Patrick Flores, Manila Times, 1996

Film It, And They Won’t Come

The classic case, of course, is “Sister Stella L.” which was battered black and blue by “Bukas Luluhod ang mga Tala” in the turbulent anti-Marcos month of July 1984. Vilma Santos’ activist nun takes up the cross of striking workers, but audiences might have felt that Sharon Cuneta’s heroine who sings her way to wealth had held out the more compelling hope.

The most recent variation on the theme is “Mumbaki,” which was clobbered at the box office by “Madrasta.” Raymart Santiago’s Ifugao doctor-shaman grapples with the dilemma of identity, but the public might have believed that Sharon Cuneta’s stepmother who wends her way into the heart of a family by sobbing endlessly had embodied the more real perturbation.

And now this: the movie version of TV soap opera champion “Mara Clara” beats Nora Aunor’s “Bakit May Kahapon Pa?” to a pulp, and it’s as if we’re surprised. Nora seeks justice for her family and townmates who had been massacred by a heartless General, but the fans might have though the sight of Judy Ann Santos and Gladys Reyes scrounging for each other’s faces is the more resonant of the times.

Nora’s film is significant if only because it is the most compelling anti-military film under a military presidency. What saps the film of its vigor is its failure to invest memory with a transformative spirit. While the film does not forget the past, it does not really remember---that is to say, reconstruct the heroine’s life in the content of historical change a possible future. “Trauma” here, as in Mario O’Hara’s film noir exercise “Fatima Buen,” is appropriated as an aesthetic device which fleshes out psychosis, and puts in place of the genre requirements of a suspense thriller. But unlike O’Hara’s better film noir experiments in “Bulaklak sa City Jail” and “Condemned,” Joel Lamangan’s film is not able to constitute the character’s memory with the dimensions of social progress. We are quite sure that Nora’s traumatized persona has undergone revision in light of her entry into the larger world beyond her barrio, her adolescence, her membership to the NPA, her dealings with the parish priest, her profession as a real state broker. What we mean is that “trauma” is dealt with, and does not presuppose a continuity that endures without being rearticulated.

But the film would like to say that trauma ‘then” is trauma “now,” the better perhaps to propel a suspense thriller which negates ideological conviction in favor of a consuming kind of personal vengeance and a spiritual philosophy of the millenarian mode. While we recognize that the traditional leftist movement has severely neglected “personal” politics in order to unduly privilege class as a premier category of oppression and struggle, we could never permit personal dilemma to circulate outside the domains of political culture and choice.

But here’s the catch. What “Bakit May Kahapon Pa?” tries to say is, when it kills the heroine and her tormentor at the narrative’s end, that the progressive movement could never afford to sustain personal trauma and vendetta as the raison d’être of transgression and that the idiocy of feudal life must perish in the fires of hell along with its racist system. But then, where do we lodge our sympathies in this nihilist denouement? And can we be content in this erasure of the personal just to overinvest the political, which is lived out anyway in the very private and intimate processes of living and being?

In spite of Nora Aunor’s fine performance and even portrayal---her most rigorous in the ‘90s---the film is consumed by an ambivalence that is not at all complex, only clumsy.

And so, between one film’s ambivalence which serves the enterprise of the soap opera and another which lends its technology to the suspense thriller, which is better and packs more drama? Between two teeners whose lives are as rich as the dimensions of their cardboard characters and a disturbed woman who demonizes the military literally and revises religion as idiom as critique, who is nearer to our hearts and heart of our change?

With the success of “Mara Clara: The Movie,” many have lamented the way we pay lip service to the clamor for better movies. For when a good movie comes along, no one goes to see it. This though begs more questions.

First, is the industry capable of delivering quality? Inspite of a tradition of excellence forged in the ‘50s and the ‘70s, is the current community of filmmakers, stars and studio executives committed to sustaining tradition? Do the young filmmakers have the resolve and vision to pursue a path of socially responsible cinema and deserves the screen’s silver? Or are they merely slaves to the fashion of the times and the formula of their producers?

Second, what kind of quality are we talking about? Is Carlos Siguion-Reyna’s “Abot Kamay ang Pangarap” quality when its theme is retrograde as its producer’s costume? Is Olivia Lamasan’s “Madrasta” quality when it has no argument to spin, only middle class affectations to flaunt? Is going international like social climbing, hobnobbing with festival directors who do not know any better or promoting gloss and technology as acme of film insights? And will the emerging markets of video franchise, television release, cable networking, and international exhibition allow more varied films to flourish and address the demands of a more variegated film audience? Is technical progress ideational innovation?

Third, who arbitrates quality? Members of the Films Rating Board whose vested interests in the industry fail to ingrain in them a modicum of delicadeza and whose initial imagination fail to make them realize that they cannot really judge films intelligently? Industry bigwigs---the vestiges of film history’s bygone era and intellectually feeble minds at that---who have found themselves entrenched in well-funded governmental agencies and pumping money into projects they deem important? How can we possibly allow them to fritter away our money and hope?

Fourth, is the market better served when it produces quality? Will an awareness for quality make it more efficient as an industry? Or must the State intervene in making it more efficient? But can the latter do it considering that it too is malfunctioning, and in terms of cultural leadership cannot seem to do anything right, except engage in propaganda and produce an encyclopedia of errata?

Fifth, does the entertainment media have the moral right to fight for quality when it is by itself corrupt and mediocre, and in fact a vital part of the machinery which engineers the hits and flops of the industry?

Sixth, how much credence do we accord box office success? When will we realize that commercial success can in fact be embarrassing especially if the product is very much substandard?

Must we subject an artist of high stature like Nora Aunor to the impositions of an ungrateful and ingratiating industry? Times have changed and audiences have expressed new passions since the ‘70s, but Nora has withstood the caprice of business and the schemes of merchants, in the process proving her worth as an actress and film artist. Must we still demand from her to crank out more money? Is this the way we honor a gifted colleague? The fact that she still makes films is a blessing and an event.

Seventh, is the public competent to insist on quality? How far have the educational system and media educated the public? How far has the latter resisted the ways in which they are rendered in the image of the market? Does the industry facilitate the critical skills of viewers or has it blunted them with controversies, award scams and sheer incompetence?

Finally, how do we live with a film culture which is more bacterial than anything else?

With all the class, gender, religious, ethnic tensions cinema secretes as it scans social reality, what do we get? Mara and Clara slugging it out in a marble house filled with kitschy celadon? Nora Aunor subtly undermining the fascist apparatus and sabotaging its stake in industrializing the country?

Win some, lose some in this game of chance.