IT is tempting, but facile, to use the wine as metaphor for Nora Aunor, with another year added to her gilded age. But she deserves more than metaphors and modifiers. You know, the cliché of mellowing through the years, and being more superior over any in our memory of her excellence. How she is the greatest, or how she rose from being a social zero to a breathtaking phenomenon—those things have been said and need not be uttered anymore.
If there is an element about the persona of Nora that has to be reviewed, it is her rise from a personality, a box-office sensation, a star of those early silly, giddy plots who, in one film, stunned a new group of critics to declare her the discovery of the decade of what then became the beginning of the golden age of Philippine cinema: a thespian of the first order. That Nora stayed on for more decades—and up to now—honing her gift, doing film after film, seemingly in search of more stories to tell not only by herself but with other actors who share her vision, exploring and allowing herself to be used in all kinds of screenplays and scenarios, in varied attempts of filmmakers to find that supreme strand of the human experience.
Nora Aunor is at the center and core of the new cinema. She gladly and, most of the time, intriguingly continues to haunt the imagination of new filmmakers and new and young actors. Not all of these collaborative events are triumphant; there are still filmmakers who come upon Aunor with the mission to overhaul her genius, impose on her their techniques and strategies instead of looking into the heart and art of this individual and finding there the many dimensions of one who have travelled far and wide, up and down, in the valley of tears and hopes of this existence.
Nora Aunor has been there and done that. She has contributed mightily as an actor by way of characterizations unforgettable because they have been seared in the collective unconscious of this nation. She has done so much as a producer in the development of our cinema by supporting films made both for commerce and consummate craft. She was not a mere observer, not a putty in some filmmaker’s sweaty hand and rabid delusion. Once a filmmaker gets over this realization, without despairing then, she or he can proceed and chart a fresh direction, navigate threads of reactions and responses, and show the actor that she is being given a new road to tread upon, a new role to try, a grand highway from which she can sally forth to battle good and evil and thus continue to tell what she as a true actor was created to achieve—TRUTH.
And while this wonderful, irascible, unpredictable, loveable enigma is celebrating her birthday on the 21st of May, we might as well ask truthfully this: what is Nora Aunor’s singular contribution to Philippine society at large, and this industry of illusion and artifice called cinema in biting particular?
Nora Aunor was the original, supreme contravida. Allow me to rephrase that: Nora provided a new way of looking at flawed, imperfect characters. Before Nora, actresses and actors were defined by their appearances alone, leaving motivations suspect, painting characters who had no human agency. Lacking control over destiny and class structure, the woman had only two options—to be bad or to be good. Rendered bad, she was to wear tight skirts that threatened to hoist up anytime for the meek leading man. The bad woman had eyebrows so thin they could be manipulated to go west and east in order to manifest disgust over the leading lady’s easy tears. The bad man, in reverse, had a mustache and was always inches away from ravishing the pretty, hapless lady.
All this changed in the hands—and eyes—of Nora Aunor. She enabled the creation of a being that was imperfect because she was human. She convinced us there was more to a weakness of spirit than gestures. In the small universe of slow twists and turns, in her gripping understanding of lines or in the absence of dialogues, she told stories about how difficult and given it was to be human and moral, how it was not easy to read quickly the good in an action when too many options were there presented each day, each hour to a woman struggling to be a woman, lover, mother, enemy.
Think of Nora Aunor in her magnificent films.
Think of her as the title caharcter in Bona. She leaves her family to be with an idol, a stuntman. She is found out by her father who dies because of broken heart. She comes home, avoids the rage of a brother for the moment, is ushered in by her mother but her presence is soon discovered. She is brutally manhandled, pushed out of the house. We applaud that virtuoso scene not because we approve of Bona’s conduct but because Nora as Bona has demonstrated to us the virtue of veritas, of truth. She has performed for us a web of emotions of a young woman who has to see the dead father even if it is at the cost of personal violence.
Think of her as Lorna in Mga Tinik sa Dibdib. An ordinary tale of a woman charting her own life becomes a mirror for us to look at and find there the dregs of our society. Her Lorna has the capacity to deliver speeches that are strident but fluent that, upon first hearing, we agree with all that she says. Then we look back and realize it is the daughter now cursing her own parent. We praise the acting and we suspend our moralizing. And we are troubled and tasked to review our value system.
Think of her as Ester, daughter to Lolita Rodriguez’s Renata in Ina ka Ng Anak Mo. Against the backdrop of Nora Aunor as Elsa in Himala, the inestimable film scholar and historian Nick Deocampo, in an interview conducted years back, conspiratorially glowers at an unseen audience: “How can you call your own mother hayup?” Half-mocking, half-pontificating, all the while the instructive film educator, Deocampo whispers, “Ohmygod!”
Earlier, Deocampo, summarizing the plot of Lino Brocka’s Ina ka ng Anak Mo, thinks back about the film and how it “destroys all morals.”
The point is Nora Aunor’s films and her delineation of the characters in those films are never safe grounds of entertainment but daring spaces for recriminations, introspections, analysis and judgment. Viewing these films, we are learners in these shrines to the moral imaginary; we are consumers of courageous literature; we are the diggers unafraid to see, hold and spit at the artefacts of false manners and pretentious conducts.
In the book Centennial Anniversary of the Philippine Cinema: Cinema as a Response to the Nation, released during the 23rd Busan International Film Festival in 2018, I wrote in my essay “Lost Archives, Found Regrets, Photographs of Guilt: Critiquing the Filipino Cinema” how the film Tatlong Taong Walang Diyos tested the waters by dealing with the unsaid and the taboos during the war.
Remember the story: a Japanese official falls in love with a Filipina whose family becomes comfortable while the rest of the village—or the country—remains hungry and suffering. The woman also betrays her boyfriend who is a guerilla. Returning to her woman, the Filipino man finds her in the arms of the enemy who has stopped being enemy.
Nora plays this woman, Rosario, an outing which I described as “the beginning of a criticism where her very self [her persona] impinges on the delineation—and acceptance—of the character she seems fated to play on-screen.” I wrote further: “It is the power of this actor that she had been able to play roles that could be considered, to use a local term, kontrabida or contravida, the counter-life on-screen. She [Nora Aunor] can play any role so long as she plays it well.”
The loyal fans are preparing many little things for Nora, their Ate Guy. I believe, however, the nation should also do that—thank her for her legacy, for those celebrations and subversions of life and death on-screen, for giving us cinemas whose power and virtue are not only embedded in the taboos they portray but also the unsaid we sense after watching them, and in her performances that, long after the noise of the work of other stars has subsided, will be remembered for their incomparable sincerity and silences.