STRIPPERS AND PSYCHO: THE NEW WOMEN OF THE ‘90S

Noel Vera, Manila Chronicle, 1996

“Bakit May Kahapon Pa?” is equal parts “The Official Story” and “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle” with a sprinkling of “Blown Away.” Nora Aunor plays a woman traumatized by the massacre of her family backs in the ‘70s --- the Marcos era, the movie implies but never states directly. She plans revenge on the army officer responsible (Eddie Garcia) by renting the house next to his and becoming close friends with his granddaughter (Melisse Santiago), to the point that the child prefers Aunor to her own mother (Dawn Zulueta). Zulueta in turn is taping a series of video interviews to give her father for his birthday; she learns from the interviews that her clean-cut father is actually a cold-blooded mass murderer responsible for the death of hundreds during the Marcos regime. Meanwhile, Aunor plants bombs around Garcia’s house like so many Easter eggs; the film’s end has the house (or a reasonable facsimile of it) blowing up in a literally explosive climax.

The film is a vehicle for Ms. Aunor, and while it’s a pleasure to see on her screen again (it always is), you wish she had a snazzier set of wheels. The mix of psycho-thriller movie and political drama is, to put it politely, unusual. Less politely, it’s cappuccino-flavored spaghetti sauce: the film’s politics drags the thriller elements to a halt, while the thriller elements tend to cheapen the film’s political content.

Carl Sagan once said: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” Well, extraordinary storylines require extraordinarily careful details before we can believe in them, and the filmmakers haven’t given the movie that kind of care. Aunor’s character is a hodgepodge of frustrated maternal instincts, psychosis, and arbitrary religious fanaticism. As written, she doesn’t make sense; despite all of Aunor’s talent, the character refuses to become real enough to believe in.

It doesn’t help that the movie’s premise is shot full of holes. Aunor has too easy a time carrying out her plan: she rents the General’s guest of honor with few questions asked, and undergoes, no more than a cursory background check. Which is unbelievable; I’ve yet to know a military man who was so trusting (or foolish). She wins the child’s love with hugs, a bag of candies, and a doll; the next thing you know, the child is screaming “I hate you!” at her mother and grandfather. You wonder if the child is either a) emotionally unstable; b) improbably gullible; or c) just following the script, so don’t hold it against her.

Nora Aunor’s performance here is far more restrained than in “The Flor Contemplacion Story,” which, frankly, is over-the-top; what you miss is the potent magic of Aunor performing for a great director. Aunor, first and foremost, is our most cinematic actress: the camera loves her with a near-sexual intensity. Aunor giving speeches and shouting in defiance and going through pages and pages of unnecessarily expository dialogue is all very well and good, but it’s when she’s silent that she’s transfixing. Director Joel Lamangan knows this; he gives her plenty of opportunities to turn her profile and burn holes in the camera lens. But Aunor in the hands of Lino Brocka, or Ishmael Bernal, or Mario O’Hara --- they hold her back carefully, grudgingly, like a miser clutching a golden coin; then, at the moment of greatest tension, she’s unleashed. The result is incandescent cinema, as you can see in the films like “Bona,” or “Himala,” or “Condemned,” or “Bulaklak sa City Jail,” or (probably) her finest performance) “Tatlong Taong Walang Diyos.”

Lamangan seems to know the Communist movement well; he puts in careful details like Aunor training with explosives and handguns (when she shoots, however, you don’t see any recoil; she might be using a water pistol). There’s a wedding ritual between Aunor and her lover (a fine, understated Daniel Fernando) that has the feel of authenticity. He’s on weaker ground with the military, which is largely dismissed, as a band of gun-happy gargoyles. It’s up to the enormously talented Eddie Garcia to give his role as the General whatever complexity he can muster. Garcia does his best: he pitches his voice low and insinuating, and when he looms over you, he can be as oppressive as an approaching thunderstorm. He almost succeeds, but the role is much too underwritten. At one point he rips open his shirt and shows his daughter the scars he earned in battle. It’s an embarrassingly melodramatic gesture; worse it’s a halfhearted play for sympathy. Lamangan is too clearly on the side of the rebels to make you want to feel much for Garcia.

The rest of the cast is a mixed bag: Melisse Santiago, so good in “Segurista,” doesn’t fare well here; Rolando Tinio is casually hilarious as a priest who acts as Aunor’s father confessor (you wonder, though, what their scenes together have to do with the rest of the movie); Dawn Zulueta is characteristically wan and uncharismatic; Irma Adlawan is intense but sadly underused; Alain Sia again abundantly demonstrates, as he did in “Ang Pinakamagandang Hayop sa Balat ng Lupa,” why he shouldn’t be in the movies.

Romy Vitug once more dazzles with masterful lighting and camera moves. Lamangan tries to top his work in “Flor Contemplacion;” he goes for virtuoso images, but as in “Flor,” he seems unable to connect the images with clarity or any sense of rhythm. When a military officer and his wife are assassinated, for example, Aunor kills the wife with a suddenness that’s more confusing than shocking. Roy Yglesias’ script, aside from the faults mentioned earlier, relies too much on dialogue: the scene where Zulueta confronts her father is an endless series of moral posturing and exposition. Yglesias, however, may not be totally at fault; during the premiere of the film, he reportedly claimed that this wasn’t the script he wrote. He originally thought of a simple revenge picture, the subplot about the military killings was imposed later.

For all my complaining, “Bakit” is admittedly a more passionate and ambitious film than the standardized product of Hollywood assembly lines; take “Striptease,” for example.

A stripper and a psychotic, playing side-by-side in our cineplexes. If aliens landed in Megamall the day after tomorrow, I shudder to think the impression we might give them of the two women of the ‘90s, watching these two films.