this most popular of art
forms, the movies.
With the roles and
films, there was ultimately the formation of new ways of reading cinema. Nora
was still the leading lady but there was no more the leading man. In fact, her
leading ladies led only because she was Nora Aunor in the film; otherwise, in
the narrative they were peripheral personas, not template for good behavior but
trails to a forest of symbols. The characters are not always likeable, better
for us to look at how life can be unfair and, well, better. Without us knowing
it, Nora has lifted the contravida from the dark side of the stock and the
stereotype into the center, the spotlight of importance for us to contemplate
both the evil and the good, for us to savor the grays and the anomalous, those
inscrutable in-betweens that mark us imperfect, human.
In Thy Womb,
Shaleha the midwife holds the child that her husband had fathered with another
woman. She praises the heavens but could not let go of the infant. When she
does, the camera follows the sky. The woman is lost in the eternity that appears
to be made for man. Before we got there, we are treated to how an actor
suffuses the screen with awesome ordinariness that appears only ordinary
because the mind behind those gestures has the gift to make the everyday
profound.
Which came first,
good criticism or good film? That, of course, is a chicken-and-egg predicament.
What is clear is that there is a Nora Aunor, whose manifold characters can
bring in a slew of questions. Love her or leave her; take her or leave her.
Good critics can disagree with her, dispute the best and worst in her but no
good critic can ignore Nora Aunor in cinema. Ever.
Nora Aunor is the
Natatangi, separate, singular, distinct for the Manunuri ng Pelikulang
Pilipino.
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