Canon Decampment: Laurice Guillen

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Kasal?

English Translation: Wedding?
English Title: The Marriage
Additional Language: English
Year of Release: 1980
Director: Laurice Guillen
Screenwriter: Mario O’Hara
Producer: Trigon Cinema Arts

Cast: Christopher de Leon, Hilda Koronel, Jay Ilagan, Chanda Romero, Gloria Romero, Johnny Wilson, Bobby Ledesma, Mia Gutierrez, Luis Benedicto, Lino Brocka, Menggie Cobarrubias, Janice de Belen, Johnny Delgado, Dindo Fernando, Edgar Mortiz, Phillip Salvador, Charito Solis

In preparing to get married, Joel and Grace strive to be honest with each other about their past. They begin by admitting that they had fallen in love with people in previous relationships: Grace with Ernesto, a dissolute musician who wound up in a loveless marriage with Ellen, and Joel with Lani, an elusive woman who first confessed she loved him but suddenly kept her distance until she vanished from his life. Indulged by his widower father, Joel is amused that Grace’s parents believe their daughter is still a virgin, while Grace is apprehensive that she has not yet let go of Ernesto.

The splash that Laurice Guillen made with her debut film certainly sustains effectively through nearly the half-century since she completed it. She demonstrated not just a solid sense of audience appeal (drawn from her tenure in a long-running daily TV drama), but she also had enough dramaturgical discernment and cinematic sensibility from her years as a highly regarded theater and film performer. One reservation raised about Kasal? is that its material does not provide as much of a challenge as any number of first films before and (most especially) since. Such a remark will seem more ornery at present, when even veteran filmmakers usually betray too much desperation in conveying the pleasures that should have inhered in any successful creative undertaking. Guillen shades what would have been a typical romantic comedy with enough darkness to make us wonder whether the inevitable happy ending will hold for its protagonists what the wedding’s observers believe. Along the way, she draws out indelible readings from a trio of supporting players (Jay Ilagan, Chanda Romero, and Mia Gutierrez) and, in the final sequence, stages a parade of cameos that attests to the warm support she enjoyed from her colleagues in the industry.

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Salome

Year of Release: 1981
Director: Laurice Guillen
Screenwriter: Ricky Lee
From a Story by Laura Guillen
Producer: Bancom Audiovision Corporation

Cast: Gina Alajar, Dennis Roldan, Johnny Delgado, Bongchi Miraflor, Bruno Punzalan, Tony Santos, Armida Siguion-Reyna, Lily Miraflor, Venchito Galvez, Edna May Landicho, Jimmy Santos, Koko Trinidad, Cris Vertido, Pangguy Francisco, Mia Gutierrez

As news of a young man’s murder rocks a sleepy seaside village, all fingers point to Salome as the culprit. Salome argues that she killed the man because he was trying to rape her. Villagers believe that Salome’s seductiveness led the man to his death, as it did to other men on many previous occasions. Macario, her husband, confides his own version of events to a defense lawyer, that upends the other narratives. From such conflicting testimonies, a still-untold story holds the truth behind the crime.

Critic-historian Bienvenido Lumbera once cited Salome as the primary example of the 1980s’ filmmaking generation’s breakaway efforts, from their predecessors’ emphasis on material to the new directors’ exploration of various approaches to reality. The film benefits from a vivacity that preempts its increasingly sordid story and transforms it into a triumph of the picturesque, showcasing Romeo Vitug’s cinematography at its height. Its obvious touchstone may have been Rashomon (1950), but the movie dispenses with Akira Kurosawa’s dated humanism and attempts a more realistically derived release from the conflicting versions of a sensational crime of passion. Gina Alajar serves as the medium—incandescent, unpredictable, and ethereal—through which the tale first unfolds, re-unfolds a few more times over, and then collapses unto itself.

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Init sa Magdamag

English Translation: Warmth for the Night
English Title: When Love Burns (title of TV series)
Additional Language: English
Year of Release: 1983
Director: Laurice Guillen
Screenwriter: Raquel Villavicencio
Producer: Viva Films

Cast: Lorna Tolentino, Dindo Fernando, Joel Torre, Anita Linda, Wendy Villarica, Leo Martinez, Bebong Osorio, Ding Salvador, Franklin Llama, Remy Novales, Melissa Mendez, Elsa Agana, Hon. Conrado J. Lamano, Raquel Villavicencio, Wilma Carbonel, Maribel Lastimosa, Tet Gozo, Boots Enrile, Jun Gonzales, Mon Carpo, Nonoy Zuñiga

When Irene’s lover dies from a bad fall, she abandons the body and assumes a new personality. In her self-identity as Becky, Armand falls for her and plans to marry her. The woman arranged for him by Armand’s family confronts Becky, threatens to expose her past life, and gives her money so she can leave Armand to her (the fiancée). Despite bearing Armand’s child, she obeys and transforms once more into Leah, a socialite. This time she attracts the attention of Jaime, who turns out to be an abusive partner. When Armand encounters her by accident, her skills at evading and masquerading are challenged by the claims made on her by both men.

The mutability of women is understood as their means of coping with a complex and judgmental system that proceeds on the assumption of their guilt in refusing their acceptance of their subservience in relation to men. Init sa Magdamag provides a demonstration of this long-acknowledged principle (first articulated by Joan Riviere in her 1929 article “Womanliness as Masquerade”) by tracking the several transformations of a character who claims to be various persons whenever the stability of her circumstances is challenged or upended. (Remarkably, scriptwriter Raquel Villavicencio does not regard the central character as a dissociative-identity case, which accounts for the character’s deliberate control of her personality shifts.) Regarded as an admirably executed abstraction when it came out, the film has been able to accrete resonances with the sudden designation of Filipinas in public life after the ignoble collapse of the country’s authoritarian experiment—from executive management (including political office) to overseas income-earning. Lorna Tolentino navigates the necessarily extreme and inexplicable shifts in character with scary conviction, embodying each new personality with subtle adjustments in ardor, sharpness, wariness, and honesty, to the point where the unstable mix of passion and frustration of her partners becomes entirely comprehensible.

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Kung Mahawi Man ang Ulap

English Translation: If the Clouds Clear Up
Year of Release: 1984
Director: Laurice Guillen
Screenwriters: Orlando Nadres & Lualhati Bautista
Adapted from the komiks by Gilda Olvidado
Producer: Viva Films

Cast: Hilda Koronel, Christopher de Leon, Amy Austria, Eddie Garcia, Isabel Rivas, Michael de Mesa, Gloria Romero, Tommy Abuel, Yasmin Ayesa, Ester Chavez, Jimmy Javier, Moody Diaz, Josie Shoemaker, Virginia Montes

Catherine learns that her inheritance from her mother is being used up by her scheming stepfather Pablo. Rita, Pablo’s eldest child, also causes Catherine to break up with her lover, Rustan. Catherine is then wrongfully jailed after killing her stepbrother Jojo, who had attempted to rape her. As she gives birth in prison to Rustan’s son, she longs for the day she will be able to avenge herself.

Laurice Guillen’s first attempt at glossy melodrama has remained her most accomplished, with its advantages foregrounded and its weaknesses minimized. Its departures from standard-issue samples include sympathy for the oppressed, acknowledgment of women’s strength, allocation of dramatic reversals, including the last-minute vengeance of the underdog, and the tempering of villainy via the use of camp drollery, a technique perfected by Regal Films’ inhouse blockbuster directors. At the moment when Philippine culture had grown disillusioned and impatient with authoritarian masculinism, it was small wonder that a major studio, Viva Films—ironically accused of having been assisted by the dictatorial regime—was able to thrive on the purveyance of these specific gender-progressive pleasures. The larger historical irony, for a Marcos-sympathetic outfit, is that in a couple of years, this emergent cultural critique of masculinity arguably contributed to the downfall of Ferdinand E. Marcos’s old-line patriarchal system.

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Sumayaw Ka Salome

English Translation: Dance, Salome
Year of Release: 1992
Director: Laurice Guillen
Screenwriter: Joen Chionglo
From the komiks series by Ric Aquino, as serialized in Superstar Komiks
Producer: Seiko Films

Cast: Rita Avila, Jestoni Alarcon, Cesar Montano, Daria Ramirez, Joonee Gamboa, Maritoni Fernandez, Barbara Perez, Metring David, Rafael Roces, Guila Alvarez, Christopher Rojas, Malou de Guzman, Joey Galvez, Ernie Zarate, Perry de Guzman

Salome is brought up by an abusive mother, who blames her for impeding her dreams of becoming a famous dancer. She trains Salome to join small-time dance competitions and forces her grown-up daughter to work at a bar and entertain wealthy clients. The mother’s paramour, who expresses interest in Salome, is confronted by his legal wife, resulting in a knife fight where Salome unexpectedly attains her freedom. Despite welcoming the devotion of Fermin, a cab driver, Salome pursues her mother’s dream of material success for herself. Upon spotting wealthy bachelor Leo Vergara, she asks Manolo, an etiquette professional sympathetic to her predicament, to coach her in the social graces necessary to win her target. She keeps her sex-work past a secret but realizes that Leo has a dark backstory all his own.

Like Marilou Diaz-Abaya, Laurice Guillen early enough realized the advantage she possessed as a biological woman director in the male-dominated Philippine film industry—that she could present women’s problems and not be suspected or accused of exploitative or mercenary incentives. Guillen’s preference was to focus on psychoanalytic dynamics, in contrast with Diaz-Abaya’s interest in the sociological, notwithstanding significant overlaps between them. Sumayaw Ka Salome may be regarded as the culmination of Guillen’s interest in exploring womanly trauma, coupled with her triumphant discovery of the ways in which these concerns could be infused in genre assignments. The sign that a confident woman is in charge lies not so much in the presentation of a phallic mother (already a staple in the works of many of her contemporaries), but in the contrast she sets up between the title character and the similarly traumatized rich man she marries: where Leo Vergara could give vent to his overwrought passions everytime he recalls the scandal his still-doting mother visited on him, Salome constantly has to make sure she maintains the same clear mind that enabled her to survive the hazards that confronted her in the past, even when severely battered by the man she decided to honor as her husband. This may be a way of explaining how our women-directed films managed to sustain where the vast majority of action films faltered: the requisite of justifying bloody vengeance by the male hero usually entailed the inundation of unmitigated violence on the women in his orbit, with the presumption that they could neither resist nor avenge themselves, and that the prerogative of retaliation is not theirs to claim either. Sumayaw Ka Salome does not evade this realistic observation, but it nevertheless modifies the generic resolution granting the abuser his self-destructive proclivity instead of enduring the retribution meted out by a heroic avenger.

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Dahil Mahal Kita: The Dolzura Cortez Story

English Title: Because I Love You
Year of Release: 1993
Director: Laurice Guillen
Screenwriter: Ricky Lee
From the biography written by Ceres Doyo and serialized in Philippine Daily Inquirer
Producer: OctoArts Films

Cast: Vilma Santos, Christopher de Leon, Charito Solis, Nonie Buencamino, Jackie Aquino, Mikee Villanueva, Richard Chaney, Saameer, Jaime Blanch, Eula Valdez, Charles Tolentino, Michael Allen, CJ Ramos, Jason San Pedro, Charlotte Lugo, Percival Mendoza, Mark Anthony Martinez, Neil Laurence, Pocholo Montes, Malou Crisologo, Ernie Zarate, PETA Kalingan Ensemble, Maila Gumila, John Gaddi, Cris Michelena, Shamaine Buencamino, Evangeline Concepcion, Amiel Leonardia, Randy Gamier, Phil Noble, Perlyn Bunyi, Alma Conepion, Christine Bersola, Mimi Yaptiongco, Candy Pangilinan, Gigette Reyes, Mia Gutierrez, Nonong Talbo, Tess Dumpit, Gil Portes, Dennis Adobas, Ross F. Celino Jr., Bong de Leon, Ed de Leon, Gerry Ocampo, Veronica Samio, Rod Samson, Gilleth Sandico

Pregnant by her army-officer boyfriend in her Mindanao hometown, Dolzura Cortez agrees to his suggestion to live with him. When she arrives at his house, however, he introduces another pregnant woman as his wife. She refuses to live with the two of them but he manages to convince her to try it out. After her third child, she decides to leave him and migrates to Manila with her kids. She works at a variety of jobs in the hospitality profession, occasionally going on dates with foreigners for money. She agrees to be a rich foreigner’s kept woman but when another Arabic man tricks her into spending the night with him, her sponsor drops her. She then makes the acquaintance of Paolo, with whom she gets along well; but one day he fails to show up for their date. Although careful about getting regular checkups, she suddenly falls sick from a series of serious infectious diseases and gets diagnosed with a fairly advanced stage of AIDS, since standard tests for sex workers still did not include HIV detection. Paolo arrives from overseas studies to conduct research on the then-new epidemic. He unexpectedly reconnects with Dolzura when he visits her hospital room, and eventually convinces her to be the first “out” patient of the still-misunderstood plague.

The third and so-far final collaboration between Laurice Guillen and Vilma Santos turned out to be their most satisfactory outing, notwithstanding the organized critics’ bizarre persistence in championing them in order to downgrade Nora Aunor: their previous collab, Ipagpatawad Mo (Forgive Me, 1991), earned the dubious distinction of being the only critics’ winner in a year when all the other recognition bodies, including new critics’ organizations, upheld Elwood Perez’s Aunor-starrer Ang Totoong Buhay ni Pacita M. (The Real Life of Pacita M.).[1] The real-life biographical content of Dahil Mahal Kita benefits from the colorfully transgressive existence led by its subject who, as she remarks at one point, strove to elude the clutches of patriarchal domination, only to be swiped by a pandemic illness that lay in wait during one of the moments when her safe practice may have been compromised or overpowered by one of her clients. The film conveys her inevitable and understandable bitterness and provides a mercifully short glimpse of the physical suffering she had to endure, but it also complements Cortez’s generosity of spirit by refusing to pass moral judgment on her choices—some of which were admittedly reckless, but only because of the existence of a then-still-incurable illness; an emblematic epilogue restores the youth and beauty that would have been Cortez’s birthright, in a fairer world. Santos is peerless in embodying the travails of a woman who insists on living as full a life as fate and society would allow, realizing only too late that history will have ways of playing mean tricks on its Others and consequently embarking on a maturation process in order to cope with the situation. Cortez herself was struck down in the prime of her life, as millions of other victims all over the world were; an even more effective pandemic would soon happen along and would have proved far more tragic, if not for the knowledge and guidance that sufferers like her first imparted.

Note

[1] I have written extensively about this matter elsewhere, but in terms of the aforementioned collaborations: Laurice Guillen expressed the only known misgiving about winning the critics’ prize for her direction of her first Vilma Santos film, Kapag Langit ang Humatol (Heaven’s Judgment, 1990). For the next year’s controversial upraising of Ipagpatawad Mo, her direction was overridden despite its fundamental function in the film. Although the best of the three and arguably also the best of its year of release, the only major critics’ prize garnered by Dahil Mahal Kita was for lead performance. For a consideration of the critics’ preferential treatment of Santos at the expense of Nora Aunor, see Joel David, “Predicaments of Prestige: Negotiations and Symbolic Violence in Philippine Cultural Film Practice,” Forum for World Literature Studies 17.2 (June 2025), pp. 272–94.

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