Canon Decampment: Emmanuel H. Borlaza

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1—Bukas Luluhod ang mga Tala

English Translation: Tomorrow the Stars Will Fall to Their Knees
Year of Release: 1984
Director: Emmanuel H. Borlaza
Screenwriters: Jose N. Carreon & Orlando Nadres
(From a story by Nerissa Cabral serialized in Pilipino Komiks)
Producer: Viva Films

Cast: Sharon Cuneta, Eddie Rodriguez, Gina Pareño, Pilar Pilapil, Tommy Abuel, Rey “PJ” Abellana, Raymond Lauchengco, Lani Mercado, Eula Valdes, Janet Elisa Giron, Romeo Rivera, Mary Walter, Eddie Arenas, Vangie Labalan, Manny Castañeda, Allan Bautista, Timothy Diwa, Mark Cruz, Luis Benedicto, Charlon Davao, Jennifer Sevilla, Heidi Gloria Santos, Cris Daluz, Nelia Rondina, George Estregan

Because she was illegitimate, Rebecca’s mother had to give birth on the street, denied a ride to the hospital by her father Roman Estrella and his legal wife. Her mother’s husband accepts her as his own daughter, but she and her brother have to endure the maltreatment of her half-sisters and their mother, who live in luxury across the street from their shanty. When her stepfather pleads for assistance for an emergency and her cruel stepmother unleashes her guard dog, which fatally attacks him, Rebecca swears to devote her life to bringing down her biological father and his family. She stops studying to work on her career as a singing sensation, but her younger brother is driven violently mad and imprisoned after her half-sister pretends to befriend him in school then mocks him in her home. Rebecca learns that the Estrellas’ businesses are failing and arranges with her lawyer to secretly purchase their residence, just as her other half-sister also goes to pieces when the man she intends to win falls hard for Rebecca.

2—Bituing Walang Ningning

English Translation: Star without a Sparkle
Year of Release: 1985
Director: Emmanuel H. Borlaza
Screenwriter: Orlando Nadres
(From a story by Nerissa Cabral serialized in Pilipino Komiks)
Producer: Viva Films

Cast: Sharon Cuneta, Christopher de Leon, Cherie Gil, Jay Ilagan, Tommy Abuel, Joel Torre, Chanda Romero, Lorli Villanueva, Vicky Suba, Lito Pastrana, Timothy Diwa, Eric Borlaza, Alvin Torres, Ronald Catahan, Gemmalyn Lingad, Rose de Guzman, Jenny Corpuz, Augusto Victa, Leila Lopez, Tony Martinez, Robert Miclat, Eddie de Leon

Dorina Pineda is so obsessed with famous singer Lavinia Arguelles that she spends her spare time and money to attend her live appearances, and sneaks out extra garlands of sampaguita (jasmine) from the handicraft shop where she works, to offer them to her idol. She also sings at casual or small-time venues, in order to better emulate Lavinia, who pretends to appreciate Dorina’s fanaticism despite finding her repulsive because of her poverty. When Lavinia, in a fit of pique, refuses to fulfill her commitment to a producer’s programs, Dorina volunteers to take her place, and Lavinia’s ex-boyfriend is pleasantly surprised by Dorina’s talent and drawn to her kindness. All of which increases Lavinia’s ire toward her still-worshipful follower.

Bukas Luluhod ang mga Tala is primarily remembered as the film that clobbered Mike de Leon’s Sister Stella L. (1984) at the box-office, in spite of the then-burgeoning antidictatorship movement. It has been read in retrospect as the film that embodied Sharon Cuneta’s “Noranian turn” (as expressed in the title of an article by Bliss Cua Lim), in which Cuneta succeeded in sustaining her box-office supremacy by adopting the rags-to-riches narratives associated with Nora Aunor, further highlighted by the fact that SSL starred Aunor’s long-term rival Vilma Santos. A more frankly commercialist undertaking than its successor Bituing Walang Ningning, BLT demands a higher level of tolerance for its overeagerness to appeal to an infantilized conception of the movie audience. Then again, this also accounts for its more effective denouemont, since its unfettering from “proper” storytelling devices provided it with leeway to harness more passionate (though predictable) circumstances. BWN, the next year’s Cuneta juggernaut, served to to underlay the essential “Dulsita” argument forwarded by Jerrick Josue David.[1] Its and its predecessor’s common historical background provides a useful context: Emmanuel H. Borlaza developed his audience-friendly approaches during the wholesome teen-idol musicals meant to provide a moral counterweight to the soft-core bomba films of the late 1960s and early ’70s; he also (more than once) assisted in the revival of Cebuano-language cinema by introducing smart reworkings of commercial genres. Viva Films, for its part, intended to foster conservative values in film material and production during the Marcos era, with Sharon Cuneta as its signature performer. This assumption served to challenge Filipino filmmakers, who were by then already used to devising ways to bypass or subvert the many restrictions that government authorities imposed on the country’s most popular mass medium. Not surprisingly, several Viva productions have proved worthier of long-term appreciation than observers initially thought. As the last of a series of Hollywood-style movie queens to stake her claim on pop-culture history, Cuneta took note of the lessons of her predecessors (hence her “Noranian” turn) and has been shaping her life according to her perception of what history expects from her: feminist responsibility then, democratic politics today, always with a well-known affection for her followers. Not only is she the only movie queen whose fan vehicles (where she ironically plays an impoverished aspirant in one and a starstruck devotee in the other) deserve to be honored, even before she upgraded to mature roles; she has also persisted in finding her way, high-profile as ever, even with the rambunctiously vexatious arrival of new media and new politics in the new millennium. Among the many other pleasures that BWN bestows are its evergreen title song and the line uttered by exasperated but self-amused drama queens since then: “You’re nothing but a second-rate, trying-hard copycat,” preferably with a glass of well-aimed cold water in hand. Cuneta had barely just begun by then.

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Stolen Moments

Year of Release: 1987
Director: Emmanuel H. Borlaza [as Maning Borlaza]
Screenwriter: Jose Javier Reyes
Producer: Regal Films

Cast: Alma Moreno, Rio Locsin, Rey “PJ” Abellana, Chanda Romero, Miguel Rodriguez, Perla Bautista, Roy Alvarez, Gigi de la Riva, Deborah Sun, Robert Arevalo, Nikki Martel, Barbara Perez, Romeo Enriquez, Lucita Soriano, Alfred Baretto, Vic Ramos, Ferdie Fernando, Naty Mallares, Geena Zablan, Vangie Labalan

Marietta endures the scolding of her stepmother, whom she resents because her foreign-based father sends some money for her upkeep to her. Fredo, her neighbor in the slum community, continues to court her although she, like many other girls, has eyes for the handsome and well-built Alex. In the company where the latter is employed, Carol, the owner’s daughter, insists on assigning Alex (whom she initially calls by his family name, Bernabe) to drive her to various occasions, to the point of eventually asking him to accompany her to social functions. They quarrel because Alex feels left out, but when he goes home drunk, Marietta attends to him and they wind up sleeping together. Finally Carol admits her attraction to Alex and he agrees to marry her even though her parents disapprove of him, while Marietta, hoping that Alex might be able to fall for her, in turn finds herself rejected by him. She then accedes to Fredo’s request that they tie the knot, and invests in the same furniture-export business that Carol founded, expressing her disappointment in Alex’s class-intimidated reluctance to help run their enterprise. Fredo and Alex meet accidentally and arrange a dinner event for their partners, where Marietta inquires into Carol’s business secrets. Carol realizes one day that Marietta has poached her investment contacts and asks Alex to talk with her—an opportunity that Marietta exploits to extend their earlier one-night stand into a full-blown extramarital fling.

Middle-class chroniclers among popular narrative artists get an unfair shake from critics, who tend to drastically conclude that they’re performing as apologists for the bourgeoisie. Ironically a new type of influential commentators emerged during the millennium, who unconsciously extended this argument by insisting on high-art values, with an even more pathetic circle of influential academe-based critics accepting this criterion so long as the products they honored depicted poverty-stricken subjects. Emmanuel H. Borlaza’s extensive career, covering commercial productions in a number of capitals, is one example of how such ridiculous requisites could have pernicious consequences: none of his Cebuano-language films have been preserved despite their strong repute. Stolen Moments demonstrates how such long-trained expertise could be misrecognized. The class conciliation that it builds toward is founded on business competition, which is forthwith dismissed as soon as one side has won, and transforms instead into a competition where the hunkier of the two male leads is the prize. The two class-divided women who drive the narrative are provided with epiphanies drawn from a realization of the cost of their aspirations: Carol, the heiress who turns her back on family wealth, discovers that working for the man of her dreams wears her out and drives him to the arms of her competitor Marietta, whose slum background in turn enables her to fight dirty when necessary—until her moral conscience makes her realize that the world where she insinuated herself will actually keep rewarding her depravity as long as she maintains a veneer of respectability. The unexpected resolution, where two strong conflicting women negotiate a workable arrangement between them, is salutary not just because of the gender exclusion that it promotes, but also because a long period of military dictatorship was just dismantled by a female challenger. Feminist studies had to do some catching up at this point, with scholars pointing out how equivalent Western film plots (notably Susan Seidelman’s Desperately Seeking Susan, 1985) appropriated the practice of homosociality articulated by queer-theory pioneer Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (in her Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, also 1985), wherein male friends displace the intimacy of same-sex desire between them by using women as objects of exchange. Carol’s acceptance of Marietta’s apology for “borrowing” her hubby, although seemingly a violation of the progressive proscription on class conciliation, actually signifies the ex-heiress’s initiation into the messily but pleasurably queer ethos of working-class pragmatisms.

Note

[1] These two Sharon Cuneta studies may be considered the exemplification, and one hopes the resumption, of Philippine star studies after scholarly literature on Nora Aunor, notwithstanding institutionally commissioned pieces on foreign-celebrated auteurs and a dubiously motivated anthology on a performer who wished to be counted the equal of Aunor and Cuneta. Their publication history is as follows: Bliss Cua Lim, “Sharon’s Noranian Turn: Stardom, Embodiment, and Language in Philippine Cinema,” Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, vol. 31, no. 3 (Fall 2009), pp. 315–358; and Jerrick Jose David, “Dulsita, ang Kabuuan ng Kontradiksyon ng Imahen ni Sharon Cuneta sa Pelikulang Pilipino (Dulsita, the Total Contradiction of Sharon Cuneta’s Image in Philippine Films),” Kritika Kultura, vol. 25 (August 2015), pp. 314–343, DOI:10.13185/1656-152x.1655.

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Á!