FILM REVIEW: the miracle of a masterpiece

Thirty years after ‘Himala’, Nora Aunor gives another miracle of a performance—at once hypnotically still, bracingly intelligent and devastatingly emotional—that’s one for the ages.

The same can be said for the film, ‘Thy Womb’, which chronicles an aging married couple’s search for a woman who can bear for the husband a child that the infertile wife cannot produce.

No, it’s not any kind of marital melodrama that’s been put on film before. (At least not in Philippine cinema.)

It’s a singular piece of work from Cannes-winning director Brillante Mendoza, who veers away from the extreme violence that usually marks his films and explores a place of gentleness, poetry, and loving kindness in this odyssey into a woman’s selfless love.

That woman is Shaleha, a Badjao midwife in Tawi-tawi who goes from one water-logged settlement on stilts to another to help other women give birth.

Ironically, she is not capable of conceiving a child that she and her husband Bangas-an (a robust Bembol Roco) could call their own, which he so desires. So she decides to do the next best thing that’s in her power to do — take it upon herself and make it her mission to find another woman for Bangas-an to sire his own child with. And not just a babymaker. Being Muslims, they would have to take her in as another wife.

It’s a very specific character that Aunor, Mendoza and writer Henry Burgos are, quite craftily, able to make universal. By highlighting Shaleha’s proactive selflessness more than the reasons and motivations for her actions, the trio makes her an everyday Filipina who could very well be an Ifugao woman, a Manilena, or a Waray making a supreme personal sacrifice for the happiness of a dearly beloved.

The beauty in their work is how, by film’s end, Shaleha, finally, emerges as both tragic and victorious. And the genius is how this manages to be heartbreaking, hauntingly so, with nary a tear shed or a word spoken.

Yes, ‘Thy Womb’ is the kind of movie that doesn’t explain everything and doesn’t spoon-feed anything. Rather than verbalize, it visualizes. Not with a heavy hand, as in many of Mendoza’s previous films, but with a subtlety, sophistication and confidence that respects the viewer and treats him as a keen, intelligent, involved observer.

The movie presents a tapestry of images—raw, earth-bound, poetic, sublime— that paint a lovely and loving portrait of Badjao life, of a couple on a mission, and of a woman on a journey to fulfillment.

There’s a lot to take in, from the pageantry of the rituals and costumes to the stunning vistas of the sea-based communities, from the big and little ironies in the narrative to the ambiguities in the script.

Most and best of all, there’s Nora. She is simply astonishing with what is practically a wordless performance, her face alone registering a tidal wave of emotions—sadness and joy, resentment and resignation, pain and ecstacy, defeat and triumph, often all at once. She is, in a word, divine. 
(ERIC T. CABAHUG, InterAksyon)