Abaya and Lee’s next project, Alyas Baby Tsina/Alias Baby China (1984) was also based on a true legal story, that of Evelyn Duave Ortega, aka Baby Tsina. (She was called this alias in court documents because she looked Chinese. Otherwise there are no references to anything Chinese in her story or the film.) Duave was found guilty in 1971 of murder, and several appeals while on death row culminated in a Supreme Court decision seven years later that declared her innocent and released her from prison. 36 37
A producer for major production company Viva had purchased the story rights and long wanted to turn the Duave story into an award-winning vehicle for superstar Vilma Santos. Abaya signed on and brought in Lee to adapt the story for film. As it turned out, as happens so often, the film strayed so far from the actual story, the producers might as well have spared themselves from paying story rights in the first place.
The documents record that an Alfredo Bocaling was killed one night in a dark street by stabbing and hitting with blunt instruments. Accused of the killing were Baby China, a call girl, and her three male friends. She had allegedly told the men that Bocaling and his friend raped and robbed her and she wanted revenge. Their guilt by murder, adjudged by the Courts of First Instance and Appeal because of the consistency and corroborative nature of the three men’s confessions, were overturned by the Supreme Court due mainly to the inadmissibility of their extra-judicial confessions. The Supreme Court commuted their verdict from murder to homicide and their sentence from death penalty to reclusion perpetua. Baby herself, who did not confess, was found innocent after the extra-judicial confessions of the three men were rejected.
One of course should never expect fidelity to an original story source, only a sense of integrity and believability in the adaptation. Did this adaptation succeed? In the struggle to fashion a crowd-pleasing story with an overarching social theme and an award-worthy role for its lead star, the film invented a number of characters and devices not in the actual story. Baby’s lover Roy (Philip Salvador), with whom she plans to start a new life in America is fictional, and so is Roy’s death by shooting in a chase by rival gang members. In the real story all the principals were apprehended by the police while they were still in hiding. The Bocaling character has morphed into the film’s Toto (Johnny Delgado), a leader of an extortion syndicate that visits a sweeping wave of mass killings and rapes on Baby Tsina and her prostitute friends. The homicide scene of the real Bocaling is pumped up here into a chase and mass confrontation between gun-wielding gangs and the police.
Neither did the real Baby (and Roy) seek refuge at the home of a lawyer friend, Jorge (played as an abugadong pulpol/cheap lawyer with sly wit by Dindo Fernando) where they debate the difference between what is law and what is right. When the fictional Baby is eventually committed to prison, she takes on a noble new role as resolute and impassioned advocate of more humane prison treatment for women, at one point making a speech before the whole prison population that spells out her message: “We are not robots that can be switched on and off! … We should be treated like human beings!”
The film was a serious attempt to produce a work with significant social import that would be commercially entertaining all at the same time. But shoehorning the original into overused plotlines involving gang rivalries and populist heroine versus the system, add to this the blatant underlining of the “social message,” and credibility is lost, provoking instead a wearying wariness throughout the film.
What succeeds in Baby Tsina is the care in production values that became such a prominent hallmark of Abaya’s works. It instilled trust in her, in that whether one liked her latest film or not, the keen attention to production design, lighting and photography at least showed that here was someone who took her craft and her audience seriously. With Baby Tsina, it is this gleaming surface, arising specially from Zabat’s production design and Manolo’s mood-infused lighting, that hints at authenticity and conviction that the narrative glaringly lacks.
On August 21, 1983, exiled politician Benigno Aquino was assassinated as he stepped onto the tarmac of the Manila International Airport to lead an opposition movement to the Marcos dictatorship. His funeral became the biggest in Philippine history and it prompted a widespread movement that would culminate in the fall of the Marcos regime in 1986 and the ascension to the Presidency by Aquino’s wife, Corazon.
The same year of the assassination, director Lino Brocka organized the Concerned Artists of the Philippines for the purpose of opposing film censorship and the group soon became active in anti-government rallies. Abaya, who was for many years treasurer under Brocka of the directors’ union, and who had had her own brushes with censorship, joined the CAP and became active with the group as one of Brocka’s chief aides. 38
Film censorship at that time was selectively applied by the Marcos regime. The most consistently prohibited topic was political activism, most especially any statements of protest against Martial Law. As far as sex went, the military censors were rather more pragmatic, often tightening restrictions on sex just to show who was in power; or loosening them when they deemed that this could provide spectacles and distractions from the country’s economic mess. 39 Thus the last years of the Marcos regime was a time of “bold” films that featured aspiring actresses frontally baring all for the public to see.
It was at this time that industry giant Regal Productions’ Mother Lily asked Abaya to make the bold film, Sensual/Of the Senses. Written by Jose Javier Reyes, it is the story of a young woman Niña (Barbara Benitez) in a small rural town, exploring her sexual awakening. She lives with her mother Turing (Chanda Romero), a repressed woman always fretting about money; and her effervescent, permissive grandmother Senyang (Charito Solis). Niña’s first sensual partner is fellow schoolmate Elsa (Lara Jacinto). As they make love on a limestone promontory above a limpid sea, they ruefully ponder over their impending separation as Niña’s prepares to pursue college in Manila.
Further avenues for exploration of the senses emerge when Ariel (Lito Gruet), a rich young man who has come back to spend summer in the family’s ancestral mansion, happens to espy them from a distance, and he soon starts courting Niña, arousing the jealousy of Elsa. Niña falls head over heels for the rich and glamorous Ariel which leads to more occasions of lovemaking and frontal nudity. A scene both sad and hilarious shows Niña trying to fit in with Ariel’s pompous cosmopolitan friends slumming in their provincial town, and failing pathetically. She soon faces heartbreak when Ariel abandons her, disappearing from her life like a summer’s momentary breeze. It is Elsa, whom she had left for Ariel, that comforts her.
The one source of constant support for Niña is her warm-hearted grandmother Senyang. At her deathbed, Senyang tells her granddaughter not to mourn for her: “Every day, creatures die. Every day, creatures get born. What matters is that you experience every moment of your life.”
Though Abaya herself dismissed the film as a mistake along with Boystown and Macho Gigolo, 40 Sensual surprisingly holds up pretty well some thirty years later. It remains lovely to look at (Jonathan Greene in charge of lighting and cinematography this time), and though there is much frontal nudity, the lovemaking scenes possess an elegance that sometimes brings to mind European arthouse films of the 60’s and 70’s; the eternal limestone promontory making a silent comment on the ephemeral naked human bodies on its pockmarked surface seems straight out of Antonioni’s L’Avventura. (Abaya counted directors Lina Wertmüller and François Truffaut, whose characters often rebelled against societal restrictions, among her favorite arthouse directors.) 41
Buttressing the film’s theme about the need to fully experience the senses are the opposing worldviews of Niña’s mother and grandmother. Mother Turing is focused on staying safe against future wants to the point of forcing the sale of their ancestral home with all its ghosts and memories. Grandmother Senyang (played with defiant abandon by the great Charito Solis) has not lost her zest for the forbidden, be it in sex or in sweets, which arouses the ire of Turing who persistently reminds Senyang of her diabetes. Indeed, Senyang is the most vivid and fully drawn character in the film, much more so than the leads. The elaboration of the Ariel character is the pithiest. Niña’s heartbreak in the end could have come across with more depth had he been more roundly developed. Still, the film, with its cogent screenplay remains a modest, well-crafted paean to the senses, gaining more poignancy now that Abaya herself has left the world of the senses.
And indeed, a case can be made that Abaya produced not just the trilogy of feminist one-titled rhyming films of Brutal, Moral and Karnal, but a tetralogy that includes the now almost forgotten Sensual.
The film had the dubious distinction of opening on the very day before the 1986 EDSA People Power of February 22 that four days later would topple the Marcos dictatorship. Movie theaters nationwide remained empty as the usually movie-crazed Filipinos rushed out to the streets to support the rebels or stayed glued to their TV to follow the rapidly unraveling events.
The movie industry took a bad dive after the revolution, partly due to the rise of video piracy, partly because many filmmakers lost steam. Abaya worked on two films that were aborted after three or four days of shooting due to funding and other problems (one of them with Nora Aunor and Joseph Estrada). 42 Otherwise, Abaya could not find any producers who would do anything but sex movies. Abaya recalls: “I was getting bored with offers to do pump-and-grind sex movies, so I accepted to do (the TV show) Public Form in November 1986… I wasn’t very interested and couldn’t muster enough stomach to do (the sex movies).” 43 Lest she be imputed with prudery, she hastened to say: “Hindi naman ako for morality or what lang. (Not that I’m for morality or what). It’s just that I found it boring… How many ways can you block sex (scenes)?” 44
It is one of the ironies that the last decade of the iron-fisted Marcos regime saw one of the richest and most accomplished periods in Philippine film history, such that the span between the mid-70’s and mid-80’s is now widely referred to as the Second Golden Age of Philippine Cinema (the First Golden Age being in the 50s, led by such names as Gerry de Leon and Lamberto Avellana; and the Third Golden Age, from the mid 2000’s and ongoing, consisting almost entirely of indie works produced by internationally acclaimed directors like Lav Diaz and Brillante Mendoza and by neophyte filmmakers supported with seed money by the Cinemalaya Film Festival and other film competitions that have followed suit.)
It has been a topic of much speculation as to why that repressive period was so rich in filmic expression, among them Abaya’s masterworks like Moral and Karnal. Abaya weighed in on the question: “(It was) because both artist and spectator were in a state of ferment. I believe that in times of deprivation, you’re hungry not only for food or the basics but also for expression. Or for a release of anger. Both the artist and spectator could find no better time than the period of repression to experience the almost instinctive or intuitive communication and bonding… It wasn’t about the movie stars in the Martial Law years. It was about the directors. It was about Brocka and Bernal walking the edge, saying everything we wanted but could not.” 45
And why did Philippine cinema experience a period of general decline so soon after liberation? Abaya mused: “You don’t become better when you are liberated from political and economic deprivations. You just become richer. You become more comfortable, and then, you begin to keep the status quo. The status quo is not to do anything. To save what you already have. To become stagnant. The idea of getting more means staying still. It’s a philosophy of comfort. This seized us in the mid-80’s after the People Power Revolution. We lost our adrenalin. Spectator and artist lost their adrenalin…. There was no space for the artist in the mid-80’s. It’s not that Cory Aquino didn’t care. The artist and the audience didn’t care. They were enjoying a new kind of life. They imagined they were already really free.” 46
The end of Martial Law with its sudden loosening of restrictions on free speech saw a boom in newspapers and TV shows about public affairs. Continuing to turn down offers on sex movies, Abaya found more meaning in directing two television programs. Public Forum (1986 – 1995), called alternatively as “Truth Forum,” was a public affairs program hosted by an erstwhile Sociology professor at the University of the Philippines, Randy David. It gained popularity as the only public affairs show at that time conducted in Tagalog instead of English. Her other show was Sic O’Clock News (1987-1992), a successful news satire (predating Jon Stewart’s Daily Show by almost a decade).
Working in television gave Diaz the kind of regular family life with Manolo and their two sons that is almost universally out of reach to active filmmakers: “By concentrating in television, I could remove my children from film locations. It meant I could stop dragging them to dirty toilets. It meant an orderly life and limited movements from my house to the studio. I could have a comfortable, settled, predictable, even a normal life with my children. They were in grade school. I really felt I was happy. They were very good years – the six years I spent in television.” 47
References
36 Francisco, Ariel. Baby Tsina Meets Baby Tsina. Star for All Seasons (1984 clipping posted 2009, Nov 17). http://vsr-starforallseasons.blogspot.com/2012/10/alyas-baby-tsina-1984.html
37 Supreme Court decision transcript, G.R. No. L-34248. (1978, November 21). http://www.lawphil.net/judjuris/juri1978/nov1978/gr_34248_1978.html
38 Ibid. 1, p. 45.
39 Ibid 7, p. 260.
40 Ibid. 1, p. 45.
41 Ibid. 4.
42 Ibid. 7, p. 259
43 Ibid., p. 260.
44 Reyes, William. Part 2: Marilou Diaz-Abaya Talks About How Jose Rizal Film Bio Landed on Her Lap and Why She Will Not Direct Another Sic O’Clock News. (PEP, 2012, Mar 4). http://www.pep.ph/news/33245/part-2-marilou-diaz-abaya-talks-about-how-jose-rizal-film-bio-landed-on-her-lap-and-why-she-will-not-direct-another-sic-o39clock-news
45 Ibid., 7 p. 261.
46 Ibid.
47 Ibid., p. 260.