A call in 1992 from Mother Lily Monteverde proposed to end Abaya’s self-imposed exile from film. Filipino movies were starting to recover from its doldrums. Fueled by the so-called Petro Metro dollars being sent back home by OCW’s (overseas contract workers), a new educated middle class was emerging with spare cash for art and entertainment. At the same time, magnates like Henry Sy and the Ayalas were building megamalls across the country, with their requisite multiplexes. There was a boom, Mother Lily said, so why not come back to film? Abaya resisted but Mother Lily countered by saying that Abaya could do anything she wanted. Finally, Mother Lily came up with her trump card: Abaya could call the shots on the casting. Abaya gave in. 48
The engagement thus settled, Mother Lily asked Abaya what project she would like to do. At that time, the marriage of Abaya’s in-laws was disintegrating and it was a subject that was currently resonating with her. As for the actors, she proposed casting Lorna Tolentino, who had worked with her in Moral, and Gabby Concepcion, in Boystown. Mother Lily agreed and made a suggestion that Abaya include the children’s perspective in developing the story. 49
Abaya recalled: “When Mother agreed to my demands, I talked to my husband who was by then at the top of his advertising career. I told him I was tempted to direct again. But I was very scared. I hadn’t done a film in six years. So I asked him to line produce and photograph again for me. In a sense, to control the production for me. I managed to convince him. And this is how I came back to the movies. With my husband, Manolo, and all the people who mattered to me from the very beginning.” 50 It would only become clear later that, apart from another stint helping Marilou as underwater camera operator in Muro-Ami/Reef Hunters (1999), it would be pretty much the last time that Manolo would work in feature films. He would go back to advertising and from then on, Abaya would have to chart her own course without Manolo by her side on the set. Even at their level, filmmaking was too erratic and undependable to support a family, and it was always painful for them to tell cast and crew members from their previous films to take a job outside the industry until a good project came along. 51
Soon, whatever qualms afflicted Abaya gave way to quite another feeling: “After six years of not being on a set, I blocked my first setup. I mounted this chair and said, ‘Action.’ And then I said, ‘Cut.’ And then I said, ‘That’s good. Print that.’ I went to the bathroom and started to weep, to really weep because I was so happy.” 52
The following period of Abaya’s career, before her next artistic breakthrough film of Milagros in 1997 and her epic productions beginning with Sa Pusod ng Dagat/In the Navel of the Sea (1998), saw Abaya work on four relatively modest films that, for all their flaws, continued to establish her credibility as a dependable, meticulous director that a commercial producer could reasonably take a risk on, whatever streaks of subversiveness came with the package.
The fastidious person that she was, Abaya would have been deeply averse to producing even an immortal masterpiece at the cost of losing money for her producers. This must have figured among her fears when considering a return to filmmaking. Indeed, the commercial record of movies in the Philippines with serious artistic ambitions was a sorry one. Of Abaya’s works thus far, only Brutal was a certified commercial success. 53 Rare was the artistically serious and accomplished movie that also became a hit, the prime example being the film widely seen to have initiated the Second Golden Age, Brocka’s Tinimbang Ka Nguni’t Kulang/You Were Weighed in the Balance and Found Wanting (1974). Instead, the treacherous shoals of Philippine cinema history are littered with the remains of money-losing films that even at their time were already considered classic masterworks. Brocka’s Maynila sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag/Manila in the Claws of Neon, Insiang, and Bona all lost money. So did Bernal’s Manila by Night (then called City After Dark due to the objection by censors over associating the city with drug addicts and sexual deviants), Mike de Leon’s Itim/Rites of May, Mario O’Hara’s Tatlong Taong Walang Diyos/Three Years Without God and a host of other works. With a public conditioned by years of stereotypical, over-the-top movies churned out by the studios at the rate of over 200 titles a year, it was generally the more mindless specimens of the action, sex and melodrama genres that were raking in at the box office.
Kung Ako’y Iiwan Mo/If You Leave Me (1993), written by Amado Lacuesta, begins as a fleet-footed, if a tad familiar, depiction of the breakup of the marriage of an upper-middle-class couple. Winnie (Lorna Tolentino), an account executive in a firm, is driven to succeed in the city while Felix (Gabby Concepcion), a Sunday botanist or biologist (an activity that Winnie dismisses sarcastically), is more of a free spirit who prefers to live close to nature. The difference in personalities and aims have opened a silent gap between them and they are staying together mainly because of their young children, Alice (Antoinette Taus), Bimboy (Tom Taus, Jr.) and Pinky (Sarah Jane Abad). When Winnie learns that Felix is having an affair with mutual friend Carol (Zsa Zsa Padilla) who is more pliant to humoring Felix, Winnie demands that they live in separate houses, with the kids alternating between them.
It is in the second half that the film focuses on the theme that would drive the rest of the story forward: Affluent couples tend to break apart more easily because money is not a problem; whereas economic expediency forces the less affluent to work out differences and in this way, they develop forbearance and emotional resilience that more brittle wealthy folks often lack. When the parents are squabbling, the kids often find comfort in their less nervy nanny Nena (Pewee O’Hara) and family chauffeur Pedring (Al Tantay). There is a brief episode when Felix, Winnie and their kids, hiking inside a prehistoric cave, chance upon an aboriginal couple living in its deep recesses with their children. The two families just stare with wonder at each other — one untouched by modernity and apparently cohesive; the other spoiled by modern conveniences and breaking apart.
The story starts taking turns that require delicate handling if it were to avoid sentimentality. One day, the estranged couple deposit their kids with Winnie’s father who permits the kids’ request that they go with the chauffeur when he visits his parents in the slums. There the kids experience the warmth of the elders and the slum children that they never experienced in their own milieu. Later, when the parents split the siblings apart for a weekend, the kids rebel and manage to persuade Pedring to spirit them away back to the the slums so they could stay together. Pedring gets suspected of kidnapping and a police chase ensues. It is in the latter half that the film gets shaky, overlplaying comedy into farce and pushing sentiments to saccharine levels, the stickiest instance being the husband-wife reconciliation scene in front of the slum folks, with everyone clapping and cheering. Though the film started confidently enough, its loss of consistency seems to indicate Abaya still groping to get a feel for what may appeal enough to Mother Lily’s mass audience who have time and again shown their partiality for farce, sentimentality, and melodrama. The film didn’t lose money in the tills, though, and this satisfied Mother Lily enough to asked Abaya to do another film on a marriage gone wrong.
Co-producing was one-year-old Star Cinema, the film division of TV titan ABS-CBN, and just at the start of its remarkable rise to industry dominance. Whereas Abaya in her previous film chose to just mostly observe the foibles of the upper middle class, she gives herself the more involved role of advocacy for abused women in her next film, Ang Ika-11 Utos: Mahalin Mo and Asawa Mo/The Eleventh Commandment: Love Thy Spouse (1994). The screenplay was written by Jose Dalisay, who had already won dozens of awards for his fiction, poems, and screenplays (Brocka’s filmography would have thirteen screenplay credits by him).
The film’s story hearkens back to Brutal in that newlywed Sol (Aiko Melendez) learns that her husband Roy (Gabby Concepcion) is a psychotic who alternates between treating her tenderly and beating her up when she disobeys his orders. In a traditional Catholic society like the Philippines of the 1990s, there lingered a pervasive machismo culture that required women to follow husbands’ orders.
Kindly neighbor Sylvia (Maricel Laxa) gives refuge to Sol despite the objections of her husband Tony (Edu Manzano) over getting involved in other people’s troubles. Eventually, Sylvia brings Sol to a home for battered wives. Unlike the hopeless situations of her women in Brutal and Karnal, Abaya points out some hope for women in these homes. Roy can’t be put off so easily; in love with his wife in his own obsessive and psychotic way, he eventually finds the home. The efforts by other women to help Sol eventually end up with Roy getting killed by one of them. At the trial for the killing, the three accused women, which include Sol, Sylvia and social worker Susan (Zsa Zsa Padilla), initially refuse to divulge which one of them actually killed Roy. For them, the woman who wielded the weapon was only fighting for all abused women.
Doubtless that the film had serious social intent, and as always with a Marilou Diaz-Abaya film, it bore the mark of Abaya’s attention to production values; but too many of the scenes, especially the wife-beating and the chase, are staged so melodramatically, credibility flies out the window. Abaya was later candid on her assessment of the film: “In retrospect, I see it as a disjointed movie… I don’t remember how I could have had such dreadful control over the subject.” 54
Abaya’s next film project began with a call from Charo Santos-Concio, the powerful executive of Star Cinema and its mother company ABS-CBN. Concio asked Abaya if she had seen the ABS-CBN TV program Ipaglaban Mo/Fight for It, a series based on real-life legal stories, and if she would be interested in doing a film version. Abaya, who had seen the series on and off said that she liked legal cases and eventually accepted the proposal. 55
Abaya and her writer Lee chose two legal cases and, emerging as a diptych. the movie
Ipaglaban Mo/Redeem Her Honor (1994) continued the strain of advocacy in Abaya’s work for the rights of abused women.
The first story follows the travails of 17-year-old Maria (Sharmaine Arnaiz) who works as a housemaid at the home of her uncle Rosendo (Ronaldo Valdez) and aunt (Nida Blanca), in order to pay off debts left by her deceased father. Rosendo seduces her and repeatedly visits her at night but she eventually flees the house. Her mother Feliza (Elizabeth Oropesa) files a lawsuit. Mother and daughter resist attempts by their relatives to settle out of court, including fervent appeals to family ties (the Nida Blanca character is Feliza’s elder sister).
The second story finds Gilda (Chin Chin Gutierrez) obsessively pursued by rich boy Alan (Ricky Davao) even after she marries another man, Daniel (Joel Torre). One day, Alan feigns an accidental injury in the presence of Gilda who lets down her guard and goes to comfort him in a restaurant. There he slips some drugs into her drink that enables him to rape her.
In both its segments, the film is lovely to look at, quietly celebrating the old houses, public buildings, and churches of Laguna, where it was shot, and recalling the surface beauty of earlier Abaya films like Karnal and Sensual. However, this diptych, in terms of narrative credibility, is divided as well: In the first story, victimization is overplayed, the weeping scenes of mother and daughter laid on too thickly, and speechifying hammers in points about evil that were already made apparent in other ways. The film, as one reviewer called it, was “an exercise in feminist hysterics.” 56
On the other hand, the second story finds Abaya for the first time since her comeback in full control of the material, rigorous, credible, and consistent. While Abaya does not make short shrift of the suffering of the raped woman Gilda and her husband, the story is also a study of obsession in the person of Alan. Instead of playing mere villain to be feared and condemned, Ricky Davao makes the character of Alan relatable as well. Davao deservedly won most of the industry and critic’s supporting actor awards for his performance. Beyond preaching to the converted and rehashing well-worn moral lessons, the second segment gives the viewer a fuller comprehension of the world and its complexities.
The film became a huge box office success, and Star Cinema offered to produce Abaya’s next film. May Nagmamahal sa Iyo/Madonna and Child (1996), written by Lee and Shaira Mella-Salvador, centers again on a woman, but its concerns this time are not about victimization and the fight against it. Instead, the film attempts to explore something more basic about a woman’s nature, that of motherhood.
Abaya reflected on the evolution of the women characters in her films: “I can’t help having women as central characters in my films because the films I make correspond to my condition at the stage of my life when I’m directing those films. So in 1980, I’m 24 years old. You’re very idealistic and also very angry. And unforgiving about the handicaps of your environment. That’s what my films look like and feel like. They’re angry, they’re very sure that there are political solutions, social solutions, economic solutions.” Her perspective had changed by the time she reached middle age: “When I started to do May Nagmamahal sa Iyo, written again with Ricky Lee, I am looking at a woman who has attained her economic self-reliance. She’s gone to Hong Kong, now she has money, she can live by herself, she’s useful. So she has finally become liberated and then for what?” 57
The film introduces us to Louella (Lorna Tolentino), a dazed, begrimed woman who was thrown out by her mother (Gina Pareño) after she got pregnant out of wedlock. She hands over her infant son to a priest (Rolando Tinio) who promises to find him a good home. Years later, she is no longer the dazed woman but a smartly dressed woman, in control of her destiny, having saved her money as an overseas contract worker in domestic jobs.
Louella is now obsessed with finding the infant she gave up many years ago. Aided by earnest cop and suitor Nestor (Ariel Rivera), Louella’s search eventually leads her to an orphanage where she finds the surly boy Conrad (Stefano Mori) who uncannily knows a tune that Louella once used to sing her infant son get to sleep. Even more uncannily, Conrad has kept a picture of her very own infant. Convinced that this is her son, she focuses her love and attention on him, while urging the nuns to giver he back. Anti-social and embittered that Conrad had been, his belief that her mother has come back for him begins a healing process.
A huge disappointment comes after the nuns, considering Louella’s claim to the boy, finds some documents that her real son named Leonard (Tom Taus, Jr.) had been given to a couple for adoption. As it turns out, Conrad was a close playmate of Leonard when they were in another orphanage that eventually burned down (thus Conrad’s familiarity with the tune and his possession of the son’s infant photo). Louella searches for Leonard and this leads her to the slums where she finds Editha (Jaclyn Jose) who tells her about the death of her son. The adoptive parents had so brutally beaten up the boy that Editha, then their housemaid, tried to rescue the boy by spiriting him out of the house. But the injuries were so severe that he eventually died. Beyond grieving for her son, a devastated Louella now has to face the dilemma of whether or not she would go forward with adopting Conrad.
Though flawed – some of the orphanage scenes with the nuns and Conrad are played too farcically and others between Louella and Conrad tend to get too sticky — the film generally manages to deliver a cogent theme, leaving us with some provocative questions: What is motherhood? Is it just a matter of blood? And what does it mean for one’s self-identity to love another being?
It was about this time that Abaya dug up a script written some ten years back by Rolando Tinio, one of Abaya’s closest mentors (only next to Bernal). She had started teaching filmmaking for small classes at the Jesuit-run Ateneo de Manila fifteen years ago. Tinio was the university’s tart-tongued professor and creator of its Ateneo Experimental Theater. At that time, during the height of student activism, Tinio was reviled by many other intellectuals as being elitist and irrelevant in his preoccupation with staging writers like Goldoni, Sophocles and Ibsen, instead of following the lead of theater groups like Brocka’s PETA that were attempting to expose the injustices of the feudal system and the Marcos regime, however veiled, in original plays set in contemporary times or in Philippine history. Tinio’s passé reputation did not prevent Abaya from cultivating his friendship.
Tinio became one of Abaya’s most fervent supporters, and he appeared in small but piquant roles in her films. He once offered his script Milagros to Abaya. The script had no plot in the conventional sense, character motivations were obscure, story development discontinuous, the ending unexplained. Abaya lost confidence after Bernal told her that the script was a masterpiece but cautioned her from producing it, saying that she was not yet ready to direct it. 58 Still, Abaya couldn’t shake the script off, and there came a time when she felt that there was something in the story that spoke to her current situation as a woman: “I realized that the feminist movement was for me a limiting exercise. It could no longer yield for me what I felt I needed.” 59 She eventually reunited with her first career mentor, Jesse Ejercito, to film the script with a new independent film company, Merdeka, none of the big producers wanting to touch the project.
She was about a month preparing for Milagros when suddenly, her closest friend Bernal, whom she would sometimes refer to as her “intellectual soul mate,” suddenly died of a heart attack. Abaya said: “After Ishmael died, and at the time I was directing it, I lost my faculty of speech, I lost my mind. I lost all I had. I was robbed of everything, of every talent, of every faculty I’d trained to perfect. And I was reduced to nothing but intuition. That’s how I felt throughout the making of Milagros.” She told the actors that she did not know if she could be coherent enough during the shooting, but she just asked them to trust her. And compounding the anxiety was the diffuse script. Inspecting the day’s rushes became a persistent cause of foreboding. She didn’t know if the audience would even understand what it was that she was doing. Abaya said: “Then a third through the film, I realized I didn’t care. It felt so suicidal, but I really couldn’t afford to care anymore. I just finally let my intuition take over.” 60
She somehow managed to finish the film and she dedicated it to Bernal. The plot of Milagros/Miracle (1997), or whatever semblance of plot it has, revolves around the titular young woman (Sharmaine Arnaiz) who moves in as a housemaid in the big old provincial house of a family of men after her estranged father dies. The father had long left Milagros and her mother Miding (Elizabeth Oropesa) to live with another woman, but Milagros continues to carry within her the rapt childhood memory of her fatjer promising to take her up to Mount Banahaw to search for unidentified flying objects.
All is not well in the house. The head of the household Mang Nano (Dante Rivero) is haunted by his sins as a young man that caused the death of his wife. Milagros is a guileless woman and she sees nothing wrong with giving comfort to the old man by going to bed with him. He is overtaken by guilt and cautions her not to use her body just to give him comfort.
Following Abaya’s direction, Arnaiz portrays the character with an innocence and almost angelic purity that strangely obviates any idea that we are seeing here a sex-obsessed or an immoral woman. Milagros soon gets involved in the lives of the three sons as well and during the course of the film finds herself in bed with each of them. Junie (Joel Torre) is a photographer who asks Milagros to pose for his portrayals of Amorsolo-like rural maidens. He soon falls in love with her, which causes trouble for his marriage to Arlene (Mia Gutierrez) an intellectual who ceaselessly plays Wagner records, discusses philosophy, and quotes Sylvia Plath and German poetry.
Another son, Ramonito (Nonie Buencamino) was born blind, the result of gonorrhea that his father Nano had given to his mother. Ramonito soon finds some relief from his dark prison as he plays blind tag with Milagros inside the big old house.
The youngest son Bennet (Raymond Bagatsing) is an angry young man who initially treats Milagros contemptuously and abusively, having seen her by chance working as an exotic dancer in Manila. Her guilelessness somehow has a healing effect on him and he eventually treats her with tenderness and respect.
These strands, don’t build on each other in any conventional sense of plot and the film refuses to yield a moral lesson or social commentary, yet there is a palpable sense of souls suffering and making journeys. At the point of death, Milagros uses her powers of imagination to fulfill her lifelong dream of going to the top of Mount Banahaw with her father to watch unidentified flying objects. The film contains some of the most beautiful visuals and consistently graceful ensemble acting in Abaya’s filmography. It works like a piece of chamber music that communicates not by logic but by intuition; and whether or not one actually manages to pin down what the story is all about, the film provides for the receptive observer a strong sense that one has been in the presence of a transcendental, even a healing work of art.
Milagros got rabidly divided reception from audience and critics, who either hated or loved it, some calling it silly and stupid and some an original masterpiece. Feminists were up in arms against a woman who would sleep with all four men in a family. The film failed badly in the box office, having provoked a lot of walkouts, 61 which must have contributed to the demise of its producing company Merdeka a year later. Milagros then swept up at awards night of the Manunuri, where it took an unprecedented ten trophies, including the top ones for picture, director and screenplay; the Manunuri eventually named it one of the ten best films of the decade.
Abaya addressed the fierce opprobrium the film received: “I’m saying to the critics who accused it of anti-feminism, that there is no sharper form of liberation than the one Milagros discovered for herself… She deliberately makes a choice on how she is going to spend her life. She also makes a conscious deliberate decision on how she’s going to die.” Abaya reflected on how her perspective on feminism had evolved: “That this (point) can be missed by even the feminists themselves is understandable, because, if you have locked yourself only into a material framework, then a spiritual framework or a framework of ambivalences will become very uncomfortable. … (And) the power of the woman’s imagination which is the power of Milagros, the power to wish, the power to invent, the power to imagine that it is her father that is there beside her – to me, (this) is the ultimate virtue of any human being, but most especially of a woman who is so restricted and confined that she is inhibited from living her fantasies, living her illusions… And to me, ultimately, she is the most liberated of all the women in my films.” 62
A recent screening of Milagros revealed it as fresh, current and provocative as it was at the time of its premiere more than fifteen years ago. Indeed, it has held up much better than a number of her own films that were hailed in their day for their “social relevance” (eg, Baby Tsina, Ipaglaban Mo). A study of Abaya’s filmography, with the focus that time sometimes confers, reveals Milagros as one of her most essential masterworks, perhaps not the most powerful but certainly the most original if not the oddest. The film’s co-author, Rolando Tinio, reviled in his day for being irrelevant and passé, has managed to find some form of redemption in Abaya’s film, itself a testament to the lasting power of intuition.
References
48 Ibid., p. 262.
49 Ibid., p. 263.
50 Ibid.
51 Ibid. 4.
52 Ibid. 7, p. 263.
53 Ibid. 1, p. 45.
54 Ibid. 7, p. 264.
55 Ibid.
56 Vera, Noel. Mother Love. Critic After Dark (Big O Books, Singapore, 2005), p. 25.
57 Ibid 1, p. 46.
58 Ibid. p. 47.
59 Ibid. 7, p. 265.
60 Ibid. p. 265-66.
61 Tariman, Pablo. Moral Then and Now According to Direk Marilou Diaz-Abaya. (Philstar, 2003 August 3). http://www.philstar.com/entertainment/215891/moral-then-and-now-according-direk-marilou-diaz-abaya
62 Ibid. 1, p. 46-47.