FILM REVIEW: gratitude and awe for genius

THE wide expanse of the sea and the constant rain, and the vision of Brillante Ma Mendoza—these are all that is needed for great cinema to be formed. Then there is the presence of Nora Aunor, natural and artifactual, filling the spaces with her silences and silencing the spaces of doubts, pains, understanding and misunderstanding, historical and individual, with a performance that will go down in history as the ultimate in the aesthetics of reality. Or realities.

The film Thy Womb has a story that is terribly cinematic but also rare, as in ordinary. The story begins with a woman, Shaleha, a midwife, who collects the umbilical cords of the children she delivers. After each birthing, she brings the inch-long snippet from the cord now wrapped in gauze or cloth and hangs it on a wall, along with other umbilical cords of earlier births. The rope from which those birth cords hang is a tiny history of population in her community.  The collection of cords is an almost hyperbolic sign of fertility against the incapacity of Shaleha to have a child.

Shaleha has a fruitful relationship with her husband, Bangas-an. Too bountiful is the love between them that she agrees when Bangas-an suggests that they find a woman who could give them a child they could call their own. In between the quest for a wife/mother, Bangas-an and Shaleha go about their daily routine of fishing and selling what they catch. There are days when they are not able to catch any fish. There are days when Bangas-an has enough money to buy his wife a colorful shawl. Otherwise, it is a remarkably ordinary union, with the occurrence of rains and the festivities breaking the regularity of their life and the life in the island.

As with any art, portraying the stillness is as difficult as the roar, the former singular because it is the less trodden path. Mendoza’s triumphs in Thy Womb are found in the quiet, the life energies not dramatized but narrated in the majesty of their unremarkableness. The power of the film is in the tremor, barely felt but disturbing: in these geographically isolated islands, a different kind of social rules exist. How are we to like this film then?

For the Sama di laut, or Badjau (this label is more problematic when explored), nature and culture conspire to provide them an existence that is circumscribed differently than those in Luzon or the Visayas. This is the daring that we should acknowledge in the decision of Mendoza to travel to the far-flung village. Where production outfits shoot their “Mindanao” on the hills of Tanay or some beachfronts of the Visayan islands, Thy Womb, like its title, travels back to trace its umbilicus to where they were buried. And yet, this is also the challenge of the film: how an outsider illustrates the culture that is so different from his.

Here lies the significance of this film, Thy Womb: in its journey to a place of those we love to call sea gypsies, the filmmakers revisit the ethos of the place. Gone is the ethnocentric mysticism of Lamberto Avellana’s Badjao. Recall that scene in the Avellana film where a newly born infant is thrown into the sea to test if he indeed is the child of the sea. There are no scenes of those kinds in Thy Womb. What we have is the beauty of the southern seas and also the poverty of the communities. These do not make up a National Geographic vision, as some critics put it. Mendoza’s work thrives in the simple, the unglorified horizon. There are no excesses in the film. The wedding scenes are grounded in the economic realities of the land and not choreographed to satisfy a country’s tourism program. Irony and an acute feel for life’s contradictions fuel this work by Mendoza that does not rely on the facile tricks of exoticism.

Nora Aunor, it seems, has found the film to capture the maturity of her skills in a film that is multi-layered, uncompromisingly difficult, and unobtrusively political. Her Shaleha does not rise to a level that should satisfy the mob who believes that performances should be loud and then quiet and raging again for it to be called dramatic. Rather, Aunor relies on the majesty of the quotidian, the secret allure of the prosaic. As admirers of the great actor, we cannot avoid noticing the legendary intensity. Away from a major screen performance for a long time, the actor reminds us that no one in this film industry can ever portray the difficult poetry of the every day. The Tagalog/Pilipino sounds jarring at first but Nora Aunor works her magic of effacement and soon we blend with her in the populace of the communities.

These we learn from the film: Reality is not sequential, not given to harmony and partakes of drama only because some viewers recognize certain scenes. The artifice of cinema has weaned us to expect musical scores to prepare us for sad scenes, for grand orchestral notes to climb up for monumental events. Hollywood has speeded up for us, for so many years and still does, the happening each day.

Mendoza is reminding us that there is a side to realities that we have not explored yet. Thy Womb tells us truths even if they come only from one group of people we may never get to know. The film takes us to those small islands that we are convinced comprise this nation and yet never really care about.

Out there in Tawi-Tawi is a land that is open to understanding and misunderstanding. Those territories have been forgotten for what they are in their day-to-day existence, and are remembered only for the “crimes” that are perceived to have been committed against the make-believe notion that we are a nation of people under a banner of one ideology. Thy Womb is an attempt to recover that territory not for ownership, for that is colonial-minded, but for knowledge. That is, if we allow ourselves to go out of our cities and our false sense of the central, and travel to a place where cinema can be a teaching tool, an instrument from which we can learn once more that there are other Filipinos for whom the label “Filipino” may not make sense at all.

I say this because audiences feel there should be something much more in the film. Perhaps some warrant that the violence of the military and those fighting them should be articulated, explained in the context of the wars that this nation has been fighting for. Instead, what we have in Thy Womb are outbursts of gunfires amid a celebration or even an ordinary day in the marketplace. The sounds, like the rains that come perfunctorily, need not be explained. The cultural—or, if you wish, the political—happens as part of the tapestry of reality in the southern Philippines.

At the center of this tapestry are the two individuals, Bangas-an as portrayed by Bembol Roco and Shaleha in the person of Aunor. They are not leading characters but pivots in the narrative of a village where the “ought” is beyond our empathies. Would a Shaleha in that community be given to long speeches about the rights of women? Where would the rights of women reside in that place where the men hold sway over children and women?

I do not have an answer. I am thankful enough that Mendoza attempted to celebrate the integrity and candor of the people of Tawi-Tawi, or a portion of the communities there, without making them look like effigies in museums of natural history. Gratitude and awe also for Nora Aunor for leaving us with spaces with which we could work out interpretations of what happens to women who are not able to reproduce by nature but are still caught in the web of cultures in their place.

Unfortunately for the Nora Aunor aficionado, Thy Womb offers no so-called “moments,” those conjured lessons about acting regular actors are proud of. Fortunately for those who love Aunor, the film provides momentary scenes that up the ante of performances for all actors in the land—female or male, transsexual or bisexual, young or old. Already much commented upon are the shots of the face looking up the crescent moon, pain the only potency in her being. I call attention to two scenes: the one in the Catholic chapel and the other toward the end of the film.

Caught in the rain, Shaleha and Bangas-an find shelter in the eaves of an old chapel. Aunor as Shaleha turns around, walks in and inspects the artifacts of faith inside. She goes out again and holds on to the arms of her husband. In those few cautious seconds are revealed the conflicts of beliefs and the naïve helplessness of those who are caught in between religions. There is only one word for that: genius. At the end of the film, when Lovi Poe, as the second wife of Bangas-an, gives birth to their child, Aunor as the midwife lingers on holding the baby. Bangas-an calls her name to signal that she gives the baby to the mother. From Aunor then comes the ephemera of gestures and expressions so limited they become like gasps of sadness and timidity and bravery before a camera that has by this time turned invasive and relentless. I cannot tell you what happens after that except to say that reality is the only truth of this film called Thy Womb. Nora Aunor is its avatar. (TITO GENOVA VALIENTE, Business Mirror)

Postcript:  From Dr. Matthew M. Santamaria, political scientist based in the Asian Center of the University of the Philippines, came these information and facts regarding Thy Womb: “Nora’s portrayal of a childless Sama Dilaut [a.k.a. Badjao] was most poignant. The Sama treasure children so much, equating them to the completion of one’s existence [see Nimmo and Bottignolo].” Santamaria is referring to two ethnographers of the Sama ethnic groups. He continues: “The depiction of Sitangkai as a water village confronted by insecurity due to piracy is very realistic, as Bajau informants reveal. The inclusion of the Sama Dilaut’s intangible cultural properties such as kulintangan titik [graduated knobbed gong ensemble] and the igal dance tradition [not to be confused with the Tausog pangalay] is truly laudable, revealing our country’s cultural wealth. The participation of holders of intangible property like Fatima Salinghati [kulintangan player], Ligaya Baruk [igal dance master], and Jaafar injahali [Kalamat or head igal djin Shaman] makes the film truly a work of intercultural creation.” Santamaria says he is most impressed with the use of “tepo” (banig mat weaving) as a visual metaphor for one’s personal struggle in sorting out entanglements in life...chaos leading to order as an individual raison d’etre. On Nora Aunor, Santamaria states: the non-sensational ending hews close to the aesthetics of realism, like Nora’s artistry, beauty unadorned.

Santamaria has gone to Sitangkai and the neighboring areas for fieldwork and research. He contributes art reviews to this newspaper.

 

bow for the best

With her world-class talent, Ms. Nora Aunor is not resting on her laurels as "best actress." For her performance in Brillante Mendoza's 'Thy Womb', she made history as the first female performer of any nationality to become the critics' choice for the Bisato d'Oro (Golden Eel) prize at the 69th Venice International Film Festival--a feat validated by her victory as the first Filipino actress to win at the 6th Asia Pacific Screen Awards (APSA) in Brisbane, Australia. 

That does not mean, however, that Aunor--ranked as the topnotcher of the Best Asian Actresses of the Decade at the 2010 Green Planet Movie Awards in Hollywood--is no longer excited about receiving another trophy in her own country. Recently, she reigned at the 38th Metro Manila Film Festival where she holds the record of being the most-awarded actress with eight wins so far.

On a roll for more honors, or so Aunor seems to be as she figures prominently in the Top 5 Movie Performances of 2012. A timeless portrayal, according to the reviewer: "Thirty years after 'Himala,' Nora Aunor gives another performance for the ages. As Shaleha, a barren Badjao wife who goes on a mission to find a woman who could and would give her beloved husband a biological child, Aunor is hypnotically still, bracingly intelligent, and devastatingly emotional, often all at once and without uttering a single word. She is, in a word, divine in what is the most hauntingly sublime piece of acting in all of Philippine cinema not only this year but in the last 30 years." 

That's hardly suprising for Mendoza, also a history-maker as the first Filipino to win as best director at the Cannes International Film Festival in 2009 as well as at the recent APSA. In the following video, the feisty but gentle filmmaker attests to Aunor's greatness even as he talks about other issues pertinent to his struggle as an independent artist out to push the borders of Philippine cinema.

FILM REVIEWS: delight of discerning viewers

True to the full tide of critical acclaim from international and local reviewers for Thy Womb, the social network has been abuzz with awe. From Facebook, for instance, a raft of erudite analysis has been floating around the film's virtue as a work of art. Here are three samples: 

Transformative cinema, a gem of a film...

"'Thy Womb' could've been more fortunately titled, and the pacing could've been fine-tuned here and there, but it's doubtless a great film, soaked in the inks, forms and movements of our southern islands' natural splendor on one hand, and entirely committed to the task of a closely observed life on the other, braiding both rhythms into each other, as is the way of the people whose little-known story it attempts, in its own careful and admittedly limited way, to tell.  Moreover, what seemingly impedes it--the narrative oscillation, the doubleness of its vision as documentary and as drama--is revealed, in the end, to be part and parcel of its insight, as embodied in the placid greatness and numinous depth of Nora's exceptional performance: the heroism of the devoted and barren wife, her largeness of heart and self-abnegating love for her husband, is indissociable from her world, which permeates her very being, entwined as her spirit and character must be in the weft and woof her culture's ever-imperilled and resolutely enduring life. Cherished, in their innermost faith, by their gracious and compassionate God, the people of Tawi-Tawi dance in the midst of gunfire and depredation, hunger and drought, and it is very same ethos that animates the barren woman's actions, for as her own people remind her, life must be lived for others, and with hope, no matter how difficult and tight-fisted it often is. Once more, nora sears into our memory the persona she enacts into powerful art, and we cannot help but recognize, in the luminous alchemy of a face that's been softened by the rheum and chastised by the exertions of eventful age, the sadness and pain (as well as horror) of the knowledge of our own forfeited happiness, as well as the glimmerings of a stubborn joy that our own abiding faiths must urge upon us...Transformative cinema, a gem of a film. Go watch.

It's not perfect, this film. But the flaws are forgivable. And they are even possibly necessary, to confound its own claims to authenticity. What Mendoza succeeded in doing, by threading Shaleha's life so unobtrusively into the fabric of this world--the oscillation I was referring to, between the dramatic and the ethnographic--is to render inevitable her decision to be selfless: it is notable, but also entirely possible, in this kind of life. The dignity of our people, caught between inexorable forces (national and global), dancing through the minefield of abject precarity, yearning towards the consolations of tradition, seeking again and again the truth of the spirit: a story Nora tells so eloquently, using little else than the quiet scripture of her face."-- J. Neil Garcia, U.P. professor and prize-winning author

Performing the aesthetics of patience...

 "I don't really care about what people say or think about Brillante Mendoza. I admit that I haven't seen his earlier works, and after hearing the stories, I personally don't think I can muster the courage to ever watch them at all. Besides, I am never a fan of blatant, sensationalized violence.

But can I just say that 'Thy Womb' is such an impressively subtle and beautiful film? That these days, it is just very rare to encounter a sensitive, honest and delicate storytelling such as this one? That Nora Aunor becomes, not simply as a mere character, but as a complete human being before our eyes? That it is a magnificent exercise on dramaturgy and anthropological truth, making it not only as a narrative, but also as a well-researched documentary? That it contained such clever signs and foreshadowings, thus proving that a story does not only run on the course of dialogues, but continues on with the silences, the gazes, the positioning of characters, the gestures, the rituals of the hands, the reserved expressions of love, the meeting of the eyes.

And of course there are flaws. Art is done by humans after all, and not by gods. And the sooner that people will finally get this fact into their skulls, the sooner that our criticisms will become more constructive and less nit-picky. With that said, the local audience members are always disappointing for me. I dare say: it does not matter if you come from the upper or middle or lower social class. If you lack an education that emphasizes on literary inquisition, then you are left with nothing but the sparseness and mediocracy of a literal intellect. Truly, it is quite exhausting to cater to audiences who would rather settle for less.

But 'Thy Womb' refuses to bend. Because perhaps, more than pleasing the shallow pleasures of our so-called civilized audience members, it chooses to be an honest representative of the Tawi-Tawi community instead. That it chooses a subtle and reserved filmmaking approach because there is simply no other way--it is in parallel with the peaceful and modest culture of our Muslim brothers and sisters.

Oh, but if only the Filipino audience member can finally understand that patience is an aesthetic performed by no one else but s/he. If only s/he uses this facility when encountering a film, play, prose or poetry, then works such as Thy Womb can finally achieve its significance in full circle.

'Thy Womb' requires one to exercise and thus, eventually, labor one's way to beauty. Watch it when you are fully rested, and that all of your six senses are sharp and activated. If you are willing to participate in the task of patience, then perhaps you will experience what I had experienced: I was hypnotized, melded, and purged with the film's details." 

-- Jenny Logico-Cruz, cinephile

Elevating acting to its purest and powerful form... 

"The massive weight of 'Thy Womb' has been placed on Nora Aunor's shoulders--a tall and daunting order for any actress. Yet she breezed through her role with aplomb and quiet dignity--making the audience believe that she is indeed that barren midwife toiling in some faraway island in the hope of giving joy to her husband. Nora Aunor shines because she stayed in character throughout what must have been a grueling shooting process, never faltering in her role as Shaleha. In the end, she gave the audience another gift: a glimpse of her unparalleled talent as an actor. Here, Nora elevates acting into its purest form: to not call attention to oneself, or latch on to a "big" moment and display a fireworks of emotions. What she did here was to get lost in the many nuances of her character and be the flesh and blood of her director's vision. What a brave actress she is for allowing all her faculties to be used and to inject her own passion into a most challenging role. Not a movie for all, definitely. But a movie for those who find magic in the seemingly mundane. 

Nora Aunor's performance in 'Thy Womb' brings to mind the quiet but powerful acting of German actor Brigitte Mira in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 'Fear Eats The Soul.' It is about a 60-year-old cleaning lady who falls in love with a much younger man and a black at that. Mira gave a totally absorbing performance as she essayed the pain of discrimination in many forms. Nora's portrayal also has the same unobtrusive beauty as Fernanda Montenegro's beautiful acting in the Brazilian film 'Central Station' which gave her an Oscar Best Actress nomination... She was so totally unselfconscious, so natural and effortless in ‘Thy Womb,’ making her the frontrunner in all awards ceremonies this year. Mahirap pantayan ang ginawa n'ya sa ‘Thy Womb’--to convey the complexity of a woman's emotions with a minimum of dialogue. And when she does speak, her lines are so ordinary, so matter-of-factly that you will believe that she is, indeed, the suffering Shaleha. The lovemaking between Shaleha and Bangas-An has got to be the most emotionally painful cinematic coupling in the history of Philippine cinema. Bravo La Aunor!" -- Vic Sevilla, magazine editor

the conquest continues: the best of Asia-Pacific

Congratulations to Ms. Nora Aunor and Brillante Mendoza for their joint victory as best actress and best director, respectively, at the 6th Asia Pacific Screen Awards (APSA) in Brisbane, Australia.

Ms. Nora Aunor receives her APSA best actress trophy from best director winner
Brillante Mendoza at the national premiere of "Thy Womb" in Davao City.

The maiden cinematic collaboration of Aunor and Mendoza has been widely celebrated since its world premiere at the 69th Venice International Film Festival where they both received prizes from the critics. 

From Venice to Brisbane (and other international venues in Europe and Asia), Aunor and Mendoza have  reaffirmed their status as world-class artists with their historic triumph in APSA-- the first Filipinos to win at the so-called Oscars of the Asia Pacific comprising more than 70 countries-- the most prestigious accolade in cinema at the world's most diverse region. 

Thy Womb is primed for more international awards, hopefully, as it competes at the ongoing 43rd International Film Festival of India (IFFI) and the 9th Dubai International Film Festival in December. The film is also expected to grace other festivals elsewhere next year. 

See the the video clip from the ceremony during the announcement of winners: 

For more details about the recent APSA victory, click here for the news and also here for a related story. Two thumbs up, "Thy Womb"! 

Click here to access and watch the entire webcast of the APSA ceremony.

to see is to rave

Take a peek at the official trailer and poster  of Brillante Mendoza's latest masterpiece--an  enthralling mix of ethnography and love story--about an aging Bajau midwife coping with the irony of her own infertility amid the crosscurrents of nature's grace and the grim banality of terrorism in her indigent community of sea gypsies. Set in the islands of Tawi-Tawi, here's a tale that swirls between the devil of passion and the deep blue sea of tradition. 

 
In retrospect, the cinematic collaboration of Ms. Nora Aunor and Mendoza (best director at the 2009 Cannes International Film Festival)  has been brimming over with the bounty of their artistic chemistry as shown in the following teaser suggesting the camaraderie of the cast and crew behind the scenes.