BEYOND THE NORANIAN BLUES

Source: Songs of Nora Aunor

By MYKE U. OBENIETA

Sun.Star Cebu

Bulls never go extinct as long as bullies exist. One of them in our midst may even assume the appearance of a president. Never mind if he were hell-bent on making us believe a lamb would have suited him fine, especially with his silence after the sly rearing of his horns. Thus he butted his head against the heroine who have long been lionized for being not only authentic but also audacious in exceeding our expectation on the role of the underdog.

Rabid, thus the rapt devotees of Nora Aunor are sometimes described as if her magic were madness. Ah, Noranians! Such name-calling does spit-fly with contempt, as if stomping merry at the parade of her prodigious talents were the "bakya"—this bamboo slippers worn rough-shod by an evil boar in many a grandmother’s tale when the moon loomed monstrous. But such labeling some of us wear like a badge of honor, having made sense in awe at the way she has been an inspiration: conquering the challenges of her humble origin and desecrating our culture’s colonially enshrined template of celebrity while breaching the boundaries of music, television, film, and theater.

See how her transcendent streak has figuratively incarnated the legend of the cat’s nine lives long after her career had yielded more than her fair share of tragedies and tabloid muck over alleged misdemeanors. Even her bane turned out to be a boon for stand-up mimics who have milked her misfortunes dry. Through it all, recklessly genius and irrepressibly genuine, she has blazed forth a formidable body of work that orients us into the wonder of witnessing not so much who she is but who we are as a nation, casting light on the complexity of our identities, if not the neurosis out of our historical ironies. And she’s still here, hailed as world-class actress with her unprecedented achievements in various international film festivals. As pop-culture scholars waxed exultant of her significance—short of appropriating Edith Piaf, Meryl Streep, and Barbra Streisand into her larger-than-life dimension—posterity may yet reveal how she has survived the fate of her contemporaries in showbiz, or how its bizarre power has transmogrified their flair for pretense into a mania for politics. Meanwhile, she continues to show us what makes her tick: defiant, defining timelessness.

At 61, she is collaborating with the country’s best directors in at least five new projects even as her old films get resurrected for special screenings. Her brother may have been mistaken for a pig in one of her iconic films, but no way she’ll be misjudged as a sloth either. For real, she has even become the pet peeve of the country’s most powerful man who has unceremoniously erased her honor as National Artist despite resounding affirmations from the panel of experts he summoned for the selection process. Failing her, he succeeded only to make her more newsworthy—a figure of “national interest” which his spokesperson invoked as essential to his discretionary power of defining the last word in the epic paradox between legality and morality. Alas, indiscretion becomes him as the disgrace of presidential prejudice against her has disrespected not just the virtue of due process but more so the value of nationhood exemplified by the massive evidence of her acclaimed body of work that has nourished our culture’s soul. Something indisputable, indeed, as early as 1983 when she was named one of the Ten Outstanding Women in the Nation’s Service (TOWNS) for her artistic output. She made history again in 1999 when the Cultural Center of the Philippines awarded her the Centennial Honors for the Arts: the only actress among “100 premiere Filipinos” that included the painter Juan Luna, the scholar Resil Mojares, and most of the country’s National Artists.

Lesser mortals, of course, can only hope at best to become president. Or, a “political animal” whose “considerations in choosing National Artists may include factors other than artistry,” according to the lawyer of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA) in defense of Aunor’s honor. The lawyer’s distinction may as well sum up the president’s problem out of his impulses—destructive, uncreative, divisive. Thus, while the din of protests over his disrespect of Aunor seems to drown out the persistent drone of other national issues, what’s amplified is his sense of absence— this untamed creature of his own cluelessness. Small wonder he can’t be trusted to be his sister’s keeper, at least, to spare us her litter out of the merry spectacle of her mediocrity. As for his execrable exercise in defacing the Noranian monument, even a dimwit can see that Nora Aunor’s initial is inescapably National Artist. No need for magnifying lens. As for the president, whose full name, is Benigno Simeon, well…. we don’t have to spell out what BS also means. (geemyko@gmail.com)

SIMPLY SUPERNATURAL

REVIEW: The gospel of Mabuti and Mes de Guzman

By Michael U. Obenieta

It takes a miracle to make things appear utterly simple. Even mountains can move, no sweat, as if such spectacle were as unobtrusive as Basho's frog splashing into a pond. If only prayers for our individual or social ills could ripple with such ease, imperturbable and impervious from the complications of faith and hope. Recall the rumpus of worship and wishful thinking at the end of Ishmael Bernal's classic 'Himala'---the crowd still dragging themselves on bended knees hard on the heels of a riot, returning to the hill where deception and its deadly consequence only raised the needy's stakes for redemption.

Deliverance is the driving force that propels the dramatic tension in Mes de Guzman's 'Ang Kwento ni Mabuti.' Obviously allegorical, its titular protagonist lives up to the lightness of being good-natured, bearing with equanimity everything gone bad in her family and around her community in the boondocks. Never mind if her luckless children have left her with four granddaughters to feed on top of her sickly mother even as they are threatened with eviction from their land. Where she's famous for her kindness and her folksy remedies, her generosity and gladness are not always full of grace. This paradox--jam-packed in a country so blessed with natural bounty and inner resources of cheer but accursed with wasted opportunities and desperate need--epitomizes Mabuti's epic struggle as well. No less Sisyphean, indeed, is Mabuti's unassuming stance of standing true to Pollyanna's optimism. That goodness will prevail is another story, however, especially as long as the rock and roll of a self-centered culture persists along with the narrative of inequity, inescapable like the maddening cult of greed in our midst.

In medias res, Mabuti's tale begins. She is trudging uphill, out to untangle herself from a burden--a bagful of cash that fate may as well have plunked on her lap as good as a cosmic prank. Along the way she meets the village chieftain's minion who seemed weighed down by the windfall from his lord's unholy sidelines, always stumped in his menial task of counting money (from illegal gambling, probably). He and Mabuti may as well be two sides of the same coin, tossed where evil is rooted deep under a climate of corruption. Looks like it's going to rain, he told her. The rest is her story. The push of self-interest and the pull of conscience. The blurring of distances between right and wrong, unsettling her sense of direction. Where the uncertain weather stews the days and shifts to a night's shower of hail, the roads are also treacherous either in the wake of landslides or in the throes of insurgency and criminality that dispel the dreamy notion of an idyllic countryside. Beware of being lost, or sidetracked.

Finding a way out whether to let go of the bag or to hold on, Mabuti always ends up taking a detour until the very end, steered by circumstances beyond her will and always providential in its unexpected intervention--a downpour on the road, a military operation, a death in the family. The drift of her judgment and decision can only be a mere wave or raindrop in the oceanic scheme of things. In the mist-steeped mountains of Aritao that appear true to the Japanese mystics' mindset of "ukiyo" or floating world, everything looks impermanent. Or, unreal as the fog-filled landscape, it whittles down to the size and substance of a dewdrop not only Mabuti's ordinary life and the social realities around her but also our notions of morality.

Ethics, indeed, becomes riveting when we reckon at its ironies. Like hell, the road to disorientation and disappointment is paved with good intention. Self-proclaimed public servants, like the film's small-town politician, are fond of talking about taking their constituents to a higher ground until plunder (such as the pork barrel controversy, for instance) bogs the whole country down. So it comes to pass that incongruity of underdevelopment in the midst of plenty hounds the body politic, threatening collective infection.

Healing is hardly complicated. Handy does it in the case of the false visionary in Bernal's masterpiece (1982) and de Guzman's honest-to-goodness heroine (2013). Both film's healers portrayed by Nora Aunor, one only had to shut her eyes with a Marian devotee's silent invocation and the other merely chattered away with an unblinking animistic belief in the power of a white stone (after all, every object has a soul). Whether in the desert plains of Ilocos or in the denuded hinterlands of Nueva Vizcaya--both milieus serving as a stark metaphor for the nation's festering maladies of marginalization--Aunor reaffirms her artistry that is nothing short of supernatural. In both films, reminiscent of the rigor with which she fleshed out her finest collaboration with Lino Brocka and Mario O'Hara as well as Gil Portes' 'Merika' and Brillante Mendoza's 'Thy Womb', Aunor becomes a purifying force, forging a performance that is almost surgical in its precision to purge itself from artifice. Thus she she embodies authenticity as a source of comfort, stirring into clarity the context of her characterization as she blends like second skin into the familiar particulars of place and its people. She may as well be a non-actor, a detail in a documentary, or an echo from the stillness of a haiku.

Less is more. This Zen sensibility certainly reflects the aesthetics of de Guzman whose previous works, prickly with portents of conflict, are at once serene in its unhurried fluidity and studded with hints of revelations in spite of its spare visuals. Indeed, de Guzman's grasp of his material provides an antidote to the pompous contrivance of image and message that is the bane of most filmmakers too reliant on technique. With a cinematic design devoid of clutter and organic in its immersion with nature, de Guzman's narrative does not impose moral judgments on its situations and its inhabitants, intuiting as he does a sage-like capacity for sympathy. In mapping Mabuti's journey, de Guzman renders her dilemma to its sociospatial dimension or the contextual interweave of the individual and the collective. Insinuating "mono no aware" or the pathos of things even in the upbeat prospect of becoming an instant millionaire, Mabuti unmasks de Guzman's grin in bearing the sadness inherent in the world owing to its impermanence.

To the extent that de Guzman has written the most down-to-earth character in Aunor's fertile filmography so far, his lightness of touch has also suffused her creation with a sense of levity, an effervescence that assumes an air of levitation. No less magical is his evocation of a mini-Greek chorus for Mabuti with the contrapuntal voices of her cranky mother and her chirpy granddaughters, providing a tonal tapestry through her gaiety, grief, and grit en route to a state of grace. Such notes of uplift, though abundant in its instances, are handled with such intricacy as to be almost inconspicuous. These moments of rapture, for those keeping the faith for a cinema of meditation enshrined by the likes of de Guzman, are enough tell-tale signs of a true miracle.

A FILMIC FEAST. A TRIPLE TREAT!

Now and forever, a faithful testimony of timeless art.
A documentary directed by Sari Dalena and Keith Sicat. 

By: MICHAEL U. OBENIETA

THY WOMB starring Ms. Nora Aunor

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Source: http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.230160597114827.58126.102939136503641&type=1

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"Himala" (Miracle) remains potent ever since it started to enthrall its audience 30 years ago. The magic continues under the directorial spell of Ishmael Bernal (National Artist for Film) along with the alchemy of Ricardo Lee's hypnotic writing and a brew of production values that are nothing short of heavenly, especially the ethereal presence of Ms. Nora Aunor who just reaffirmed her status as a world-class actress through her latest film, "Thy Womb."

Star Cinema's re-mastered edition of the Ishmael Bernal
masterpiece--honored at the Asia Pacific Screen Awards (APSA)
in 2009 as the "Best Asia-Pacific Film of All Time" by CNN viewers
--got a royal treatment when it was showcased among classics of world cinema at the Venice International Film Festival 2012.

Written and edited by Ricardo Lee,
one of the Philippines's top screenwrights,
a book with an insider look.

The old poster, circa 1982.