NASAAN KA NANG KAILANGAN KITA And The Changing Roles Of Women In Society

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Mel Chionglo's Nasaan Ka Nang Kailangan Kita (Regal Films) is a film that respects the moviegoers and treats them as intelligent individuals, a trip back to reality and sensible filmmaking. It is many things at the same time, a story of love and hate, of false pity, of dark yesterdays and uncertain tomorrows, but above all, it is a story of people. Scriptwriter Ricardo Lee wrote a screenplay rich in detail but fails to tell us why Julio (Eddie Garcia) left Rosa (Susan Roces) for Jenny (Hilda Koronel). We could surmise that it had something to do with money, but this was never fully verbalized in the story. At least, his script for Nasaan is not as dotted as that of 1988's Babaing Hampaslupa. Nasaan Ka Nang Kailangan Kita is an unmitigated triumph for Susan Roces. Her performance is the kind that is sure to be underrated by most moviegoers because it is not the least bit showy, but is undeniably a work of great understanding and imagination. I particularly like her in in that scene where she tells her husband "Tatapatin kita Julio, o baka naman nagpalit ka na rin ng pangalan nu'ng magpalit ka ng asawa? Nu'ng iniwan mo kami noon, dahil sa pera ng babaeng 'yon, umasa pa rin ako at naghintay na babalik ka. Sinabi ko sa aking sarili, natukso ka lamang, mahal mo pa rin ako at babalik ka. " By the time the film ends, her face has become a relief map of the pain that characterize a life when it is barely bearable.


Rising above her usual level of acting is Snooky Serna as Cristy, Rosa's ambitious young daughter. She can bristle with fire and intensity in her confrontation scenes with Jenny. Eddie Garcia, Hilda Koronel, Aga Muhlach (Joel) and Richard Gomez (Dinky) all deserve commendation for fully understanding their roles. Brief but powerful cameo performances are also rendered by Chanda Romero as Helen, Julio's lover and Anita Linda as Marta. The best performer in Nasaan Ka Nang Kailangan Kita is Janice de Belen, in a quiet role demanding minimum speech but maximum emoting. She plays Diana, the devoted daughter who eventually ends up with Joel, Cristy's ardent suitor. The movie's technical aspects are all first rate. Conrado Baltazar's cinematography further complimented Chionglo's keen cinematic eye. George Jarlego has edited the film but it can stand more prunning to make it more tight. Benjie de Guzman's production design is accurate and Willy Cruz has also provided an adequate musical score. But the lion's share of credit goes to Chionglo and Lee for drawing a very critical portrait of the changing roles of women in society and their increasing disassociation with traditional roles as wives, mothers and daughters. In a film made by men about women, this transgression of defined roles is viewed with much sympathy.


Directed By: Mel Chionglo
Screenplay: Ricardo Lee
Cinematography: Conrado Baltazar
Music: Willy Cruz
Film Editor: George Jarlego
Production Design: Benjie de Guzman
Produced By: Regal Films
Release Date: September 18, 1986

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MIGUELITO... Rebel With A Cause

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Miguelito Batang Rebelde (D'Wonder Films, Inc.) is primarily a vehicle for Aga Muhlach, but Lino Brocka is shrewd enough to transcend this limitation. The previous year, Muhlach took teeny boppers by storm as the embodiment of the bagets personality. He was initially merchandised as such and appeared in a string of movies that hardly differed from one another. Instead of making just an Aga movie, Brocka succeeded in delivering a fairly touching drama about injustice. Miguelito (Aga Muhlach) is a typical teenager, easygoing and carefree. His father Venancio Hererra (Eddie Garcia) is the town mayor who intends to bequeath the post to his only son. Miguelito's secure world is shattered by the arrival of a strange woman in town, Auring (Nida Blanca), his real mother. For fifteen years, she suffered in prison after being framed by Venancio and is now determined to see her son and get things straight. Ningning (Liza Lorena), a former colleague is the only person willing to assist Auring in her fight for justice. She was paid by Venancio to testify against her. Remorseful, Ningning helps Auring in filing a new court case. Miguelito discovers the truth and confronts his father about the matter. Janet (Beth Bautista), Venancio's mistress whose dream is to leave town and go to the city unwittingly gets involved in the conflict between Miguelito's parents. In the film's climax, they will give Venancio the comeuppance he deserves. Miguelito Batang Rebelde is fine enough as a transition movie for Aga Muhlach. With Brocka, he gets to prove that at least, he has a partially mobile face and minimal emotional power. He manages to strike a spark or two as in his confrontation scene with his father and in the car where Susan (Gretchen Barretto), his girlfriend, tries to console him.

It is Nida Blanca, cast against type who is well served by her director. She gives the best dramatic performance since 1983's Saan Darating Ang Umaga? and clearly demonstrates that she has an inner reserve of dramatic talent most moviegoers would not have suspected in her or believed she would know how to utilize. The scene where she is finally introduced to her long lost son is so touching. All mawkish directors of caterwauling telenovelas should be taken to that heartbreaking reunion and held fast by the neck until they have seen it ten times. Pedestrian directors would have milked the scene dry with oozing sentimentality but Brocka knew how to play his cards well. The rest of the performances are generally fine. Brocka pushes the characters against each other as often as possible and pushes the camera up against them. The technique allows the actors a lot of opportunity for emoting. Eddie Garcia is remarkable as the father who becomes a fallen idol in the eyes of his son. Both Liza Lorena and Beth Bautista are very competent in their respective roles. The biggest hitch in the film is that Venancio's accomplices in his crime against Auring did not get their own share of punishment. I was was expecting a big climactic scene where they would all be exposed to the public and get humiliated by robbing Auring of fifteen precious yeas of her life. That's probably why I felt the ending was sort of unsatisfying. Jose Dalisay has written a fairly absorbing screenplay but some details are very disconcerting. For instance, Cristina (Gloria Romero) reveals that Venancio got Miguelito from the orphanage when he was five years old, only when they were dead sure that she is incapable of bearing her own child. In that case, the whole town must have known that Miguelito was not really her own son. How come this surfaced only upon Auring's arrival? The story is reminiscent of Friedrich Durrenmatt's 1956 tragicomedy The Visit but there are those who would surely interpret the town as a symbol of contemporary Philippine society, what with the allusions to cronies who are Venancio's partners in crime. The movie does have some technical weaknesses, most especially the cinematography. Pedro Manding, Jr. is not yet that accustomed to Brocka that one hankers for dramatic pictorial composition the director achieves best with Conrado Baltazar. Joey Luna's production design is a lot better. What with the attention to detail like the pencil drawing of Venancio's family prominently displayed in their living room. Miguelito Batang Rebelde may not be as great as Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kulang (1974) and Maynila Sa Mga Kuko Ng Liwanag (1975). But in a year of lean harvest, this film achieves a better significance.

Directed By: Lino Brocka
Screenplay: Jose Y. Dalisay
Photographed In AGFA Color By: Pedro Manding. Jr.
Musical Director: Homer Flores
Film Editor: Armando Jarlego
Production Design: Joey Luna
Produced By: D' Wonder Films, Inc.
Release Date: June 14, 1985

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TURUMBA And The Destructive Effects Of New Money Economy

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Kidlat Tahimik's second film Turumba (Kidlat Kulog Productions) offers a virtual textbook demonstration of the penetration of capital into a traditional village, and the transformation of collective relations by the market and money relationships. It is a process symbolized by the impact of the cash nexus on the religious ritual designated by the film's title and turns on the change visited by production for the market on Romy (Inigo Vito), the musician-performer traditionally responsible for this annual event. It is a festival in which what are separated in modern societies as culture and religion have not yet been dissociated and those whose beauty the tourist-spectators who are Turumba's Western public can still distantly glimpse and reconstruct from behind the interposed medium of the camera and its travelogue language. Here already, therefore, formal elements that will be found more ambitiously deployed and developed in Mababangong Bangungot (1977) can be enumerated. A secondary symbolism marked as such and the co-optation of co-optation involved in admitting and ostentatiously foregrounding the inauthenticity of the Western spectator and of the average travelogue spectacle. Here, handicrafts are the vehicle for what never changes and is yet changed irrevocably beyond all recognition. A German tourist-businesswoman likes some of the the decorations used in the festival and orders more. Family and then village itself must be enlisted in the gradual mass production of these items, which eventually destroy the cyclical or ritual time of the village and prevent the organizer for wasting any more of it on the festival which was the source of the objects in question in the first place. Even the crudeness of the final irony as their reward, Romy and his son Kadu (Homer Abiad) are given a trip to Europe, to the 1972 Munich Olympics, the Third World visiting the first at the very moment in which the latter is about to be violently impacted by the former is consistent with Kidlat's aesthetic, in which a gesture toward language and representations is preferable ti the thing seemingly achieved and thereby mistaken for the real.

What remains real in the later film is the historic fact of the destructive effects of a new money economy. It is a fact that more modern societies have once lived, long ago and now have forgotten, save in the form of empty slogans that stereotype themselves by living on without experiential meaning. But Turumba does not try to reinvent that, or to put us as subjects imaginatively back into a concrete situation of otherness in which we might fleetingly recapture this historically unique event. It does not even make an appeal to historical pathos nor is its essential gaiety a frivolous or restorative matter either, but the face of an essential indifference, the icy disdain of farce for the fates of individual subjects, the joyous mask that covers a stoic refusal of complicity with the ego's life and death. What Turumba does therefore, is not to commemorate the ancient catastrophe in any historicist way nor to represent it with the immediacy of the historical novel, but rather merely to designate its simple existence as a fact, you forgot it, you don't remember what it was like, or even that it happened, but it is still here, somewhere, still happening in one form or another, whether you remember it or not. The incisiveness and simplicity of Turumba's demonstration, however, preclude the richness of Mababangong Bangungot, in which we not only get to Europe, but wonder through the Third World metropolis itself. Significantly, Kidlat is absent from his second, more completely rural film, something which must have disappointed viewers of the first.

Written And Directed By: Kidlat Tahimik
Cinematography: Roberto Yniguez
Music: Mandy Afuang
Editor: K.H. Fugunt
Production Design: Santi Bose
Produced By: Kidlat Kulog Productions
US Release Date: April 11, 1984

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NOLI ME TANGERE... Rizal's Social Cancer (For Alexis Tioseco 1981-2009)

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Dr. Jose Rizal's Noli Me Tangere portrayed in a so clear and sympathetic way the lives of Filipino people and has produced a real piece of literature. Enter Gerardo de Leon, film director-writer. Aside from technical expertise, ambiguity has been his most manifest trait. But never has this been more pronounced than in his film version of Noli Me Tangere (Bayanihan / Arriva Productions). What sets Noli apart is its quasi-official nature. Intended as the story of a Filipino's belief about great injustice, it normally would have, in these polarized times, two orientations to choose from, conservatism or radicalism. Gerardo de Leon, however, steers Noli away clear of any such commitment, his achievement in this regard is the movie's prime virtue. De Leon's earlier efforts were better than the average Filipino director's output. Here, the apparent attempt is to state that politics is never a matter of dichotomy, that social contradiction may demonstrate dialectical modes of behavior, but not necessarily according to the expectations dictated by academic idealism. Noli tells the story of Crisostomo Ibarra (Eddie del Mar), a Filipino who returns to his motherland after having completed his studies in Europe. In his honor, Don Tiago (Engracio Ibarra) throws him a welcome party attended by Padre Damaso (Oscar Keesee), Dona Victorina (Lilian Laing) and the town's most prominent figures. Meanwhile, Lieutenant Guevarra (Manuel Ojeda) reveals the incidents preceding the death of his father Don Rafael. The following day, Crisostomo visits Maria Clara (Edita Vidal), their long-standing love clearly manifested in this meeting. He carries out his father's plans of building a school believing that education would pave the way to his country's liberation. Crisostomo becomes the hunted as he gets implicated in a staged revolution. Together with Elias (Leopoldo Salcedo), he flees town but as luck would have it, they were shot by the civil guards eventually killing Elias. Maria Clara, hopeless and disillusioned begs Padre Damaso to confine her into a nunnery unaware that Crisostomo had survived and was able to escape. Before the film's end, Crisostomo finds Basilio (Eddie Ilagan) in the forest and helps him bury his lifeless mother Sisa (Lina Carino).

Although the film is weakened by the incompetence to weave an alternative historiography to which reality must be indebted, Noli infuses the Rizal question with subtle but sparkling imagination. Occasional heavy-handedness sets in when the film makes didactic attempts at value reorientation. Production design, cinematography and editing are above par compared with standard industry outputs, acting is low key and works well in most cases. De Leon's straightforward style somewhat falters after more than three hours of utility though, not withstanding the presence of big-time performers. Instead, he opts for a measure of sad success by playing his politics both ways. De Leon in Noli manages to flesh out political and class tension in the act of depicting social change . On the basis of his humanistic emphases, here and in his earlier films, one may allow him the benefit of the doubt. Like it or not, Noli Me Tangere is a major Filipino movie, the industry's significant output for an uncertain decade. As for De Leon, one can at least admire the daring by which he tackles complex political ramifications, infusing the attempts with a serene diplomacy surprising for its rarity hereabouts. His ability to control a material so complicated in its details and so earnest in its yearning to effectively disseminate the action of society. Noli's novelistic narrative may fumble in its attempt to explore character and weave milieu into dramaturgy, but the film emerges from the thickets with engaging moments and stirring energies. Noli Me Tangere's strength lies not so much in its technique as in its affecting vision of sacrifice.

Directed By: Gerardo de Leon
Screenplay By: Dr. Gerardo de Leon And Jose Flores Sibal
Directors Of Photography: Emmanuel Rojas & Arsenio Banu
Music Composed & Directed By: Tito Arevalo
Editors: Victoriano Calub And Joven Calub
Production Design: Carlos V. Franciso
Produced By: Bayanihan And Arriva Productions
Release Date: June 17, 1961

The author is eternally grateful to Alexis Tioseco for entrusting me with the only existing videotape copy of Gerry de Leon's Noli Me Tangere. You'll forever live in our hearts.

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WANTED: WIVES... Women In Love

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Finally, an insightful movie about women in Philippine society. Gil Portes' Wanted: Wives (Sining Silangan, Inc.) is an incisive look on the Filipina's timeworn role as sexual and social underdog delivered with a calculated intensity that abandons the intellectual recklessness and fanaticism common to such discourses on female sexuality. Together with scenarist Jose Carreon, Portes puts to satisfactory use the signifying systems of film by designing the narrative according to the exigencies of brisk, lean storytelling. This is achieved in the effective sequencing of scenes and shots that tame the sometimes warped traditions of formula through steady technical control. The pivotal characters in Carreon's story are Concha (Charito Solis), a spinster who dreams of leaving the dreary life of a teacher, cousins Rona (Gina Alajar) and Chona (Cherie Gil), two young women whose constant preoccupation is in finding the right man, and best friends Julie (Jean Saburit) and Delia (Tet Antiquera), whose desire to love and be loved is unflinching. Man's sex partner is the function in which Julie seems destined to comply with. Her revelation yields the film's disconcerting impact. Though dramatically more subdued, Concha's dilemma nevertheless draws a parallelism to Delia in the narrative's progression as well as nuances in behavior, character and action of the dramatis personae simply by resorting to adept composition and minimalist camera approach . Concha's resolution tempers off the severe implications of Delia's denouement towards self-realization and fulfillment. 

In Wanted: Wives, Gil Portes displays a command of the craft few directors have arrived at. His employment of production elements, from Florante's surprisingly restrained musical score to Arnold Alvaro's evocative visualization is both purposive and sensitive. His efficient execution furnishes the film with a thoroughly polished design. In this, he is ably complemented by Edgardo Vinarao's taut editing through successful spatial and temporal shifts . The cast generally turn in creditable performances, as most of them usually do, so the significant portrayal here is Tet Antiquiera's. Delia is Antiquiera's first fully realized characterization, and with it she graduates from sexy actress to serious performer with apparent ease. Jean Saburit's portrayal of Julie is competent. The acting method employed here is able to twist the logic of cliche and reconstitutes the drama of yearning with passion and grace. But Wanted: Wives' triumph stems from the screenplay written by Jose Carreon for painting a sophisticated interplay of characters, settings and plot lines in profoundly human terms. His structured narrative unravels a reality that withstands the arguably shallow delineations of it's male characters, particularly Julie's lover Ronaldo (Freddie Webb) and Igmedio, Concha's ardent suitor perfunctorily played by Renato Robles. Carreon and Portes together collaborate to fashion the film's lucid exposition and surges into a most cogent resolution. Hence, it is with this thematic coherence and cinematic competence that Wanted: Wives renders itself a valid attestation of a progressive Filipino cinema.

Direction: Gil M. Portes
Screenplay: Jose Carreon
Cinematography: Arnold Alvaro
Music: Florante
Film Editor: Edgardo (Boy) Vinarao
Production Design: Vic Delotavo
Produced By: Sining Silangan, Inc.
Release Date: October 10, 1980

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Karapatang Magpalathala 2006-2013. SARI-SARING SINENG PINOY Lahat Ng Karapatan Ay Nakalaan. Disenyo Jojo Devera