SARI-SARING SINENG PINOY

     Right from the start of Chito S. Roño's Espantaho (Quantum Films, Cineko Productions, Purple Bunny Productions, CSR Films.Ph., 2024), Lorna Tolentino as Rosa emotes substantially with expressions alone, but is also wholly capable of delivering her lines convincingly – her voice and guarded body language is exactly of someone who has a terrible secret. This is her film and she makes it work. Tolentino also nicely complements Judy Ann Santos, who takes on a more subdued, contemplative persona as Monet. There is poignancy in her bewilderment. Chanda Romero plays Adele with every nerve frayed, every emotion on the surface of her face. In context, young Kian Co's performance as Keith, works beautifully. Fortunately, there are no weak links here, even in the minor, supporting parts, which is essential in a horror film – especially one with supernatural elements. Espantaho is a horror picture on the outside, but it also does a striking job of how people cope with tragedies and disquieting attitudes. But more than anything else, the crux of the story – is unforgettable. It’s a creative, haunting attribute that sets the stage for numerous, expertly crafted sequences of terror. But just as scary, or at least as unsettling, is the film's presentation of human existence as an endless series of tragedies and agonies, relieved only by foolish distraction. The heart of Espantaho is in the conversations between Rosa and Monet, as well as between Monet and the frazzled Adele. Roño builds and sustains an eerie mood made up of equal parts tension and despair. Unlike ninety percent of films, Espantaho gets better as it goes along. I have to admit I was blind-sided by the ending. 

     The solution to many of the film’s puzzlements is right there in plain view and the movie hasn’t cheated, but the very boldness of the storytelling carried me right past the crucial hints and right through to the end of the film, where everything takes on an intriguing new dimension. Chris Martinez's screenplay is a perfect example of misdirection. The way he frames the story and the interactions characters have with each other are subtle enough on a first watch, but clever and obvious on subsequent viewings. Once Roño reveals the reason for all this, Santos' performance takes on a sense of poignancy. Monet's love for Rosa is a crucial facet of Espantaho and she demonstrates it flawlessly. It has a kind of calm, sneaky self-confidence that allows it to take us down a strange path, intriguingly. Roño's main concerns are isolation and the strains and tensions of family ties. Espantaho is an attention-grabbing fusion of minimalism and overstatement. The horror story is shot as Andrei Tarkovsky might have shot it, with briefly glimpsed figures on the fringes and with constant ambiguities of action and attitude. Setting the mood persuades us that an unseen intruder is about to pounce. Here, Roño is in top form. The camerawork by Neil Daza is gorgeous and shadowy, making much use of Roño’s expert framing and camera blocking. Plus, the music by Von de Guzman adds to the chilling, mysterious effect that the director wants to create, but the movie lays realistic groundwork for the supernatural events to come. And when they come, they are all the more unsettling for being rather matter-of-fact. Espantaho is an impressively well-rounded, triumphant thriller, full of unexpectedly positive themes that transcend its typical classification as a mere horror flick. 

A Film By:  Chito S. Roño

Screenplay: Chris Martinez

Director of Photography: Neil Daza, LPS

Production Design: Angel B. Diesta, PDGP

Editor: Benjo Ferrer

Music: Von de Guzman

Sound: Alex Tomboc, Lamberto Casas Jr.

 

     Fandom comes in many forms, whether you’re talking about the different subgenres of the pop-culture obsessed or the types of fans themselves and how they choose to express that devotion as individuals. It’s no wonder that after decades of pop culture obsession gradually morphing into a globally recognized phenomenon, we’ve taken to documenting fandom on film, through both fictional and nonfictional accounts of people willing to go very far, maybe even too far, for the things they love. Infused with a fresh, crowded sense of community, Adolfo Borinaga Alix, Jr.'s Faney (The Fan) (Frontrow Entertainment, Intele Builders, Noble Wolf, AQ Films, 2025) is anchored by an emotionally wrought yet effective turn by Laurice Guillen. She etches an unforgettable screen character in Lola Milagros/Bona, a woman whose complexities and eccentricities match her dignity and willpower. While Althea Ablan is authentic and funny as Bea, Milagros' great granddaughter, Gina Alajar's Babette is the real lynchpin, the part that truly holds the film together. It is too easy to overlook what she does because she plays daughter to Guillen's mother, but she is arguably the most important character because Babette embodies the kind of innate decency to which all the other characters must aspire. Of course, fandom can get out of one’s control, which is what happens in Faney’s most entertaining subplot involving Pacita M. (Roderick Paulate). Added to this, we find it exploring themes of family – particularly the challenges of mother-daughter relationships and how they can usually be softened by speaking from the heart. 

     The film is more nuanced and it points out that nostalgia lies and simplifies, but it's also yearning and swooning enough that it doesn't mind us being nostalgic. It wants the viewer to be more sensible and objective, so we're thinking about the characters as characters. Loss is something that everyone processes differently and much has been written about the fact that no two people mourn in the same way, which is precisely why no one has been able to craft the definitive text on grief, despite it being one of the most common philosophical and artistic motifs across all of human history. Because of its strong sense of character development, Faney touches a plethora of emotional chords. It is unabashedly sentimental with tear-filled scenes, plenty of hugs and moments of downright existential angst. Yet there are also moments of lightness sprinkled throughout and, deep intimacy and exceptional believability, as well as a dash of full-on humor, that makes things far less dour than they otherwise easily could have been. The poignancy of Lola Milagros’ visit to Nora Aunor’s gravesite is calculated to make the audience join her in regretting that she’s come to the end of her devotion. We too can feel a palpable absence, ready to believe that she’s really gone. It’s hard to imagine another director doing a more loving, thorough job with this material. Through the extraordinary grace of Alix’s filmmaking which revels in the transmutational power of filmmaking itself, Faney renders it larger than life. The film lives on Guillen's performance and she once again shows, as she did in last year’s Guardia de Honor that she’s up to the task of shouldering such a complex character with seeming ease. Faney is a celebration of a pop culture phenomenon. By the end, we're looking at Lola Milagros and the world, through Nora Aunor's eyes. It does work off the conventions that rule more ordinary movies, but only to enrich its own singular voice. 

Sound Design: Roy Santos

Production Design: Jhon Paul Sapitula

Editing: Xila Ofloda, Mark Llona

Music: Mikoy Morales

Director of Photography: Odyssey Flores

Written and Directed By Adolfo Borinaga Alix, Jr.

     Greatest Performance (NCV Films, 1989) gambles its entire first half on lead actress, Nora Aunor playing Laura Villa being able to simultaneously present a character who is enormously, unquestionably gifted, but sufficiently insular and self-doubting that she needs to have someone intercede with the world on her behalf. Aunor ticks all of those boxes as easily as breathing, while also showing that Laura's talent is sufficiently undisciplined to justify keeping Cholo (Julio Diaz) around. Despite how inextricable Aunor’s personal pain is, the arrival of catharsis twenty minutes in feels audaciously premature. At this point Aunor’s character, an unknown singer has been established only in broad strokes. The voice exposes interiority, the inside of a body and self, the very things that get obscured in a genre so invested in surface beauty. But if ever a narrative movie could be said to fulfill some sort of ideal of a singer’s film, Greatest Performance is it, in the way it visually mythologizes the singer in the act. Where most emotionally driven musical numbers serve as outlets for what’s being felt in the heat of a given moment, the anguish surging through Iisa Pa Lamang exists independent of any apparent catalyst. Aunor’s voice becomes all the more compelling for having wriggled out of contextual constraints, for stopping us in our tracks without the justifications of narrative or character development. It’s Aunor’s voice that makes it difficult to hear the song as anything other than an authentic cry of pain. And it’s their sharing of this same inimitable sound that makes actor and character impossible to disentangle. The scene assumes that, in Aunor’s hands, any sad love song is inescapably personal. Without her, such an unseemly outpouring would lack all credibility. Iisa Pa Lamang lingers like an aftertaste, an agonizingly short-lived moment of clarity that the rest of the film feels all the more poignant for failing to recreate.

     It’s the self-knowing and effortfulness of the acting, the moment-to-moment decisions moving it forward, that foreground the song’s seemingly inevitable candor. Aunor played the part with such raw emotion that it was often painful to observe. With Laura's talent as the driving engine for the whole movie, Greatest Performance does trade pretty heavily on Aunor's star power, but it's never just red meat for the fans. The single most obvious gesture in the film is Iisa Pa Lamang.  We catch glimpses of a shift in her acting style that becomes more pronounced. Aunor, the filmmaker, in her detached authorial power, has captured what she needs while Aunor, the performer, is left with all that emotional excess roiling inside her. It’s a brief moment, one that evokes its obsessive chronicling of the singer’s transformations in and out of performance and its cold observation of everyone else’s indifference toward the toll it must be taking on her. Greatest Performance honors the chameleonic dexterity and creative agency of the performer whose constant self-making may exist within another’s vision but is never any less her own. Laura becomes a palimpsest of the actor’s accumulated public self and because we know the beauty of the singing originates from the depths of a life lived, we are led to acknowledge an offscreen Laura who for all we know may have suffered a pain that likewise preceded the camera. Laying her soul bare, Aunor articulates the plight of a singer with such raw agony that it transcends the art form of acting and registers on a level that is real. The endless days of cheering strangers while harboring private pain remains one of the most powerful stretches of cinema ever conceived. Tirso Cruz III holds his own dramatically with Aunor, but while he pulls off the big scene of a dressing-room breakdown, its effect is inevitably informed by our knowledge that he lived his own life, not the character, Briccio. Aunor's public life sheds light on the places where her character has been granted relative privacy and mystery. For all her personal problems, Aunor shows on the screen why she’s a star. As a melodrama, this real-life presentation is roaring with intense fierceness.

Sound Supervision: Rolly Ruta

Film Editor: Ike Jarlego, Jr. (FEGP)

Musical Director: Danny Tan

Production Design: Merlito 'Len' Santos

Cinematographer: Johnny Araojo

Written & Directed By: Guy

     There’s certainly no doubting the fact that Nora Aunor was a major star of the 1970s, with a string of box-office hits behind her and a legion of die-hard fans. She also had a distinctive star image of an unconventional woman. I’ve often asked myself if we neglected to fully recognize the extent to which Aunor’s celebrity beyond her film roles provided her fans with greater access to her personality. And so the time has come to revisit this question by considering Nora Aunor not only as an actor and a star but also as a celebrity. Looking at the final decade of Aunor’s career certainly reveals that she was a major celebrity consistently profiled in the press, magazines, on television and social media. Now I’m wondering if celebrity was a major facet of her work as a star at a much earlier stage of her career. It’s something that I need to pay more attention to. Aunor gained a considerable amount of publicity and sympathy among moviegoers and movie magazine readers, significantly raising her profile.Throughout her film career, Nora Aunor was to draw repeatedly on many of the expressive techniques most often seen in the way she concentrates her performance specifically on the movements and tensions of her shoulders, torso, hips and arms. Aunor in 'Merika (1984) demonstrates her greater finesse and subtlety but also her greater reliance upon the technology of cinema. The camera’s ability to register and project minute movements and expressions is used to maximum effect here. What has gone is the attempt to project thoughts and feeling via elaborate physical action. It is not that she ceases to use physical movement to express her character’s every thought and feeling but rather that muscle tension and tiny movements of eyes and fingers convey as much (indeed more than) an arm thrown out from the body or a writhing torso, all of which are registered and revealed by the camera. Under restraint, Aunor produced a much finer and more affective screen performance in 'Merika. Aunor had proven herself not only capable of quiet restraint on the big screen but also of sparkling, ironic and witty comic playing in order to secure what is called a "smash hit comedy." However, she would attain the very highest levels of stardom and praise for her performances in a string of heavy duty dramas widely referred to as  “melodrama." As one of the country’s biggest stars, Aunor is regularly featured in movie magazines, often appearing on the covers, but also featured in photo-spreads and appeared in advertisements for products such as Coca-Cola and Pepsi, and Dial soap. Her marital breakdowns were regularly cited in the papers, and there were sometimes intimations of relationships with co-stars. 

     Television certainly proved more lucrative for her, with many of the fans that had flocked to see her movies watching her on the small screen in their homes in episodes of the weekly drama anthology, Ang Makulay na Daigdig ni Nora and her Sunday evening variety show, Superstar. Yet Aunor was struck down by ill health in 2022. Little regard was given to the effects that it might have on Aunor’s now precarious health, career and image. In fact, it couldn’t have been better calculated to jeopardize her recovery and destroy what remained of her career and public persona. Yet, once again, Aunor revealed a remarkable resilience and rather than withdraw from public view, she took whatever work was available to her, often in the full glare of the celebrity spotlight. Earlier the same year, Aunor completed work on one of her most remarkable films, Adolfo Alix's Kontrabida. This touching portrait would have made a fitting end to Aunor's illustrious film career. Aunor and her films have shown no sign of being forgotten. Nora Aunor is remembered as a great actor, an independent spirit and a gay icon. This is partly because she was a huge star and a remarkable actor but also because she maintained her celebrity profile during the troughs of her film career. Although she earned a place in film history during her lifetime, she repeatedly insisted on maintaining her cultural visibility by whatever means she could. Aunor's long and distinguished career demonstrates many of the classic hallmarks of film stardom: the rise to success and the fall from glory; the peaks and the troughs; the adjustments to accommodate age and changes in the nature of the Philippine film industry. Aunor's career illustrates the restrictions of the contract system, while her career delineates the consequences of the break-up of the studio system and the shift undertaken by stars as they were transformed from studio-owned and controlled properties to freelance agents responsible for their own choices and publicity. Her career after 1973, provides a case study for how studio stars survived in the post-studio era by appealing predominantly to marginalized audiences, while continuing to move between mainstream and more marginal productions. Meanwhile, her posthumous career is instructive in terms of how and why some stars are remembered while others are forgotten. At this moment in time, it looks very unlikely that Nora Aunor will ever be forgotten. For there is so much to remember and admire about this woman who subsequently became one of the greatest screen performers and one of the most respected celebrities. It can certainly be claimed that she is one of the most fascinating and accomplished women to have lived and worked on this planet. In short, her’s is a great story that deserves to be told and told again. As I’m sure it will.

REQUIESCAT IN PACE…

NORA AUNOR

May 21, 1953  - April 16, 2025

     It was that heady moment when movies had become cinema and were being recognized as art, with fierce critical battles underway. In the Philippines, critics suddenly had disputes and followings, while serious film books and even collections of reviews were coming out from trade publishers. The URIAN Anthology 1970-1979 landed in 1983 where a number of critics wrote essays on their chosen films, many of them prefacing their essays with a distinction between favorite movies and greatest films. My life stretches back to when we casually went to the movies, walked in at any point, stayed through the coming attractions and left where we came in. The New Frontier Theater in Cubao, in the late ’70s and ’80s, Coronet, Remar and Diamond Theaters on Aurora Boulevard, ACT Theaters and Ocean Cinemas along EDSA, and lost myself at The Manila Film Center of course. But we’ve been writing obituaries for movie theaters almost as long as we’ve been mourning the death of cinema and of cinephiles. The latter two are alive and well and yes we miss the physicality of theaters and audiences, but perhaps we should think of this not as a zero-sum loss but as a transmogrification, a metamorphosis. The where and how is not as important as the what, the thing itself. 

     There was a crusading fervor to the arguments. It was a fanaticism unique to moviegoers born of a conviction that cinema was an art unlike any other: quintessentially modern, distinctively accessible, poetic and mysterious, and erotic and moral. For cinephiles, the movies encapsulated everything. It was the moment when cinema became conscious of itself. There are not enough hours in the day to make a dent in my ever-lengthening watchlist. I pursue whims and passions as I never could have done years ago: I went through an Ishmael Bernal phase and watched Sugat sa Ugat (1980), revisted Pagdating sa Dulo (1971), Nunal sa Tubig (1976), Manila by Night (1980) and Himala (1982). We all have favorite movie years or decades, often having less to do with the quality of the movies than with our own age and susceptibility, who we were and were about to be, at the time. For someone who formed an early addiction to transactions between grown-up men and women, my favorite theaters where my cinema education and my adulthood really began—screens that, in retrospect, seem both smaller and larger than the one in my bedroom. On the latter I watched all or most recent Filipino films. And I began to think about the idea of spectacle being as much in the beholder’s eye as on the screen.     

     When VHS was introduced in 1977 and DVDs burst onto the scene 20 years later, consumers were presented with the first viable alternatives to a movie theater. Though seen as revolutionary then, watching movies at home and bypassing theaters continues to grow. Streaming services have been available since 2005 when YouTube burst on the scene and its pickup continues to increase sharply, particularly in the past few years. Over the last decade, movie theater attendance has declined and the list of streaming services seemingly grows every day. However, COVID-19 devastated theaters due to closures and the apprehension people felt about returning to theaters after the lockdown. Streaming services facilitate the production and distribution of more diverse and niche content. In addition, because they are not as limited by the traditional studio system, streaming services can take more chances on relatively unknown filmmakers and projects, which might have a more challenging time securing funding or distribution through conventional channels. A broader range of voices and perspectives are now represented in film. It is easier for underrepresented groups to find content that echoes their experiences. Streaming services are now challenging traditional studios as prolific producers of films. Should they continue investing in original content production, this could lead to an even greater diversity of voices and perspectives represented in the entertainment industry. As these services grow in popularity, their impact on the film industry will continue to evolve, requiring traditional distribution channels to adapt and find ways to coexist.