Tag Archives: canon

November 17, 2023

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 antidictatorship movement’s full-blast status. 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.

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 reverse gender exclusion that it promotes, but also because a long period of military dictatorship was just dismantled by a female challenger. Carol’s acceptance of Marietta’s apology for “borrowing” her hubby,[2] although seemingly a violation of the progressive proscription on class conciliation, actually signifies the ex-heiress’s initiation into the messy 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.

[2] Feminist studies was just 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 straight male friends temper the terror of the prospect of the intimacy of same-sex desire between them by displacing it onto women—i.e., using their female partners as objects of exchange instead of offering their own bodies to their friends.

Á!

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November 17, 2023

Canon Decampment: Gil Portes

By Joel David

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Gabi Kung Sumikat ang Araw

English Title: Sun Rises at Night
Year of Release: 1983
Director: Gil Portes
Screenwriter: Ricky Lee
(From a story idea by Manny Pichel)
Producers: Four N Films & Gold Lion Productions

Cast: Gina Alajar, Charito Solis, Sandy Andolong, Kristine Garcia, Edgar Mande, Juan Rodrigo, Bebong Osorio, Willy Cruz, Glenda Tuazon, William Martinez

A nightclub singer, Rosita is used to entertaining male customers and occasionally sleeping with them for the money. After a while, she falls in love with Danny, but winds up quarreling with him. Lota, Danny’s ex, searches for him to be able to reconcile with him. Via a detective, she finds out that he died after his last date with Rosita. The detective also warns Rommel, who’s apparently falling for Rosita’s charms, that a number of other people have been found dead after associating with her.

More typical of Gil Portes’s output, Gabi Kung Sumikat ang Araw furnishes strong material with less-than-satisfactory execution. Enough integrity remains to reveal certain concerns of the period, specifically the late martial-law era of the elder Ferdinand Marcos, when pent-up dissatisfaction with the regime’s mismanagement and corruption was just about to be detonated by the assassination of returning oppositionist Benigno S. Aquino Jr. The mid-plot revelation of a community of nighttime normies who transform into old people during the day could readily be read as an allegory for Communist-rebel outsiders, amplified by their wariness about being discovered. Yet the contemporary decline in rebel militancy enables the film to command an even stronger signification—as a metaphor for outlaw sexualities. The climactic onslaught of geriatric folk evokes parallels with the Spanish horror classic Island of the Damned (dir. Narciso Ibáñez Serrador, 1976), where the seemingly harmless children are replaced by initially benign elders. The situation in GKSA is arguably more distressing, since people who age are presumed to have acquired wisdom and enough apathy to let go of survival issues.

’Merika

English Translation: America
Year of Release: 1984
Director: Gil Portes
Screenwriters: Clodualdo del Mundo Jr. & Gil Quito
Producer: Adrian Films

Cast: Nora Aunor, Bembol Roco, Marilyn Concepcion, Cesar Aliparo, Boogie Abaya, Chiquit Reyes, Marshall Factora, Brenda Duque

For five years, Mila has been living well in New Jersey as a hospital nurse and a nursing-home aide. However, she is beset with loneliness and constantly questions whether or not she should stay in America. It is when she falls in love with fellow Filipino immigrant Mon that she truly sees the situation she is in and finds the answers she has long sought out.

The Nora Aunor persona embodied the working-class Filipina, tracking the latter’s transition from local domestic to foreign care professional. ’Merika would necessarily exhibit alienation and weariness, since these are essential components of the overseas worker’s experience. The film sports a rarely encountered reality effect, drawn from filmmaker Gil Portes’s training in official (and therefore “objective”) documentary practice. Local film observers would be hard-put to find a movie whose production elements are so subtle and unobtrusive, perfectly matched as usual by Aunor’s delivery. Toward the end of the narrative, a series of editorial interventions points up the fictional nature of the material by interweaving simultaneous scenes from disparate locales. At this point, and by this means, the text’s reality-based presentation transforms into a call to empathy and attention.

Bukas … May Pangarap

English Translation: Tomorrow … There’s a Dream
Year of Release: 1984
Director: Gil Portes
Screenwriter: Ricky Lee
Producer: Tri Films

Cast: Gina Alajar, Tommy Abuel, Ruben Rustia, Michael Baluyot, Richard Baluyot, Joy Glorioso, Lucy Quintos, Bebong Osorio, Dante Balois, Daniel Martin, Eric Lava, Tony Pascua, Beda Orquejo, Thea Cleofe, Chito Vicente, Evelyn Vargas, Josie Galvez, Mel Ladongga, Lucy Baldorado, Bes Flores, Sammy Morales

When her husband Udong becomes a contract worker in Saudi Arabia, Mering adopts an optimistic disposition despite the hardship of rural poverty. After a month without hearing from him, she tries to allay her fears for the sake of their two young sons. When he returns with nothing, victimized by his recruiter and imprisoned as an illegal alien in the country he had pinned his hopes on, she has to figure out ways to pay their creditors and survive from one day to the next, since Udong is obsessed with avenging himself on the recruiter. Nothing that the couple can do is able to stave off hunger, the contempt of unsympathetic neighbors, and the negligence of an unresponsive government system, compounded with their growing disaffection for each other.

One way of accounting for the critical negligence suffered by Bukas … May Pangarap is that it functioned too effectively as a cautionary protest film, the same way that early social-realist texts presented difficulties suffered then by our impoverished compatriots that have since been redressed, or that war films delineated conditions that no longer exist. An even more insidious factor may have been at work as well: Gil Portes did not belong to the front- or even second-rank of elite practitioners favored by local tastemongers, so he apparently could not be capable of accomplishing two vital samples in a row, no matter that they happened to cover the same topic of overseas work. ’Merika, the film with a triumphant narrative, has been the one that shows up in extensive canon listings, although Bukas can similarly boast of a storytelling triumph of its own. As an entry in the country’s yearend film festival, it has even proved to endure better than the films that out-earned and out-awarded it. As in the case of Nora Aunor in ’Merika, Portes hands to Tommy Abuel what has been far and away his defining performance; but it is Gina Alajar’s also-overlooked turn as the conflicted housewife, stressed beyond humanly endurable limits, that remains frighteningly and recognizably real.

Á!

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November 17, 2023

Canon Decampment: Mel Chionglo

By Joel David

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Playgirl

Additional Language: “Swardspeak” [Philippine gay lingo]
Year of Release: 1981
Director: Mel Chionglo
Screenwriter: Ricky Lee
Producer: Regal Films

Cast: Charito Solis, Gina Alajar, Phillip Salvador, Alicia Alonzo, Mary Walter, Al Tantay, Gabby Concepcion, Lily Miraflor, Jimi Melendez, Ernie Zarate, Deborah Sun, Emma Valeros, Joonee Gamboa, Renee Johnson

Tonya endures her profession as a middle-aged Chinatown hooker to enable her daughter to finish high school. Cindy, however, prefers to audition at singing contests despite having no talent, and hang out with her good-time pals, through whom she meets Boogie, a smooth-talking pimp. Tonya’s discovery that Cindy never completed her studies drives the latter to finding any available job. When Tonya learns that Cindy has become a prostitute, she drives her daughter away, further intensifying Cindy’s resolve to succeed in sex work.

Although he had dabbled in other aspects of film production, Mel Chionglo became best known as a production designer, prior to debuting as a filmmaker. Not surprisingly, Playgirl foregrounds this element (with Benjie de Guzman in charge), with a deliberately measured pace allowing its audience to partake of its impressively detailed environment. What got overlooked, in the initial flurry of reservations regarding languid sensibility and sordid subject matter, was the carefully calibrated treatment that inhered in Ricky Lee’s screenplay. The women realize that it may be next-to-impossible to break out of the life, but it also motivates them to redefine the terms of their relationships with men and, when afforded an opportunity, with their exploiters as well. Its compassionate dissection of mothering evokes several high points in Classical Hollywood cinema (notably King Vidor’s 1937 Stella Dallas), with Playgirl qualifying the female parent’s readiness to sacrifice by counterweighting it with an essential component of righteous rage.

Sinner or Saint

Year of Release: 1984
Director: Mel Chionglo
Screenwriter: Ricky Lee
Producer: Regal Films

Cast: Claudia Zobel, Charito Solis, Gloria Romero, Patrick dela Rosa, Ricky Davao, Raffy Bonanza, Rey Malte Cruz, Julio Diaz, Joey Galvez

Despite being a wife to Fred and a mother to their child, Dina cannot resist her youthful restlessness. Against familial objections, she goes to Manila to pursue her studies but ends up having an affair with a classmate. When Fred learns of this, he takes his wife back to their hometown where they have another child. But it does not take long before Dina’s promiscuity gets her into trouble again.

Sex goddess Claudia Zobel died in a vehicular accident right after completing work on a film whose narrative bizarrely paralleled her peripatetic and unconventional existence, and uncannily predicted her tragic end. Based on the tabloid report of a woman who kept abandoning her well-appointed rural middle-class family for a series of dangerous big-city encounters, the film maintained the abject elements of her tale while providing Dina, the central character, with heightened self-awareness, as a sometime student of literature and occasional critic of traditional gender roles. Despite the harrowing depths of Dina’s self-degradation, the film is remarkably non-judgmental about the decisions she makes and their effects on her family and lovers—a rare local achievement in film naturalism.

1—Nasaan Ka Nang Kailangan Kita

English Translation: Where Were You When I Needed You
Additional Language: English
Year of Release: 1986
Director: Mel Chionglo
Screenwriter: Ricky Lee
Producer: Regal Films

Cast: Susan Roces, Hilda Koronel, Snooky Serna, Janice de Belen, Eddie Garcia, Aga Muhlach, Richard Gomez, Chanda Romero, Anita Linda, Katrin Gonzales, Vangie Labalan, Ernie Zarate, Alfred Barretto

Cristy finishes high school at the top of her class, but her mother Rosa informs her that she cannot afford to send her to college, asking her instead to help her expand her food-catering operation. Cristy instead seeks help from her estranged father Julio, whose wealthy wife resents Cristy’s presence in their household. Rosa refuses to reconcile with Cristy and instead pressures her younger daughter to work harder so she can prove to Julio that his abandonment did not crush her. The older generation’s concerns intensify with the younger people as their pawns, until Julio’s undiscovered medical condition gets the better of him.

2—Paano Kung Wala Ka Na

English Title: What Will Happen When You’re Gone
Additional Language: English
Year of Release: 1987
Director: Mel Chionglo
Screenwriter: Ricky Lee
Producer: Regal Films

Cast: Susan Roces, Eddie Gutierrez, Charo Santos-Concio, Snooky Serna, Miguel Rodriguez, Mona Lisa, Marissa Delgado, Debraliz, Ramil Rodriguez, Chanda Romero, Romeo Rivera, Linda Montenegro, Raquel Villavicencio, Becky Misa, Malou de Guzman, Luis Benedicto

After raising Ampy, a mature and level-headed daughter, Raffy feels suffocated by his marriage to Ruby and wishes he could start anew with Doris, his mistress. Ampy meanwhile is perturbed when her boyfriend Don insists on going abroad for further training even after she tells him that she’s pregnant with their child. Sonny, her long-time admirer, takes a job in Raffy’s firm so he could get closer to Ampy. Ruby’s old flame Gary also starts hanging out with Ruby even though he’s still married to a mutual acquaintance of theirs. As someone who believes in propriety and keeping her feelings to herself, Ruby realizes that she has to undergo a process of adjusting to a messy and constantly changing world.

Despite some problems brought on by her attempting monopolistic control as well as by the meddling of self-appointed culture authorities led by then First Lady Imelda Marcos, Lily Monteverde was a true-blue cinema fan who made sure to introduce old-time talents, genres, and traditions whenever the opportunities presented themselves. Her success with First Golden Age movie queen Susan Roces had all the hallmarks of laudatory tributes, at a time in Philippine production history when such attempts were too retrograde for the hip crowd yet too advanced for screen-culture scholars. No matter though, since the films were warmly welcomed by their intended audiences and earned Roces a younger set of admirers. Around this time “Mother” Lily also successfully revived the Guy & Pip tandem, the country’s most successful multimedia love team; but it’s the Roces films that set the template. Both focus on conflicts in the domestic sphere, with the interests of mothers and daughters colliding with shifting social values. Nasaan Ka Nang Kailangan Kita negotiates class-crossed outings while Paano Kung Wala Ka Na confines itself to the privileged sector. Each one makes sure to arrive at a point where the women can have a satisfactory resolution, with Roces’s histrionic confidence building up as the earlier film leads to the later one. No one will commit the mistake of wishing she tackled the historical and/or working-class tragediennes on which, say, Anita Linda or Nora Aunor founded their reputations, but within the circumscribed terms that her persona observes, no one will wish that someone else had taken her part either.

Babaing Hampaslupa

English Title: Vagrant Woman
Alternate Title: Babaeng Hampaslupa
Additional Language: English
Year of Release: 1988
Director: Mel Chionglo
Screenwriter: Ricky Lee
Producer: Regal Films

Cast: Maricel Soriano, Richard Gomez, Edu Manzano, Rowell Santiago, Gina Alajar, Janice de Belen, Liza Lorena, Leni Santos, Carmina Villaroel, Anita Linda, Mario Escudero, Vangie Labalan, Roscoe Martin, Eva Ramos, Lucy Quinto, Josie Galvez, Rosanna Jover, Sylvia Garde, Maribel Legarda, Tita de Villa, Aida Carmona, Ilonah Jean, Alma Lerma, Evelyn Vargas, Joe Jardi, Malou de Guzman, Hazel Atuel, Bing Davao, Edgar Palomar, Elaine Eleazar, Lollie Mara, Bon Vibar, Valerie Mayor, Patty Calupitan, Romy Bermudo, Troy Martino

After their mother elopes with a neighborhood suitor, Remedios assumes responsibility for her two younger sisters. She couldn’t make ends meet via farmwork, so she entrusts her sisters to relatives and migrates to Manila. She finds work as a dunk-tank girl in a carnival, where Vincent, a slumming entrepreneur, takes pity on her and recruits her for his bus company. She agrees to be a ticket conductor since it’s the only job opening at the moment, and becomes fast friends with another lady conductor as well as her route driver, Jimmy, who offers her residential space in his small family home. When Vincent finally finds a less stressful position for her, she realizes that he and Jimmy are both interested in her and resolves to pursue her pragmatism, since it had enabled her to upgrade her stature in society.

Maricel Soriano’s star persona was popularly described as taray (fierce or sassy) but its expansion in film roles necessarily transmuted into street-tough combativeness (butangera would be the closest equivalent), where its comic roots served to temper her characters’ harsh behavior. That she would turn out to be the most successful among the Regal Babies crop of young talents also indicated a perfect fit with the company’s (and its owner’s) unruly reputation, constantly running into trouble with the hypocritical moral guardians of the martial-law regime of the earlier Ferdinand Marcos. Babaing Hampaslupa provides what may be the closest to a standard version of her persona’s trajectory: a ferocious personal struggle against destitution that mirrors her real-life narrative, leading to early triumph via charm, talent, and chutzpah, with an ill-advised turn into the excesses and indulgences of the high life leading either to catastrophic loss or, as in this film, to (re)discovering fulfillment in returning to the family and community she once left behind. The moralism of this type of closure might have accounted for the apparent cold reception by conservative critics resistant to the challenges posed by genre studies, consequently missing out on a vital opportunity to connect popular culture with then-emerging trends in feminist empowerment and queer politics after the collapse of the military dictatorship.

Developing Stories: Lucia

Alternate Title: Lucia
Year of Release: 1992
Director: Mel Chionglo
Screenwriter: Ricky Lee
(From a story by Lino Brocka)
Producers: Manila Inter-Film Productions, BBC Television, Television Trust for the Environment, One World Group of Broadcasters

Cast: Lolita Rodriguez, Gina Alajar, Suzette Ranillo, Elvira Baldomero, Jonathan Darca, Lorenzo Mara, Mario Escudero, Aurelio Estrada, Marilou Garingalao, Nanding Josef, Vangie Labalan, Mark Jason, Aida Carmona, Pocholo Montes, Malou de Guzman, Dante Balois, Eva Ramos, Edgar Santiago, Carmen Serafin, Mike Montey, Evelyn Vargas, Fred Capulong, Estrella Antonio, Reggie Lasam, Joel Lamangan, Rey Malte Cruz, Prones Gonzales, Jun dela Paz, Domingo Landicho, Renato Morado, Edna May Landicho, Nonie Buencamino, Pons de Guzman, Loida Damondon, Chie Concepcion, Kess Burias, Rody Vera, Rey Ventura, Lucy Quinto, Josie Galvez, Mari Sambilay, Ireneo Flores, Lucita Soriano, Sylvia Sanchez

After an oil-tanker spill, most residents of a fishing village migrate outward, to be able to earn a living. Since Lucia’s husband and father refuse to leave, she stays on with her family. After her husband and his fellow fishermen are gunned down for venturing too close to privately owned fish pens, Lucia decides to move her family to Manila, although her daughter Cynthia remains to be with her husband Ador, a peasant organizer. In Manila, her daughter Chedeng, who also lost her spouse in the same incident where her father was killed, is able to secure sweatshop work. Lucia however could not watch over her younger daughter Jenny, who gets drawn into the red-light district overrun by foreign pedophiles. She sends her young son to school but he gets waylaid by child hoodlums and soon partakes of their use and selling of illegal drugs. When Cynthia clandestinely asks to see Chedeng to report that Ador was abducted by soldiers and that she has become a wanted figure, Chedeng also confides her involvement in union work. Lucia’s family and neighbors are driven out of the slum area by a developer and reduced to scrounging for resellable scraps at the notorious Smokey Mountain landfill.

Lucia stands as the best-realized of the many projects left behind by Lino Brocka, after his sudden death in a 1991 vehicular accident. It exhibits his late-career preference for incident-packed storytelling, resembling Orapronobis (1989) but with the narrative driven by a woman whose heroic efforts at overseeing the welfare of her family are thwarted by the inhumane malignancy of uneven neoliberal development. Only Brocka could have bestowed full justice to this tale, but Chionglo manages with enough compensatory achievements to make the film worth one’s time. His sense of socioeconomic milieu is arguably superior to Brocka’s—no mean achievement by any measure, and essential in a narrative that barrels ahead almost without pause for its characters’ (and audiences’) recovery. Even more impressively, he extracts from Lolita Rodriguez veristic depths that she was never able to display in any of her outings with Brocka, enabling her to claim to being one of Philippine cinema’s acting greats. Anyone who still harbored doubts about Chionglo attempting a global master’s material might find further confirmation in his then-forthcoming trilogy on male erotic dancers, a takeoff from Macho Dancer (1988), Brocka’s biggest overseas hit.

1—Sibak: Midnight Dancers

English Translation: Hacked: Midnight Dancers
Alternate Title: Midnight Dancers
Year of Release: 1994
Director: Mel Chionglo
Screenwriter: Ricky Lee
Producer: Tangent Films International

Cast: Alex del Rosario, Gandong Cervantes, Lawrence David, Luis Cortes, Richard Cassity, Danny Ramos, John Mendoza, Leonard Manalansan, Perla Bautista, Ryan Aristorenas, Soxy Topacio, Gino Paul Guzman, Maureen Mauricio, Jeffrey Suarez, Ray Ventura, Nonie Buencamino, RS Francisco, Cherry Pie Picache, Cezar Xerez-Burgos, Romy Romulo, Anthony Taylor, Leonard Obal, Gino Fernando, Frannie Zamora, Armando A. Reyes, Cherry Cornell, Edel Templonuevo, Archi Adamos, Francis Villacorta, Chie Concepcion, Roden Biag, Herbie Go, Frank Rivera

Arriving from Cebu to join his family, Sonny is informed by his mother that the family can’t afford to fund the continuation of his studies yet. His brothers bring him to their workplace, a gay bar, so he can observe them and maybe earn some money from customers who invite him to their tables; eventually the manager notices his popularity and asks him to try his luck in dancing, like his brothers. Dave, who once lived with Joel, visits the place again because he couldn’t stand being apart and accepts Joel’s married status and desire to continue working. Dennis, Sonny’s other brother, gets fired because of his drug habit and winds up jacking cars with a small gang. He also meets Bogart, an apparently homeless youth, and brings him to their residence to be fed and sheltered. The family’s links to the underworld, despite their careful conduct, leads to dangerous consequences when it shows up to haunt them.

2—Burlesk King

Year of Release: 1999
Director: Mel Chionglo
Screenwriter: Ricky Lee
Producer: Seiko Films

Cast: Rodel Velayo, Leonardo Litton, Elizabeth Oropesa, Raymond Bagatsing, Cherry Pie Picache, Gino Ilustre, Nini Jacinto, Joonee Gamboa, Joel Lamangan, Tonio Ortigas, Ross Rival, Frannie Zamora, Joseph Buncalan, Arthur Casanova, Joey Galvez, Joseph Pe, Sofia Valdez, Aila Marie, Lucy Quinto, Teresa Jamias, Jazzi Oropesa, John Wayne Sace, Jake Mendoza, Edgar Santiago, Eric Hegazy, Dante Gomez, Jonathan Paguio, Jhim Tarrosa, Dennis Coronel, Jude Molato, Marvin Lim, Patrick Suarez, Natz Ordon, Jerry de Vera, Reden Villar, Bojo Roa, Leandro Reyes, Jun dela Paz, Alex Cabudil, Marcel Geronimo, Francis Angeles, Jeffrey Lopez, Raneth Jordan, Yessa Jordan, Gino Fernando, Diding de Andres, Daniel Isherwood, Kevin Isherwood, Patrick Richardson, Lee Walco, Amid Eton, Mark Dionisio, Rey Fernando, Justine Perez, Pinky Roces, Remy Aquino Talents

Harry is introduced to a croupier’s job by his best friend James. After the latter fends off extortionists who target the gambling den, they attack him on the street and he winds up killing one of them. He and Harry then flee to Manila, where they find employment as erotic dancers. Harry’s only quirk is his refusal to accommodate American customers, since he still remembers having been traumatized by his American father. He and James live with Harry’s lesbian sister and her partner, while Harry becomes the favorite of a brokenhearted writer and successfully courts a gold-hearted female sex worker who never turns away street urchins asking for food or money. Harry’s pursuits come to a head when he finds out one day that his mother, stabbed by his father when she tried to escape his clutches with Harry, survived the attack.

3—Twilight Dancers

Additional Language: Pampango
Year of Release: 2006
Director: Mel Chionglo
Screenwriter: Ricky Lee
Producer: Center Stage Productions

Cast: Tyron Perez, Cherry Pie Picache, Allen Dizon, Lauren Novero, Ana Capri, William Martinez, Arnel Ignacio, Joel Lamangan, Jerry Lopez Sineneng, Glaiza de Castro, JE Sison, IC Mendoza, Terence Baylon, Kris Martinez, Chester Nolledo, Dennis Recto, Dino Dizon, Marvin Bautista, Harold Montano, Christian Navesis, Johnron Tañada, Topher Castro, Randy Macapagal, Jack Gabaisen, Tyrone Trias, Kryven Lacson, Perry Escano, Miggs Espina, Paolo Larosa

Rescued by Alfred from an abusive family, Dwight joins his friend to work as an erotic dancer. Since his wife disapproves of his profession, Dwight becomes instead a ballroom-dance instructor, despite the smaller income. Madam Loca, who’s fond of rentboys, takes a liking to Dwight and hires him to entertain the murderous and decadent town mayor. Dwight tells his sponsor that he’s saving up to be able to work overseas, so she conscripts him for a well-paying special assignment, which Alfred asks to join for extra income.

After Macho Dancer (1988) became Lino Brocka’s most profitable overseas release, it became possible for his confrere Mel Chionglo, conscripting one of the film’s scriptwriters, to propose another project along the same lines. The still-successful release of Sibak led to two other films also dealing with the lives of working-class male erotic dancers. The first essential point about these entries, despite some of their titles’ attempts to resemble Macho Dancer, is that they were sequels neither to Brocka’s films nor to one another (Ricky Lee, Facebook Messenger, February 22, 2025), thus lending credence to Joel Lamangan’s claim that his Anak ng Macho Dancer (Son of Macho Dancer, 2021) was the first actual sequel to the Brocka film. But a rewatch of the three Chionglo titles in succession also makes another point evident: the trilogy as a whole surpasses the Brocka film—admittedly not a tall order, considering how Brocka himself was still a few projects away from dispensing with conscienticizing foreign viewers, toward recapturing the local mass audience with a light-handed skills display, the likes of which have never been replicated. Nevertheless, the Chionglo films also perform the careful mission of reworking (a different creature from remaking) Macho Dancer, more or less following its chronological presentation: Sibak introduces the social milieu where erotic dancers attempt to redefine family and friendship on workable terms, Burlesk King focuses on the personal circumstances of the typical worker’s extensive sojourn, and Twilight Dancers inspects the sexual and political exploitation conducted by the very officials tasked with overseeing the welfare of the dispossessed. Where Macho Dancer was hesitant in suspending its judgment of the seamier elements of the underworld, the trilogy embraces the entire gamut of so-called perverse sexualities and prohibitions, the better to cast in relief the instances when these options are exercised at the expense of Others. The universe they reveal is peopled by characters who’re loud, theatrical, violent, inclined to camp and drama, with genuinely affecting backstories even when they function as villains, an acquiantanceship worth making when one is in need of intensive rehumanizing.

Iadya Mo Kami

English Title: Deliver Us
Additional Language: Ilocano
Year of Release: 2016
Director: Mel Chionglo
Screenwriter: Ricky Lee
Producer: BG Productions International

Cast: Allen Dizon, Eddie Garcia, Aiko Melendez, Ricky Davao, Diana Zubiri, Rolando Inocencio, Allan Paule, Ana Feleo, Elora Españo, Tabs Sumulong, Carlo Juan, Brian Arda, Leo Sarmiento, Jess Evardone, James Pascual, James Alanis, Mark Nino Brinsuwela, Minerva Torrejos, Bongjon Jose

Father Greg, a young priest, is transferred by his order to a far-flung diocese, where he learns that the small town is dominated by Julian, an overbearing landlord. He carefully navigates his way around the place, especially since Carla, with whom he had a child out of wedlock, followed him to work out their relationship. The womanizing Julian, whose tolerant wife also takes a shine to the priest, discovers Father Greg’s secret and discusses the situation with him over drinks. When Julian is discovered murdered afterward, Father Greg’s life takes a spin that he barely manages to handle.

Mel Chionglo’s entire career proved most productive in his collaborations with Ricky Lee, yet his last film remains an enigmatic entry, since neither talent had exhibited any leaning toward the spiritual. Yet with Iadya Mo Kami, they managed to advance the strongest religious text in Philippine cinema, ironically by focusing on a cleric teetering on the precipice of moral collapse, more concerned about the human cost of his actuations than about his standing in heaven. Chionglo pulls off this feat by infusing the film with a strong undercurrent of melancholy, allowing the ravishing beauty of the mountain setting to do the necessary work of seducing the audience. Topnotch performances abound, with special attention to Allen Dizon’s quietly authoritative delivery and Aiko Melendez’s fire-and-ice reading of an unpredictable yet fearsomely secure political wife.

Á!

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November 17, 2023

Canon Decampment: Maryo J. de los Reyes

By Joel David

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Schoolgirls

Year of Release: 1982
Director: Maryo J. de los Reyes
Screenwriter: Jake Tordesillas
Producer: Regal Films

Cast: Snooky Serna, Dina Bonnevie, Maricel Soriano, Edu Manzano, Joel Alano, Edgar Mande, Mitch Valdes, Anita Linda, Louella, Benggot Pe Benito, Melvi Pacubas, Mary Walter, Balot, Matimtiman Cruz, Alma Lerma, Domingo Landicho, Estrella Antonio, Manny Castañeda, Rina Peredo, Willie Natividad, Donna Sanchez, Sandy Andolong, Ricky Davao, Soxy Topacio, Eric Borbon, Ed Villapol, Tessie Tomas, Lito Pimentel

Three teenage girls contend with the various challenges and constraints of college life while parrying the insults of mean girls. Margot insists on her prerogative to play the field even after a squarish young professor takes an interest in her. Sora decides to drop an abusive boyfriend when an apparently well-fixed folk singer pursues her. Matthew is frustrated in courting Margot so he confides in tomboyish Ella, who thinks no guy will notice her because of her homely appearance. Tet, their former teacher, acts as their life coach but also has difficulty in maintaining a partner because of her high standards.

Unexpectedly banned by the militarized censors board when it was submitted for approval in late 1981, Schoolgirls may be seen as a victim of circumstances beyond its control. Regal Films was still in the government’s crosshairs after the brouhaha over Ishmael Bernal’s Manila by Night’s disallowment from participating in the Berlin International Film Festival led to bad press overseas for the regime. The “dry run” for the Manila International Film Festival was raising expectations for a liberal spell (meaning, among other things, no censorship), so the country’s right-wing agents desperately needed one last show of force on the cultural front. The fact that the film turned out to be a slightly risqué though essentially wholesome romp, more of a sequel to Joey Gosiengfiao’s Underage (1980) than Underage Too (1991, also directed by Maryo J. de los Reyes), may have led to the all-around dismissal of the presentation, aside from the obvious conclusion that the female Regal Babies had a longer-running marketability potential than their male counterparts. Yet Schoolgirls has endured better than it had any right to. De los Reyes’s immersion in the teen wing of progressive Philippine theater, complemented by his application of film techniques in his university teaching, enabled him to unfurl a complex, class-crossed, women-positive, and gender-evolved narrative with a rowdy bunch of quirky characters and a contagious and inexhaustible sense of joie de vivre.

Diosa

English Translation: Goddess
Additional Language: Spanish
Year of Release: 1982
Director: Maryo J. de los Reyes
Screenwriters: Soxy Topacio, Khryss Adalia, Jake Tordesillas
Producer: Regal Films

Cast: Lorna Tolentino, Lloyd Samartino, Alfie Anido, Tita Munoz, Jenny Ramirez, J. Antonio Carreon, Ed Villapol, Venchito Galvez, Francisco Cruz, Willie Natividad, Donna Sanchez, Alberto Villaruz, Raoul Casado

During the colonial occupation, a Spanish soldier encounters a bejeweled diwata or nature spirit. After they make out, he steals her ornaments. In the present time, Don Jaime, tycoon-owner of Alegre Amalgamated, writes a note and keeps it in a box before killing himself. He cedes the business to his elder son Jun and a 30-hectare rural property to the younger Teddy. Jun begins a casual affair with Katrina, whom he picks up in a disco, and calls off his impending marriage. Meanwhile Teddy, while on research in his hometown for his thesis in anthropology, pursues the origin of a legend in the aptly named Barrio Alitaptap, where a forest king supposedly slapped his promiscuous daughter and her scattered gemstones turned into fireflies.

Of all his attempts at paying tribute to classical-era film trends, Diosa is Maryo J.’s only effort to reconnect with period fantasy, though still rooted in the present and using the past only as background material. It’s necessarily a mixed bag, but contains evidence of Regal Films matriarch “Mother” Lily Monteverde’s all-out support, considering her even more nostalgic affinity for old (though still not entirely then-lost) cinema. But what made the film too easy to dismiss when it came out renders it indispensable to the present, when its major creatives have passed away. Although we can be grateful that Gregorio Fernandez’s Prinsipe Teñoso (1954) has been preserved, nothing else of its kind remains. And now that our scholars and audiences might finally be capable of welcoming queer-camp appreciation, Diosa will be ready for its closeup. A forest fairy unapologetic about soliciting carnal pleasure from unsuspecting mortals who’re sometimes too eager to claim everything she possesses, capable of wreaking epochal havoc when men overstep their privilege? Plus she’s able to formulate a critique of colonization and spare anyone able to comprehend and placate her rage. Her predominance has been long overdue.

Bagets

English Translation: Pubescent Kids
Year of Release: 1984
Director: Maryo J. de los Reyes
Screenwriter: Jake Tordesillas
Producer: Viva Films

Cast: William Martinez, J.C. Bonnin, Herbert Bautista, Raymond Lauchengco, Aga Muhlach, Eula Valdez, Jobelle Salvador, Chanda Romero, Yayo Aguila, Baby Delgado

Arnel is burdened by his family’s wishes for him. Tonton has been a high school repeater for the past four years. Adie falls in love with his neighbor even if she is married. And while Toffee is neglected by his actress mother, Gilbert deals with a philandering father. As these five friends finish their last year in high school, they undergo a fun-filled but ultimately meaningful journey toward adulthood.

Youthfulness has held an overwhelming universal fascination in the photographic arts, supposedly because we see our reflections fixed in the artwork at a moment that is always past, even as we continue to approach mortality. In fact the formula that fueled the Bagets juggernaut had already been in place as early as the 1960s, with Sampaguita Pictures effectively commodifying it by casting the Stars ’66 group members in so-called smorgasbord projects. Ishmael Bernal initially demonstrated how to devise narratives that successfully maintain multiple-character lines of action and resist depicting singular heroes (or dual heroes and anti-heroes) for Seven Stars’ Siyete Belyas and Regal Films’ Regal Babies casts. After a few film exercises of his own, Maryo J. de los Reyes was primed to handle Viva Films’ so-called Bagets batch: his first film, High School Circa ’65 (1979), signalled his willingness to deploy a large circle of characters, while his disco series with Nora Aunor (five films starting with Annie Batungbakal in 1979) developed his mastery in handling feel-good musicals. The plot of Bagets does not resolve into anything out of the ordinary, but the celebratory mood—drawn from an appealing mélange of pastel designs, New-Wave music, MTV-style montage, gay lingo, and freshly scrubbed second-generation film personalities—provided a much-needed momentary diversion from the then-gathering anti-dictatorship storm, and still proves irresistible today.[1]

Kaya Kong Abutin ang Langit

English Translation: I Can Reach Heaven
Year of Release: 1984
Director: Maryo J. de Los Reyes
Screenwriter: Jake Tordesillas
Producer: VH Films

Cast: Maricel Soriano, Gina Alajar, Charito Solis, Liza Lorena, Ronaldo Valdez, Jaime Fabregas, Michael de Mesa, William Martinez, Arlene Muhlach, Francis Martinez

Having grown up poor, Clarissa ardently desires to live in luxury after being exposed to the lavish lifestyle of her godmother, Monina Gardamonte. The girl’s ambitions eventually consume her after Therese, Monina’s daughter, dies. Clarissa manipulates Monina to adopt her so that she can be the new heiress of the Gardamonte fortune. Driven by greed and eager to turn her back on her past, a heartless Clarissa will stop at nothing to reach her goals.

The downtrodden woman who finds her own inner strength and discovers the pleasures of excesses archetypically reserved for men sets herself up for the worst kind of tragic comeuppance. The appeal of melodrama is in providing ordinary mortals like us, the movie attendees, a handle on the process, able to identify with the misbehaving heroine without having to suffer her inevitably unhappy ending. The hard-knock personal background of former child star Maricel Soriano provided some intertextual credibility in her rags-to-riches-to-dust role here (and no spoilers actually: the movie begins with the end). Along the way the captive viewer will be treated to the spectacle of a nice young girl turned into an awful older-than-her-years woman, desperately rejecting her past and mouthing lines that mingled with the more serious slogans against a dictatorship already in decline: “Ayoko ng masikip! Ayoko ng walang tubig! Ayoko ng mabaho! Ayoko ng walang pagkain! Ayoko ng putik!” [I hate cramped spaces! I hate running out of water! I hate smelly places! I hate going hungry! I hate filth!] Maryo J. de los Reyes had an unusually productive year in 1984, with an often-overlooked title also worth tracking down, Anak ni Waray vs. Anak ni Biday, produced as a tribute to the First Golden Age studios of LVN and Sampaguita, and channeling the spirit of musical-comedy expert Manuel Conde; it features the lead stars in Kaya Kong Abutin ang Langit (plus movie queens Nida Blanca and Gloria Romero as the title characters) in fine mettle.

Anak ni Waray vs. Anak ni Biday

English Translation: Southern Lady’s Daughter vs. Northern Lady’s Daughter
Additional Languages: Ilocano & Waray
Year of Release: 1984 / Color with B&W
Director: Maryo J. de los Reyes
Screenwriter: Jake Tordesillas
Producer: Regal Films

Cast: Nida Blanca, Gloria Romero, Snooky Serna, Maricel Soriano, Nestor de Villa, Luis Gonzales, Gabby Concepcion, William Martinez, Chichay, Bella Flores, Zeny Zabala, Rez Cortez, Louella, Debraliz, Opalyn Forster, Donna Sanchez, German Moreno, Ike Lozada, Lillian Laing, Dencio Padilla, Balot, Flora Gasser

In the 1950s, two couples—Biday and Eli, and Idang and Narcing—are declared co-winners in a dance contest. Biday, an Ilocana, and Idang, a Waray, marry their respective partners and become next-door neighbors in a middle-class subdivision. Both couples have daughters (Susie and Amy respectively) who are courted by Eddie and Joey, while Eli and Narcing fool around with Carol and Patricia, two rich widows. Bella and Zeny, the widows’ daughters, have set their sights on Eddie and Joey, so it’s up to the married mothers and their daughters to win back their men.

Anak ni Waray vs. Anak ni Biday opens with a dedication to the founders of LVN and Sampaguita, the two most popular studios of the First Golden Age of Philippine cinema (roughly coinciding with the 1950s). LVN could boast of having the most gifted local auteur of comedies and musicals in the person of Manuel Conde (as well as the period’s master of melodrama in Gregorio Fernandez), but Sampaguita was the country’s counterpart of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, which claimed to have “more stars than there are in heaven.” AnW v AnB may be seen as nothing more than a compendium of standard musical and comic (and occasionally fantastic) elements associated with its sources of inspiration, executed in top-flight cineliterate fashion: nostalgic appreciators could have a field day identifying the procession of references evoked in the characters’ names, not to mention having the elderly but still-sprightly couples, along with the femmes fatales, portrayed by actual stars of the time. The fathers could only initially afford to ride a tricycle to work, then upgrade to a calesa (horse-drawn carriage) to rush their parturient wives to hospital, thus signaling the filmmaker’s intent to provide a critique of gentrification; but then the horse proceeds to comment on the action and secures another throwback to old-time cinema (by way of komiks material). Already known for his handling of multiply performed scenes right from the start of his filmmaking career, Maryo J. de los Reyes piles on additional skills accumulated from his disco series (mostly starring Nora Aunor), orchestrates frenetic quarrels and chases, and stages arch exchanges undergirded by familial warmth amid comic confusion. AnW v AnB never steps beyond the gay old time it celebrates, but it also remains true to its belief that our now-rare old films were indeed worthy of the adulation that their audiences lavished on them.

Dinampot Ka Lang sa Putik

English Translation: You Were Merely Scooped Up from the Mud
Year of Release: 1991
Director: Maryo J. de los Reyes
Screenwriter: Jose Javier Reyes & Jake Tordesillas
(From a story by Jose Javier Reyes)
Producer: Regal Films

Cast: Maricel Soriano, Christopher de Leon, Charo Santos-Concio, Monsour del Rosario, Maritoni Fernandez, Luis Gonzales, Sylvia Sanchez, Orestes Ojeda, Ronnie Henares, Bennette Ignacio, Gloria Romero, Eddie Arenas, Dexter Doria, Malou de Guzman, Glenda Garcia, Angela Figueras, Oliver Osorio, Eric Francisco, Naty Mallares, Nonoy Gates, Alfonso Garcera, Dennis Baltazar, Aries Bautista, James Cooper, Petit Calupitan, Joey Hipolito, Gina Leviste, Lollie Mara, Renato del Prado, Frederick Peralta, Cloyd Robinson, Eva Ramos, Lucy Quinto, Bella Flores, Jordan Castillo, Tita de Villa, Dinky Doo Jr., Arlene Tolibas, Melanie Tiangco, Tony Angeles, Dido de la Paz, Albert Gonzales, Jimmy Long

Ambet agrees to participate in a warehouse burglary so he can help alleviate the financial straits that his family’s confronting. When he gets arrested, his wife Malou leaves with their son for Manila to seek better financial opportunities. Her supportive neighbors invite her to work as a nightclub dancer, but at a stag party, Edmond notices her discomfort and extends some support toward her. His girlfriend and sister call attention to Malou’s class difference but Edmond insists that he can help her overcome her social limitations, until she points out that many of their conflicts are irreconcilable.

Regal Films had always had a long-running streak of nostalgia for Philippine film trends of an earlier era, a tendency that intensified after the fall of the Marcos Sr. regime led to an alarming decline in film attendance. Instead of taking into account these industrial and generational dynamics, critics of that time reverted to their usual lamentation of the absence of aestheticized and politicized material. Dinampot Ka Lang sa Putik may be regarded as one of the more brazen attempts, with its earnest and straightforward treatment of a class-conciliatory narrative, Cinderella without the wonder-tale elements. This, however, is where ignorance of its talents’ maturity fails the serious observer: with over a decade in intensive film practice and even longer in theater work, Maryo J. de los Reyes was more than ready to accept the challenge without reverting to the usual satirical or ironic fallback. Complemented by actors who’d been essaying these roles long enough to deliver them with nary a false note, the result is recognizably superior maize—possibly not recommendable for regular consumption, but perfect for any occasion when only the best kind of corn will do: gorgeous, savory, unexpectedly nutritious to boot.

Magnifico

Year of Release: 2003
Director: Maryo J. de los Reyes
Screenwriter: Michiko Yamamoto
Producer: Violett Films Production

Cast: Lorna Tolentino, Albert Martinez, Jiro Manio, Isabella de Leon, Mark Gil, Celia Rodriguez, Gloria Romero, Tonton Gutierrez, Amy Austria, Cherry Pie Picache, Danilo Barrios, Susan Africa

Despite coming from a poor family plagued by many misfortunes, youngster Magnifico wants to build a nice coffin for his grandmother. He also goes to great lengths to take his little sister, who has cerebral palsy, to a local carnival. As he gets different people to help him, Magnifico reciprocates their kindness in a way that gradually changes his community.

Philippine celluloid production bowed out in grand style with the release of two epic productions, by filmmakers who even have similar-sounding names. In contrast with Mario O’Hara’s Babae sa Breakwater (2003), Magnifico proffers a linear tale focused on domestic issues, its central character a young innocent whose acts of kindness transform his family and community. A number of observers marveled at how a male-centered narrative could still pack an old-school wallop this late in history, but the reasons are all on open display, so to speak: compassion even for the most deeply flawed characters, wonderful performances revolving around the precocious Jiro Manio in the title role, and relaxed, hand-on-heart storytelling expertise. Maryo J. de los Reyes keeps his narrative engine ambling along, occasionally pausing for us to savor its sharply observed character sketches, until a sudden plunge takes everyone to a place of no return. The analogy with developments in film technology is undeniable, but to wish for a different ending would be to deny the inevitable, and Magnifico shows us how grace and humor can make the journey worth the while.

Note

[1] Terminological notes in order of presentation: A. Siyete Belyas literally means “Seven Beauties,” although belyas in Tagalog is also a euphemism for sex workers. The compound term belyas-artes is literally “fine arts” (from the Spanish), but with the alternative meaning of belyas, it could also denote “indecent or vulgar conduct.” B. The other four Nora Aunor disco films are: Bongga Ka ’Day (You’re Fab, Sis, 1980), Totoo Ba ang Tsismis? (Is the Rumor True?), Ibalik ang Swerti (Restore the Luck), and Rock and Roll (all 1981). Subsequent non-disco-themed Maryo J. films with Nora Aunor were Minsan, May Isang Ina (Once There Was a Mother, 1983), the “Querubin: Maria Leonora Theresa” episode of Mga Kwento ni Lola Basyang (“Cherubim” in The Tales of Grandma Basyang, 1985), I Love You Mama, I Love You Papa (1986), and Naglalayag (Silent Passage, 2004). C. The director had possibly the highest hip quotient among local filmmakers during his heyday, as evident even in the string of wordplay that bagets begets: originally a diminutive of bagito or fresh teen, its configuration was deconstructed in order to generate several variations. Hence from an amalgamation of bago (new) and gets (to pick up or acquire), period slang proffered nagets (already obtained), pagets (deluded about one’s attractiveness), lagets (constantly available, with lagi contracted for the first syllable), and forgets (no longer desirable); the same year in fact yielded Erpat Kong Forgets (My No-Longer Desirable Father, dir. J. Erastheo Navoa), which featured the most popular of the Bagets actors.

Á!

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November 17, 2023

Canon Decampment: Danny L. Zialcita

By Joel David

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T-Bird at Ako

English Translation: Lesbian and I
Year of Release: 1982
Director: Danny L. Zialcita
Screenwriter: Portia Ilagan
Producer: Film Ventures

Cast: Vilma Santos, Nora Aunor, Suzanne Gonzales, Dindo Fernando, Tommy Abuel, Odette Khan, Leila Hermosa, Johnny Wilson, Dick Israel, Rosemarie Gil, Subas Herrero, Liza Lorena, Alvin Enriquez, Baby Delgado, Johnny Vicar, Rustica Carpio, Anita Linda

Bar dancer Isabel is charged with homicide after killing a man who tried to rape her. Lesbian lawyer Sylvia offers to represent her for free. But while their relationship as client and counsel starts off as professional, things change when Sylvia begins to have feelings for Isabel. As lust mixes with legal concerns, they soon realize that winning their case will be a much more complicated matter.

The next major showdown between the country’s top stars since Ishmael Bernal’s Ikaw Ay Akin four years earlier confirmed that the tables between them had definitely turned. Vilma Santos could still play coquettish and sensuous more convincingly than most “bold” stars of the time, but Nora Aunor could summon conflictive inner lives—lonely, lustful, and Sapphic while being outwardly contented, principled, and sexually disinterested—like only few veteran performers could pull off. Danny L. Zialcita had at least two potentially superior entries: Hindi sa Iyo ang Mundo, Baby Porcuna (The World Is Not Yours, Baby Porcuna), now lost, from 1978; and Ikaw at ang Gabi (You and the Night), somewhat overrated, a year later. He has also become a film-buff favorite for a long list of well-received loquacious melodramas and sex comedies, including Eddie Garcia’s most successful dirty-old-man “Manóy” vehicles. T-Bird at Ako falls squarely between his “quality” and “commercial” attempts, exhibiting the best, as well as the worst, of both options, and intensifying the fireworks between two talents whose histrionic duels would persist into the next millennium.

Palabra de Honor

English Translation: Word of Honor
English Title: On My Honor
Year of Release: 1983
Director: Danny L. Zialcita
Screenwriter: Danny L. Zialcita (as Mike Vergara)[1]
Producer: Viva Films

Cast: Eddie Garcia, Hilda Koronel, Elizabeth Oropesa, Beth Bautista, Amy Austria, Jackie Lou Blanco, Gloria Diaz, Dindo Fernando, Ronaldo Valdez, Tommy Abuel, Mark Gil, Suzanne Gonzales, Virginia Montes, Mario Escudero, Augusto Victa, Tony Angeles, Bert Asuncion, Lucy Quinto, Rolly Papasin, Bert Dizon, Lilian Laing, Christian Espiritu, Josie Tagle

The elderly widower Don Adolfo’s family and employees squabble over their share of wealth while making sure, as he does, to claim their objects of pleasure, illicitly if necessary. His daughter Cristy endures a loveless marriage with David but gets pregnant from her affair with Louie, who administers the Don’s educational institution. Louie’s wife Olivia objects to their new hire, an instructor with a liberal-activist background, incurring the wrath of the instructor’s wife. David meanwhile decides to blackmail Louie so he can start anew with Elma, whose husband Arthur, a lawyer for the school, wishes to collect on the promise he extracted from the instructor’s wife in exchange for his support. Don Adolfo finds comfort in his fiancée Victoria, but his possessive daughter tries to dig up dirt so she won’t have to lose her father.

After several attempts at sex comedies, Danny L. Zialcita welded his immensely profitable approach to a small-town family saga and triumphed with an offbeat, sophisticated entry. The bedroom-to-boardroom roundelay avoids redundancies by adopting a wide variety of class and gender perspectives, and reserves the juiciest revelations toward the end. With the Marcos Sr. authoritarian system still firmly in place, the film could casually portray sexist acts, but it mitigates these blunders with humor and strong-women characterization (including a distaff brawl that’s funny and shocking in equal measure). Its final twist depicts how the titular word of honor gets qualified by several levels of irony; the complaint of most know-it-all commentators at the time that these types of films don’t possess any understanding of the upper-class lifestyle that they exploit, actually reflects on said critics’ own limitations. Palabra de Honor sets out to disparage, not document, its nominal heroes—and succeeds, to the lasting benefit of Pinas pop culture.

Note

[1] For Palabra de Honor and two succeeding films, Danny L. Zialcita used a name that did not have any other Philippine film credit before or after. Some posters and publicity materials, however, listed him as writer. Film archivist and researcher Monchito Nocon pointed out in a private exchange (Facebook Messenger, January 28, 2025) that “Mike Vergara is Danny’s son. His mom, Danny’s wife, was Leonor Vergara. Ergo, that’s really just Danny using another person’s name” inasmuch as the real-life Michael Vergara Zialcita, who’d appeared in some of his father’s previous films, would still have been a preteen at the time. Several possible reasons may have accounted for Zialcita’s decision. Relevant to film criticism would have been the shrill denunciations by members of the critics’ award-giving group for his alleged plagiarism of fairly accessible Western film samples. This behavior, premised on an “originality as [postcolonial] vengeance” slogan that originated in the national university, indicates an unexamined variation of colonial mentality where local authors and artists are expected to restrict themselves in realms of practice that Westerners would describe as tribute or homage if it occurred among themselves.

Á!

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November 17, 2023

Canon Decampment: Peque Gallaga & Lore Reyes

By Joel David

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1—Tiyanak

English Translation: Demon Foundling
Year of Release: 1988
Directors: Peque Gallaga & Lore Reyes
Screenwriters: Peque Gallaga, Don Escudero, & Lore Reyes
Producer: Regal Films

Cast: Janice de Belen, Lotlot de Leon, Ramon Christopher, Mary Walter, Chuckie Dreyfus, Carmina Villaroel, Rudolph Yaptinchay, Smokey Manaloto, Zorayda Sanchez, Bella Flores, Suzanne Gonzales, Betty Mae Piccio

Christy, together with her boyfriend Jojo, visits her sister Julie who has become hysterical after suffering three miscarriages. One night, Christy finds a baby in an abandoned home. An excited Julie immediately adopts the child despite objections from her family. Little does she know that whenever it gets dark, the infant she has taken in is not as innocent as it appears to her.

2—Aswang

English Translation: Viscera-Sucking Shape-Shifter
Year of Release: 1992
Directors: Peque Gallaga & Lore Reyes
Screenwriters: Pen Medina & Jerry Lopez Sineneng
(From a story by Peque Gallaga, Don Escudero, Lore Reyes)
Producers: Regal Films & Good Harvest

Cast: Alma Moreno, Manilyn Reynes, Aiza Seguerra, Berting Labra, Janice de Belen, Joey Marquez, Aljon Jimenez, Leo Martinez, Dick Israel, John Estrada, Pen Medina, Rey Solo, Eva Ramos, Orestes Ojeda, Gigette Reyes, Romy Romulo, Lilia Cuntapay, Edison Ang, Mar Mojica, Rudy Castillo, Totoy Magno, Jun Basilio

In the rural town of Talisay, a series of nocturnal attacks terrorizes the townspeople, the latest victim being the randy husband of a pregnant woman, seduced by a beauty who transforms after luring him. When a home in Manila is gang-invaded and the residents killed for the owner’s store of wealth, the daughter and her nanny are taken by the famiy driver to his hometown, which happens to be Talisay. The family’s security guard is identified in media reports as the gang’s tipster, so he suggests that they search for the survivors in the driver’s rural neighborhood. The place’s aswang, who’s also an outsider residing in a hut as an old woman, picks out as much as she can of the newcomers as well as the town residents.

Audiences were lured in by Regal Films’ ridiculously catchy tagline “Oh my god, ang anak ni Janice [the spawn of Janice]”—a canny erasure of the distinction between character and performer. The presentation they experienced similarly toyed with the easily blurred boundaries between the film world and real life: Who wouldn’t pick up any infant foundling? Who wouldn’t take offense at malevolent insinuations about one’s own baby? And who wouldn’t be terrorized by a flesh-hungry monster snacking on moviegoers, even as one watches the onscreen bloodbath as an actual moviegoer? Beyond this affirmation of spectatorial pleasure, Tiyanak purveyed a then-ahead-of-its-time call to ecological responsibility and, via a few subtle stabs at gender exclusion, devised a plot where all the protagonists—from imp to adoptive mother to vanquishing grandmother, plus shaman-chorus—were women. In terms of generic strategy, the movie chose to lean on comedy although it was founded on melodrama. This hybrid of otherwise distinct commercial categories upholds a principle that typifies some of the best—and most of the worst—commercial outings in cinema; called genre pastiche, the approach relies on a process of accretion in which several styles, mostly associated with successful pop-culture products, are brought together in an eclectic manner. This mode of practice exposes the filmmaker’s orientation, and all too often we see texts where political material is handled seriously while producer-imposed requirements are given slapdash treatment. Fortunately, Peque Gallaga and Lore Reyes are true-blue movie buffs, always willing to meet new genre challenges, and making sure to devote as much screen time as possible to audience engagement; not surprisingly, horror filmmaking became their preferred area of specialization. A few years after Tiyanak, they reprised the eponymously titled episode in the second (of a still-continuing) Shake, Rattle & Roll omnibus series. The fuller version suffers from the expected narrative longueurs as well as the necessary demonizing of Others, but the interests in this instance are once more reflexive: Metro Manila tabloids were rife with stories of drug-fueled home-invasion massacres and manananggal sightings in slum areas, building up to the first presidential election after the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos Sr. the same month that the film was released. Aswang turned on these historical resonances (hearkening back to the possibly hyperbolic claims of Edward Lansdale [1]), hitched to the otherworldly, borderline-abject beauty of a still youthful-looking Alma Moreno.

Sonata

Additional Languages: Hiligaynon, French, Italian, Czech
Year of Release: 2013
Directors: Peque Gallaga & Lore Reyes
Screenwriter: Wanggo Gallaga
Producers: Film Development Council of the Philippines, Central Digital Lab, Wildsound Studios

Cast: Cherie Gil, Richard Gomez, Chino Jalandoni, Joshua Pineda, Chart Motus, Madie Gallaga, Dante Amaguin, Angel Lobaton, Tanya Lopez, Edouard Garcia, John Gilbert Arceo, Ricky Gallaga, Andrei Jalandoni, Manny Montelibano, Jack Triño, Louie Dormido, Milton Dionzon, Guillermo Gaston, Rudy Reveche, Pamela Henares-Jaladoni, Teresa Estrada, Jonathan Lorenzo Lindaya, Johnrick Ylosorio, Josh Motus, Raingo del Prado, Bull Dilag, Ricky Davao (voice)

When her voice fails her, Regina Cadena retires to her hometown in Bacolod in order to avoid the celebrity limelight. She explains to people who inquire about her condition that the operations performed on her throat only worsened her vocal condition and that she may never be able to sing professionally again. Her contemporary Cora, who’d been assisting the Cadena family since her younger years, goes to the Cadena residence to help Regina restore order to her affairs, since the diva became debilitated by alcohol; she brings her son Jonjon in order to keep him away from her estranged husband. Jonjon makes the acquaintance of Ping, an older kid who’s the son of a tenant family. With Ping’s help, Jonjon takes an interest in the exotic world that Regina came from, brings her treats when he notices she likes them, and fixes the mementoes she wanted to discard. Amused by the kids’ attention, Regina explains opera and, in effect, her life, to them, renames them after famous characters, and eventually makes plans to stage for them an aria from Antonin Dvořák’s lyric opera Rusalka (1901).

Sonata was a passion project of Cherie Gil, who passed away about a decade after its release. Its narrative resembled and, in a sense, reversed, the global trajectory of her experience, when she left a fairly successful career as a character actor in the late 1980s to be a housewife to Israeli violinist Rony Rogoff; her return two decades later coincided with the coming-of-age of digital-format independent film production, endowing her with several opportunities to flaunt her striking middle-age grandeur and upgraded performative ability. As seemingly further preparation for Sonata, she performed the role of the elderly, vocally busted Maria Callas in two English-language runs of Terrence McNally’s Master Class (1995). The film takes place in the idyllic manor in the midsection of Peque Gallaga’s full-length solo debut feature Oro, Plata, Mata (Gold, Silver, Death, 1982), where Gil played the lead character’s rebellious girlfriend who elopes with a gang of bandits. The connection is accentuated with Gil being the first major character to appear as well as the one who delivers the final topical statement, after having ironically gone off the deep end. The contrast with Sonata is more than just budgetary, with OPM being set in two additional locales; where the house is meant to be a refuge for the landed gentry, away from the violence of war (which nevertheless insistently approaches) and the savagery of the wilderness, both induced by the characters’ excessive privilege, in Sonata it functions as a ghostly, conflicted presence, bestowing Regina with the healing she seeks—but only her and no one else. The two tykes whom her character elects to facilitate her re-entry into the society she abandoned in the distant past, provide her with fulfillment and heartbreak with admirable aplomb, with the rest of the cast following suit. But the movie remained hers to claim, and she makes sure that no frame she appears in is wasted, with whatever vanity we might suspect on her part totally earned by the magnanimity she displayed.

Note

[1] Edward Lansdale, a psy-war operative for the Central Intelligence Agency, alleged in his book In the Midst of Wars: An American’s Mission to Southeast Asia (Fordham University Press, 1972) that he undermined people’s support for Communist Huk rebels by kidnapping recruits and sympathizers and hanging them from trees after draining their blood; the natives supposedly concluded that any aswang would be on the prowl for antigovernment insurgents and avoided providing assistance thereafter. In Aswang, the monstrous creature takes on some properties of the manananggal by feeding on a fetus while still in its mother’s womb, but also exhibits werecreatural properties in stalking and attacking people of either gender and is ultimately destroyed, vampire-style, by sunlight.

Á!

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November 17, 2023

Canon Decampment: Peque Gallaga

By Joel David

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Oro, Plata, Mata

English Title: Gold, Silver, Death
Additional Languages: Hiligaynon, Spanish, Japanese
Year of Release: 1982
Director: Peque Gallaga
Screenwriter: Jose Javier Reyes
(From stories by Peque Gallaga, Mario Taguiwalo, Conchita Castillo)
Producer: Experimental Cinema of the Philippines

Cast: Cherie Gil, Sandy Andolong, Liza Lorena, Fides Cuyugan-Asensio, Manny Ojeda, Maya Valdes, Lorli Villanueva, Joel Torre, Ronnie Lazaro, Abbo de la Cruz, Mely Mallari, Mary Walter, Agustin Gatia, Arbie Antonio, Kuh Ledesma, Gigi Dueñas, Dwight Gaston, Jimmy Fabregas, Mona Lisa, Manny Castañeda, Ben Morro, Benny Warden

To evade the arrival of Japanese forces fighting in World War II, the Ojedas and the Lorenzos—two wealthy clans based in Negros—leave the city and head to a provincial mansion. As the war rages on, the families then flee to a nearby forest where they try to maintain their affluent lifestyle. But even as they hide from the war, it does not take long before they experience its nightmarish effects.

Peque Gallaga had been taken to task by mostly academe-based politically concerned commentators for his bravura evocation of the plight of the sugar gentry during World War II. This would be the equivalent of the controversy that befell a 1958 novel by Giuseppe di Lampedusa, Il Gattopardo (The Leopard)—a fate that was the opposite of Luchino Visconti’s 1963 film adaptation: the polarized politics of the time proved resistant to accommodating a narrative that focused on the elite, no matter how critical the perspective was. Based on the fireside tales recounted by Gallaga’s elders (with story credits for Gallaga, Mario Taguiwalo, and Conchita Castillo), Oro, Plata, Mata depicts the disruption of a landowning clan’s rural idyll brought about by the incursion of marauding Japanese soldiers, with the mortal conflict actually stemming from the uprising of the family’s exploited workers. Lost in this recollection of theme and controversy is the movie’s singular cineastic triumph: a sensuous and orgiastic fusion of period detail, natural wonder, and grand human folly—with masterly cinematographic handling by Rody Lacap—that had never been witnessed before or since in anybody else’s debut project. About three decades later, Gallaga and his co-director Lore Reyes would revisit the OPM locale with the movie’s lead actress, Cherie Gil, and yield the wise and charming Sonata (2013), quite literally an “art film” in the best sense of the word.

Virgin Forest

Additional Languages: Kapampangan, Ibanag, Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese
Year of Release: 1985
Director: Peque Gallaga
Screenwriter: Rosauro Q. dela Cruz
(From a story by T.E. Pagaspas)
Producer: Regal Films

Cast: Sarsi Emmanuelle, Miguel Rodriguez, Abel Jurado, Arbie Antonio, Jed Arboleda, Bruce Fanger, Bob Zwanziger, Ama Quiambao, Peque Gallaga, Turko, Crispin Medina, Leo Martinez, Ray Ventura, Pepito Bosch, Cris Daluz, E.A. Rocha, Rolando Tinio, Roy Lachica

It is 1901 and as the Philippines’s Spanish colonizers fall, American forces begin to take over. In a remote town, three young people—Chayong, a Chinese businessman’s kept woman; Alfonsito, an insular (native-born Spaniard); and Alipio, a lowly fisherman—are taken prisoner by Filipino mercenaries conspiring with two American officers who plan to capture President Emilio Aguinaldo. The three manage to escape but they soon realize that their differences make them vulnerable to enemies from all sides.

The backlash against Peque Gallaga for the unexpected success of Oro, Plata, Mata (1982) started with the far more ambitious Virgin Forest, which holds the distinction of showcasing arguably the best work of the peerless cinematographer Conrado Baltazar. The film lent itself to controversial responses in its deliberately ambivalent approach to Philippine historical events leading up to the capture of Emilio Aguinaldo (himself a problematic figure) by US colonizing forces, assisted by allegedly mercenary natives. The developments are observed by a trio of outcasts—a mestizo, a fisherman, and a runaway sex slave, who insists on her womanly prerogatives in the face of constant bickering between the two males, each of whom claims her for himself. The trio’s interactions blatantly convey the allegory where the then-emergent nation struggles to reconcile native and foreign forces. The resultant threesome is novel and titillating enough to overpower the real-life incidents. But the years since the movie’s release, with several disappointing attempts at determining the value of Aguinaldo’s contribution, have proved that Virgin Forest’s history-from-below perspective has been the only workable approach so far.[1]

Scorpio Nights

Additional Language: Hiligaynon
Year of Release: 1985
Director: Peque Gallaga
Screenwriter: Rosauro Q. dela Cruz
(From a story by T.E. Pagaspas & Rommel Bernardino)
Producer: Regal Films

Cast: Orestes Ojeda, Daniel Fernando, Anna Marie Gutierrez, Eugene Enriquez, Amanda Amores, Mike Austria

Danny, a student boarder left in the city during summer break, becomes infatuated with the wife of a security guard who lives right below the room he is renting. When the guard returns and has sex with his still-asleep missus, Danny uses a hole on the floor to take a peek. One evening, he pretends to be the guard and succeeds in bedding the wife, who realizes someone else had touched her when her husband later gets with her. She then surprises Danny the next time he gets into her bed, and they are soon thrust into an illicit affair whose passion keeps escalating, oblivious to the dangers that lie ahead.

Controversy continued to hound Peque Gallaga since his distinctive debut, Oro, Plata, Mata (1982); this time it proceeded from the implicit support he supposedly lent the Marcos dictatorship by providing the regime with “decadent” entertainment in the form of this specific sex film for the government’s censorship-exempt venue. The historical paradox of course is that in all genuinely fascist systems, it is the government, not the opposition, that denounces decadence.[2] Since Scorpio Nights actually critiques the socio-economic deprivation that results in the depravity it depicts, its very existence winds up belying its critics’ moralistic impulse. One might wish for a more subversive handling directed at the heart of religious righteousness, which after all is the premise that unifies the movie’s objectors, whatever their political position. However, that approach would have aligned the movie with comedy-inflected Western pornographic-film tradition, and might have caused the product to be dismissed entirely out of hand. Scorpio Nights instead opted to break new ground in its own way, wherein an erotic text intended for mainstream release contained a combined meat-and-money shot toward the film’s close.[3] Evidence of the high regard for the movie among cineastes can be seen in how its spin-offs have been handled: Scorpio Nights 2 (1999) was directed by Erik Matti and Scorpio Nights 3 (2022, more a reboot than a sequel) by Lawrence Fajardo, Gallaga’s fellow Bacolodians and former mentees who each have their own canonical entries in this listing; between either, a sex-and-politics vehicle, titled Sseommeotaim (Summertime, 2001), was made by Korean filmmaker Park Jae-ho as a tribute to Scorpio Nights.

Notes

[1] Lore Reyes, who subsequently became Peque Gallaga’s co-director after the latter recovered from a major health problem, was production manager on several Gallaga films including this one. He provided clarification on several false claims by various internet-era authorities, of which mention must be made of two egregious ones: first, the declaration, supposedly issued by Gallaga himself, that he was present during the shooting in 1982 of the climactic scene of Ishmael Bernal’s Himala—a physical impossibility (to which I can also attest, inasmuch as I was then-employed at the Experimental Cinema of the Philippines), since the ECP scheduled the production of Gallaga’s and Bernal’s films to run concurrently so they could be released around the same time; second, that the dialogue of Virgin Forest contained, after Kapampangan, a high percentage of Ilokano. Familiar with the language, Reyes (who provided the list of languages in the film) said that not a single word could be heard except for the ones that the language shared with Kapampangan.

[2] In preparing an obituary for Peque Gallaga, I inquired about an incident, sensational during the time, where he denounced a number of specific cultural and academic personalities during the Scorpio Nights premiere at the Manila Film Center. The outburst, as it turned out, resulted from an attempt by an MFC official to cut out scenes from the film despite the fact that the venue was censorship-exempt. The encounter between director and official (who was also a film critic and professor) resulted in a violent scuffle and possibly accounted for the downgrading of the film by evaluation bodies, including the then-only film critics circle. See “My Peque Gallaga Interview” in Amauteurish (May 9, 2020), amauteurish.com/2020/05/09/my-peque-gallaga-interview/.

[3] In American pornographic-film practice, meat and money shots are considered genre-defining elements—at least until the emergence of “couples” or made-for-women material. The meat shot is one where male, female, or intersex genitalia can be visibly discerned, preferably in copulation. The money shot is taken when the male ejaculates, meant as documentary proof of the performer’s real-life engagement in the sex act. Those inclined to look further into these ideas are now fortunate to have a large number of scholarly titles; an excellent introductory reading would be Linda Williams’s Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible” (1989, updated 1999).

Á!

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November 17, 2023

Canon Decampment: Laurice Guillen

By Joel David

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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.

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.

Init sa Magdamag

English Translation: Warmth for the Night
English Title: When Love Burns (title of TV series)
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.

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.

Sumayaw Ka Salome

English Translation: Dance, Salome
Year of Release: 1992
Director: Laurice Guillen
Screenwriter: Joen Chionglo
(From the 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.

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. 272–294.

Á!

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November 17, 2023

Canon Decampment: Romy V. Suzara

By Joel David

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Pepeng Shotgun

English Translation: Shotgun Pepe
Year of Release: 1981
Director: Romy V. Suzara
Screenwriter: Edgardo M. Reyes
Producer: Sining Silangan

Cast: Rudy Fernandez, George Estregan, Tetchie Agbayani, Bob Soler, Tony Carreon, Dick Israel, Ruben Rustia, Mark Gil, Joey Padilla

For years, the Sablantes and the Medranos have bitterly feuded with each other. Their conflict worsens after Pepe Medrano accidentally kills Rex, a scion of the Sablantes. When Rex’s brother Manolo is elected as mayor through the use of dirty tricks, he orders for the murder of Pepe’s father. Driven by vengeance, both families refuse to rest until their blood feud has been settled.

Action, the most successful genre during the martial-law period, left only a few entries worth reconsidering, but this one remains exemplary for the subtlety of its critique of tyranny and its dignified sympathy for the persecuted. During the present, when even Hollywood films turn to computer-generated imagery effects as a matter of course, one could continue to marvel at a whole set of now-eroded skills in gunfight effects and martial-arts performances, all deployed with a grace and timing—and the occasional dash of humor—which today’s post-production houses could draw years of lessons from. Pepeng Shotgun also represents the peak confluence of several otherwise always-competent practitioners, from its production company to its director, writer, and lead performer, but the entire enterprise is literally held together by its always-impressive editor, the late Ike Jarlego Jr. During a year when critics were divided between two arthouse samples and wondered what either seemed to have missed, the modest charms and unpretentious skills display of Pepeng Shotgun has endured more satisfyingly because it had the answer: a connection with its audience.

Á!

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November 17, 2023

Canon Decampment: Fernando Poe Jr.

By Joel David

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1—Ang Panday

English Translation: The Blacksmith
Year of Release: 1980
Director: Fernando Poe Jr. [as Ronwaldo Reyes]
Screenwriter: Fred Navarro
(Adapted from komiks by Carlo J. Caparas)
Producer: FPJ Productions

Cast: Fernando Poe Jr., Max Alvarado, Lito Anzures, Bentot Jr., Liz Alindogan, Paquito Diaz, Victor Bravo, Vic Varrion, Martha Sevilla, Bert Olivar, Max Laurel

Virtuous blacksmith Flavio is forced to brand innocent children as an order from Lizardo, the evil ruler of the land. One night, a meteor lands near Flavio’s house and is turned by the blacksmith into a dagger that has special powers. This prompts Flavio, his young ward Lando, his elderly mentor Tata Temio, and Temio’s granddaughter Monica, on a quest to stop Lizardo’s reign of terror.

2—Pagbabalik ng Panday

English Translation: Return of the Blacksmith
Year of Release: 1981
Director: Fernando Poe Jr. [as Ronwaldo Reyes]
Screenwriter: Tommy C. David
(Adapted from the komiks by Carlo J. Caparas)
Producer: FPJ Productions

Cast: Fernando Poe Jr., Max Alvarado, Tina Revilla, Lito Anzures, Bentot Jr., Rosemarie Gil, Lillian Laing, Jose Romulo, Ernie David

Lizardo, vanquished in the first film, is revived by black magic and seeks to recover his dominion. Flavio, disturbed by a Black Book prophecy that he will be defeated by a masked warrior, hears about undead corpses terrorizing other towns and seeks them out to provide assistance. On the way, he is overpowered by a monster and awakens in the company of the flying villagers who saved him. He learns that the disturbances are caused not by Lizardo but by another villain, Wanda.

3—Ang Panday: Ikatlong Yugto

English Translation: The Blacksmith: Third Installment
Year of Release: 1982
Director: Fernando Poe Jr. [as Ronwaldo Reyes]
Screenwriter: Fred Navarro
(Adapted from komiks by Carlo J. Caparas)
Producer: FPJ Productions

Cast: Fernando Poe Jr., Dang Cecilio, Max Alvarado, Lito Anzures, Bentot Jr., Monette Garcia, Eddie Gicoso, Pons de Guzman, Romy Guarin, Eric Navarro

A destructive alien lands on earth and wreaks havoc on rural villages. Flavio has to resolve his romantic issues, since two women have fallen for him yet the Black Book has said that he should never marry in order to maintain his role as heroic savior. While searching for lost children, Flavio meets and is slain by the masked warrior, as predicted in the previous film. But his spirit now resides in the Black Book and his allies are able to use it to restore him to life.

4—Ang Panday IV

English Translation: The Blacksmith IV
Year of Release: 1984
Director: Fernando Poe Jr. [as Ronwaldo Reyes]
Screenwriter: Fred Navarro
(Adapted from komiks by Carlo J. Caparas)
Producer: FPJ Productions

Cast: Fernando Poe Jr., Marianne de la Riva, Max Alvarado, Lito Anzures, Bentot Jr., Eddie Infante, Mario Escudero, Robert Rivera, Monette de Guzman, Ruben Ramos, Aida Pedido, Rowell Santiago

An adventurer, Don Cirilo, seeks to prove the existence of evil spirits and accidentally releases a malevolent one—which possesses and resurrects Lizardo. Lando, now grown-up, courts a woman who turns out to be a manananggal (self-segmenting viscera feeder). Flavio is able to transform his sword into a shield via the power of a mysterious asteroid, but his group stumble on an opening that transports them into a new dimension where nightmares can become reality. Upon escaping from this place, he seeks a final showdown with Lizardo.

How ironic that Fernando Poe Jr.’s directorial legacy should be maintained primarily by a quadrilogy of children’s fantasy outings. The less-productive fantasy of what he could have come up with if he had survived the trauma of necessarily dirty electoral politics should not detract us from recognizing that Flavio was the character that his self-conscious, easily parodied, spare and severe performance style matched perfectly. And before we lament that the series slipped irretrievably downhill after Poe had let go of it, we might derive some comfort in the awareness that George Lucas may have continued to hold on to his Star Wars prerogative for a spell, but that never stopped the smart-kid franchise from turning into a cineastic nightmare either. The Poe-directed cycle fares better, with an utter lack of pretension as well as careful attention to pre-digital special effects, during the moment when the expertise of local practitioners was at its height. FPJ supposedly insisted on upgrading Carlo J. Caparas’s realist komiks source to include fantasy and sci-fi elements, and the gamble certainly paid off beyond merely financial terms. Poe was similarly canny enough to start modestly and build up the sequels in increasingly ambitious terms. Although the heroics are unexpectedly old-fashioned, adults need not cringe, inasmuch as the series provides a decent share of humor, scares, strong-women roles, even a few queer-positive turns. Poe’s Panday legacy persisted after he let go of it, with actors-turned-politicians laying claim to the film character, plus a number of television series, including local TV’s first animated one; worth tracking down would be the first non-Poe take-off, Peque Gallaga and Lore Reyes’s Dugo ng Panday (Blood of the Blacksmith, a.k.a. The Blacksmith’s Legacy, 1993), starring the controversial senator Ramon “Bong” Revilla Jr. as the son of Flavio.

Ang Maestro

Additional Language: Spanish
English Translation: The Master
Year of Release: 1981
Director: Fernando Poe Jr. [as Ronwaldo Reyes]
Screenwriter: Fred Navarro
(From a story by Carlo J. Caparas)
Producer: FPJ Productions

Cast: Fernando Poe Jr., Chat Silayan, Mario Escudero, Romy Diaz, Paquito Diaz, Jose Romulo, Mario Escudero, Bert Olivar, Max Laurel, Nello Nayo, Ruben Ramos, Edmund Cupcupin Don Pepot, Don Umali, Lorie Mumar, Carlos de Leon, Michael Pigar, Lito Anzures

Don Roque extracts a promise from swordsperson Maestro Carpio never to instruct any other trainee except his son, Ignacio de la Vega. But that night Hernan de Zuñiga, son of Carpio’s late friend Don Alfredo, arrives with a note from his father requesting that Carpio ensure his son’s expertise in swordfighting. Trained in secret, Hernan grows up to learn that his sister Carmen was abducted by Don Roque and imprisoned in a dungeon. While searching for her, he runs into Amanda, who’s studying swordfighting so she can challenge Ignacio to a duel to avenge her brother.

To say that Fernando Poe Jr. broke out in 1981 as an outstanding director-actor is high praise enough, with the best entry in his Panday series coming out the same year, although certain still-existing work from Gerardo de Leon, Gregorio Fernandez, and Ramon A. Estella from the First Golden Age exceed most work by their contemporaries and can also successfully challenge anything made by FPJ. Yet Da King deserves to be honored for the additional function that no other Filipino auteur excelled in—not (far and away) as performer, but as film producer. Toward this end, his readiness to indulge in syncretistic modes of production can be seen as a means of appealing to the widest possible reach, although it would be unfair and inaccurate to conclude that he repudiated all logic or tradition in his output. Ang Maestro, as an instance, draws mainly from the koboy films (the Pinas counterpart of spaghetti Westerns) that enabled him and his rival-cum-ally, Joseph Estrada, to rule the local box-office during most of the 1960s. The admixture of elements—drawn from such sources as the costume drama, swordfight epic, social realism (with both the hero’s family’s impoverished circumstances as well as the leading lady’s Romani-esque affiliation [1]), and revenge narrative—resolves in a sui-generis product that may be easy for aesthetes to resist, though fortunately movie fans will always be more receptive.

Ang Dalubhasa

English Translation: The Expert
Year of Release: 2000
Director: Fernando Poe Jr. [as Ronwaldo Reyes]
Screenwriters: Pablo S. Gomez & Manny R. Buising
(From a story by Fernando Poe Jr.)
Producer: Millennium Cinema

Cast: Fernando Poe Jr., Nanette Medved, Maritoni Fernandez, Cris Villonco, Paquito Diaz, Ricardo Cepeda, Berting Labra, Bob Soler, Romy Diaz, Zandro Zamora, Johnny Vicar, Marco Polo Garcia, Dindo Arroyo, Gerald Ejercito, R.G. Gutierrez, Bong Francisco, Manjo del Mundo, Nonoy de Guzman, Tony Carreon, Marita Zobel, Maita Sanchez, Cecile Buensuceso, Bon Vibar, Dedes Whitakeer, Dante Castro, Jesette Rospero, Naty Santiago, Nanding Fernandez

Dr. Jaime de Guzman, a military neurosurgeon, suffers survivor’s guilt when his family gets killed during a burglary. He tries to start anew in Cebu with a fiancée and gets attached to her younger sister, Sheila. When the latter requires a sensitive operation, he volunteers for the job, but the girl dies after the procedure. To evade the blame and condemnation heaped on him by Sheila’s family, he flees to Manila and lives anonymously in a slum area. In volunteering to assist in a community clinic, evidence of his skill is discovered by Connie, one of the doctors, with whom he also develops a closeness. When a renegade military gang hides out in the neighborhood and requires his expertise, he recognizes the patient he has to heal and realizes that he has to resolve his past issues.

In terms of the genre practice from which he rarely strayed, Ang Dalubhasa was the last serious Fernando Poe Jr. film and may safely be regarded as the valedictory he unintentionally bequeathed. Its appearance though was so left-field that it barely got noticed except for his usual loyal patrons. The key to its achievement lies in how FPJ opted to confront the one property that distinguished (though “disadvantaged” might be more appropriate) his persona from all other major action stars in the country: his characters’ tendency to aspire toward elite respectability. Unfortunately for progressive-minded observers, he didn’t aim to deconstruct this property this time out; that might have arrived in a later film summation, if he’d managed to survive the soul-crushing consequence of a nasty presidential campaign. The measure of his creative restlessness lay in how he deployed aspiration in order to develop a narrative arc more attuned to his old and weary bearing. Hence aficionados might not be surprised in how regularly his character requires assistance from the allies who accompany him, but most may be astonished in realizing, in retrospect, that he’d managed to avoid staging action sequences for most of the film. Not that he hadn’t tried out something similar before: his lead role in Eddie Romero’s Aguila (1980) was epically complex enough to demand a lot more dramatic highlights from him than he ever tackled before or after. But where Romero wasted the potential of the material on already-crumbling Cold War ideals, Poe invests Ang Dalubhasa with a renewed fondness for the common people along with his usual bemusement and respect for strong women and feminized men. A final sequence where this agglomeration of Others is mingled with performers who usually get cast as villains in his own films, all awaiting his heroic return by gambling to pass the time away, provides enough subtle transgression to make Poe’s untimely departure afterward a grievous loss for Philippine popular culture.

Note

[1] The Sama-Bajau, who inhabit a number of countries in maritime Southeast Asia including the Philippines, are also called “sea gypsies” because of their nomadic lifestyle. They are not, however, Roma descendants, nor are any other ethnic group in the country.

Á!

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