Canon Decampment: Marilou Diaz-Abaya

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1—Brutal

Additional Language: English
Year of Release: 1980
Director: Marilou Diaz-Abaya
Screenwriter: Ricky Lee
Producer: Bancom Audiovision Corporation

Cast: Amy Austria, Charo Santos, Gina Alajar, Jay Ilagan, Perla Bautista, Johnny Delgado, Joonee Gamboa, Nello Nayo, Robert Tongco

Monica is accused of killing her husband Tato and his two friends. Clara, a feminist journalist, believes that there is more to the crime than meets the eye. Since Monica has become too traumatized to talk, Clara gets in touch with Monica’s mother, Tato’s family, and Monica’s best friend Cynthia. As Clara gets closer to finding the truth, a disturbing revelation will determine Monica’s fate.

2—Moral

Additional Language: English
Years of Release: 1982
Director: Marilou Diaz-Abaya
Screenwriter: Ricky Lee
Producer: Seven Star Productions

Cast: Lorna Tolentino, Gina Alajar, Sandy Andolong, Anna Marin, Juan Rodrigo, Michael Sandico, Ronald Bregendahl, Lito Pimentel, Mia Gutierrez, Laurice Guillen, Dexter Doria, Claire de la Fuente, Amy Austria

Four college women become friends with different goals and pursuits. Joey leads a dissipated lifestyle as her way of dealing with an overbearing mother and with her unrequited love for a politically committed activist. The talentless but ambitious Kathy sells her body to attain her dream of fame as a singer. Sylvia longs to work things out with her husband after he leaves her for a gay-bar dancer. Maritess sets her dreams of writing poetry aside to be full-time wife and mother to an old-fashioned male chauvinist. With each other’s support as well as criticism, the ladies try to cope with their respective situations.

Brutal, the first overtly feminist Filipino film, might be showing signs of age by now, but that’s a reflection on how far feminism, or more accurately a variety of feminisms, has journeyed. One might imagine a third- or even late second-wave proponent arching an eyebrow today at how the more transgressive character, the coed call girl—who lives alone, speaks her mind, and insists on her terms even when it comes to sex—is forced to bow before the squarish values of the domestic-violence survivor; or, moreover, how the middle-class journalist is privileged with framing the narrative via her investigative research. Yet the same elements that incited enthusiasm and appreciation among viewers then are still palpable: the cinematographic, almost televisual flatness that facilitates the fluid deployment of flashbacks and flashforwards, the sharp attunement to pop culture, the on-the-mark coaching of performers.[1] Marilou Diaz-Abaya’s follow-up effort, Moral, is that rare occurrence: a commercial project that successfully demonstrates a conceptual abstraction. Inspired by her mentor, Ishmael Bernal, Diaz-Abaya sought out answers to difficult questions whenever her circumstances allowed her, and with producer Jesse Ejercito providing carte blanche, Ricky Lee was able to draft for her a one-of-a-kind narrative that fused Marxist dialectics with dramatic logic, all while observing an ever-evolving process of change through conflict. The result was a multicharacter plot that branched out in unpredictable though never less-than-satisfactory ways—as close to feminist epistemology (the use of gender politics to restructure human knowledge) and radical aesthetics as our mainstream movies have been able to get. Yet the final output has remained as approachable as Brutal, the team’s previous collaboration; this was due to Diaz-Abaya’s elegant, masterly handling, an object lesson in how plastic skills acquire value only in terms of their usefulness in thematic, histrionic, and literary applications. Diaz-Abaya endured a whole set of bum raps throughout her career, but no other non-writing director paid as much attention to the development of material as she did. On the strength of these two early projects, it was no surprise that she managed to garner the admiration of the best writer-directors in the industry.

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Karnal

English Translation: Carnal
English Title: Of the Flesh
Year of Release: 1983
Director: Marilou Diaz-Abaya
Screenwriter: Ricky Lee
From the legal narrative “To Take a Life” by Teresita Añover Rodriguez
Producers: Cine Suerte & Yalung Group of Companies International

Cast: Phillip Salvador, Cecille Castillo, Vic Silayan, Charito Solis, Joel Torre, Grace Amilbangsa, Crispin Medina, Ella Luansing, Joonee Gamboa, Rolando Tinio, Vangie Labalan, Gil de Leon, Rustica Carpio

A storyteller narrates a tale her mother told her. Narcing returns to his hometown of Mulawin with his wife Puring. Soon, Puring, who looks like her late mother-in-law, attracts her father-in-law’s lascivious attention. Puring’s fate worsens when her friendship with a deaf-mute laborer is mistaken for an affair. When Narcing finally intervenes in favor of his wife, he winds up killing his father and landing in jail. Narcing escapes and hides with Puring but the long arm of the law and the shadow cast by tradition will not allow them to live in peace.

At the point where Marilou Diaz-Abaya resolved to impress observers as a directorial stylist, she enlisted her long-term collaborator, Ricky Lee, and reworked a sensational journalistic account into a period narrative. The project harnessed a number of elements associated with theater classicism—timeless and placeless settings (actually a rural town in the 1930s) for stylized performances with elements drawn from Greek tragedy: hubristic hero and his patriarchal nemesis, an omniscient single-person chorus with her occasional direct-to-audience speeches, vengeful townfolk who torment the central couple, and so on. The technique of appropriating universal strategies is typically associated in contemporary local cinema with the “low” genres of comedy and horror, so to find them used fairly successfully in a high-art project raised issues of adaptation and appropriation, proof that Diaz-Abaya regarded entertainment as capable of bearing discursive ambition.

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Sensual

Additional Languages: German, English
Year of Release: 1986
Director: Marilou Diaz-Abaya
Screenwriter: Jose Javier Reyes
Producer: Regal Films

Cast: Barbara Benitez, Charito Solis, Lito Gruet, Chanda Romero, Rolando Tinio, Tony Mabesa, Hero Bautista, Lara Jacinto, Vangie Labalan, Cris Daluz, Josie Galvez, Arvie Antonio, Sarah Alonzo, Romeo Enriquez, Ella Luansing, Crispin Medina, Reiner Uckely, Lyn Francisco, Amy Leah, Filipinas Adnono, Charry Velarde, Marivin Choco, Dante Figueroa, Agnes Vergara, Lucy Baldorado, Elena Santos, Ming-Ming Talens, Donna Pineda, Leslie Reyes, Liza Muñoz, Rhea Flores, Dahlia Delgado, Cherry Vibar

Preparing for college in Manila, Niña grows up in a once-prosperous but now-impoverished rural household. Turing, her mother, insists on discipline and sensible behavior, but her grandmother Lola Senyang indulges her granddaughter’s every whim as well as her own, despite doctor’s and financier’s warnings. Niña develops a close friendship with her childhood friend Elsa, which eventually leads to physical intimacy. But a handsome scion, Ariel, arrives from his foreign sojourn and begins courting Niña, who’s intrigued by him but is warned by Turing of the incompatibility of their class status and resented by Elsa, who fears losing the only person she loved.

A precursor of the next phase of Marilou Diaz-Abaya’s filmmaking career, Sensual exemplifies her readiness to tackle inadequately developed material with the full force of what may have been the most impressive technical arsenal of any Second Golden Age talent. In subsequently abandoning her specialization in women-themed subjects, however, she also gave up a few non-tech skills that no other woman filmmaker in the country had been able to match: an intimate understanding of feminine dilemmas and the conflicted sentiments that heterosexual attraction induces. An additional expertise in depicting lesbian intimacy served her well in her subsequent efforts, notably Milagros (1997). It may be too late to acknowledge her as our primary queer Filipina director, but her record speaks for itself. Sensual adds to these endowments an additional treat—an attempt by cinematographer Conrado Baltazar to appropriate the painterly polychromatic approach of Romy Vitug and succeeding magnificently in his first try. Who knows what further direction he planned to take, whether with Diaz-Abaya or any other director, if fate had not intervened on another movie set two years later?

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May Nagmamahal sa Iyo

English Translation: Someone Loves You
English Title: Madonna and Child
Additional Languages: English, Chinese
Year of Release: 1996
Director: Marilou Diaz-Abaya
Screenwriters: Olivia M. Lamasan, Ricky Lee, Shaira Mella Salvador
Producer: Star Cinema

Cast: Lorna Tolentino, Ariel Rivera, Claudine Barrretto, Stefano Mori, Emman Abeleda, Archi Adamos, Cita Astals, Lilia Cuntapay, Cris Daluz, Renato del Prado, Jaclyn Jose, Vangie Labalan, Alma Lerma, Michael Macasio, Gina Pareño, Tom Taus, Rolando Tinio, Gamaliel Viray

Unable to afford caring for her out-of-wedlock son, Louella brings her child to the parish priest for adoption. After a few years of saving money as a nanny in Hong Kong, she uses her employers’ decision to migrate as an occasion to return to the Philippines. Nestor, a police officer who held a flame for her, encourages her to look for the son she gave away. The orphanage where they hope to find him was demolished to make way for highway construction, so they proceed to the next place where the wards were brought. Conrad, a trouble child about the same age as Louella’s son, hums the same lullabye she used to sing to him as a child. Despite a few doubts brought up by Nestor, Louella takes to Conrad, who in turn readily accepts her as his long-lost mother and turns into an exemplary resident of the orphanage. The day she finishes preparing the documents necessary to reclaim her offspring, the orphanage director brings up unsettling news that poses a challenge for Louella and the family she was hoping to form.

Admirers of Marilou Diaz-Abaya’s discursive film treatments must have been taken aback when she came up with a straightforward genre exercise. Except for its moderate budget and use of popular performers, May Nagmamahal sa Iyo shared the same properties that her earlier potboilers exhibited. Yet the passage of time has demonstrated how the film affirmed its director’s unwavering commitment to critiques of class and gender, in addition to her ability to uncover a kernel of truth that may have been difficult to accept but that has since proved essential in our citizens’ confrontation with the detrimental impact of labor export on the family unit. This amounts to a redefinition of what constitutes a real family, with blood relations becoming a secondary, if not dispensable, consideration, and with the country’s women tasked with moving toward this inescapable shift. One can only further admire Diaz-Abaya’s militancy (an unexpected decriptor that can only be perceived in retrospect) when the narrative’s singularly villainous character happens to come from the social class that she represents. Star Cinema has been the most insistent chronicler of overseas Filipino workers’ concerns, with films preceding and succeeding May Nagmamahal; ironically, its least financially successful entry turned out to be the most forward-thinking of the lot, and may now be unreservedly taken to heart by the audience who once hesitated to approach it.

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Milagros

Additional Language: English, German
Year of Release: 1997
Director: Marilou Diaz-Abaya
Screenwriter: Rolando Tinio
Producer: Merdeka Film Productions

Cast: Sharmaine Arnaiz, Dante Rivero, Elizabeth Oropesa, Joel Torre, Raymond Bagatsing, Nonie Buencamino, Mia Gutierrez, Rolando Tinio

Nightclub dancer Lagring learns that her estranged father Cirilo has died. Upon hearing her mother worry about paying off the debts he had accumulated, she unexpectedly volunteers to pay these off by working as a maid for their landowner, Nano, and his three sons: married photographer Junie, blind Ramonito, and playboy Bennet. Her alluring charms cause discord among the four men, but she aspires to someday visit the holy mountain of Banahaw.

Marilou Diaz-Abaya bid farewell to women-centered discourses in Philippine cinema with this controversial, demanding release—not surprising, considering her track record in rejecting easy answers to vexed questions. Her subsequent focus on men’s issues never fared as successfully, and several observers consider Milagros a precursor to her comparatively fallow period. Even then, a lesser achievement by Diaz-Abaya’s standards could still yield popular and critical acclaim, as evident in several of her post-Milagros films, notably José Rizal (1998). The first, most urgent issue about Milagros is its refusal to acknowledge feminist political correctness, beginning as it does with a young sex worker who volunteers to repay her late father’s debts, and agrees to a form of indentured slavery by servicing an all-male household. The seeming sordidness is held at an aesthetic distance and enables Diaz-Abaya to build up to a spiritual culmination, with a pilgrimage to mystical Mount Banahaw as the title character’s object of fulfillment. From a career packed with a wide range of approaches to outcast women’s characters—witness Baby Tsina (1984) and Sensual (1986) for a comparative sampling—Diaz-Abaya unsurprisingly manages to endow her wise, stouthearted tragedienne with ironic loverly treatment. An ecstatic finale has had audiences cheering, wondering, protesting, and weeping, sometimes in succession.

Note

[1] One of my pet peeves, elaborated at length elsewhere in this publication, is all about the obsession with originality, expressed in accusations of plagiarism—fortunately less of an affliction today than it used to be. One of the risible charges raised against Brutal by a recently deceased former member of the local critics group was that it filched the structure of Ingmar Bergman’s Aus dem Leben der Marionetten (From the Life of the Marionettes, 1980). In contrast, when De stilte rond Christine M. (A Question of Silence, 1982), by subsequent Oscar winner Marleen Gorris, was screened in Manila, no one brought up the question of why its basic narrative elements closely resembled those of Brutal. Such is the scourge of postcolonial mentality.

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Á!