Bona

All Manila’s a stage in the cinema of Lino Brocka. The usual distinctions between public and private, individual and collective, blur to bewildering effect. This phenomenon reflects a sociological fact. Manila’s slums, warrens of shacks crammed with huge extended families, forced people into others’ pockets. Houses become stage sets, with doors providing entrances and exits. In Bona (1980), Brocka films one scene of astonishing melodrama, as a father berates his errant daughter and then beats her while the family looks on, in one static long take shot as if from the stalls of a theatre. Family melodramas spilled onto the streets, watched by unemployed or doubtfully employed neighbours happy to have attention redirected from their own impoverished lives. Individual and family dramas overlapped and intersected with those of neighbours, often bursting like a pressure cooker into explosions of mob violence. This was OK with the governing Marcos regime so long as the neglected malcontents turned on each other, behind the huge barriers it erected to hide the grinding poverty of Manila from visiting dignitaries. It was only when the volatile crowds started looking outwards at the cause of their discontent that the regime knew that it was in trouble.

Brocka’s genius was to use this reality as a stage for melodramas of desire and fantasy. This is not to say that Brocka – a political activist, an admirer of surrealist subversive Luis Buñuel, and a gay man in an oppressively Catholic society – turned away from reality. For over two decades, Brocka demonstrated that the borders between political reality and personal fantasy, documentary and fiction, public and private, collapsed in a society as contradictory and dysfunctional as Marcos’ Philippines, especially in the closing years of a regime that would eventually be publicly overthrown in 1986.

Take the astonishing opening section of Bona, a film that was mysteriously ‘lost’ for a quarter-century. The sound of a crowd is heard over the opening credits printed on a black background, before the screen bursts into shots of surging crowds in the glaring Pacific sunshine. The lack of centre or focus in these initial shots is discomfiting. The orienting rules of linear perspective are trampled by crowds heaving in and out of the frame from all directions. What are we looking at? One of the occasional mass protests that erupted in the Philippines despite the declaration of martial law in 1972? Brocka had given glimpses of such a protest on the periphery of Maynila, sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag (Manila in the Claws of Light, 1975), probably his most emblematic and internationally famous film.  

It soon becomes clear in Bona that we are witnessing one of the many religious processions that mark the Filipino year. Recognising this does not make the sequence any more stable. It is impossible to separate the religious and the congregation, the participants or the spectators, the representations and the represented. Spectators join the procession and become part of the spectacle; they interact with other spectators, or with the colourful statues that are supposed to be the objects of veneration. Indeed, although religion appears to be all-consuming for this society, it is only one of many foci for the expression of fervent spectatorship and participation. At one point the procession passes a lurid advertisement for the macho Ramon Revilla crime film Rampador Alindog (Jose Yandoc, 1981). The next sections show fans crowding a film shoot, or cheering on a group of basketball players. It does not matter what you revere once you revere something. Again, there is a political dimension to this – a dictatorship must ensure that it gives its subjects sufficient outlets for expending its excess energies, or it might turn them in its direction.  

Amid these crowds, the camera tracks a tiny figure who will turn out to be the title character. As so often in films where ‘local colour’ is used to give a film atmosphere, documentary impulse must give way to fictional imperative. Except that, with Brocka, what appears to be straightforward and transparent is anything but. The paradox is that this slight nonentity is played by arguably the Philippines’ most revered Superstar, Nora Aunor, later named a National Artist of the Philippines. As Brocka filmed this part of his story during an actual procession, the worlds of fiction and documentary collide. ‘Real’ participants in the ‘real’ procession cannot help reacting to the ‘real’ superstar in their midst, as she tries to embody an ordinary character who risks being swallowed up by the throng.

These dichotomies between documentary and fiction, watcher and watched, inform the development of the main narrative, wherein Bona selflessly serves a handsome stuntman and bit player in the Filipino film industry who has convinced himself, Bona, and others that he is a matinee idol. Brocka’s films are often compared to the contemporary queer dissector of the classic film melodrama, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and the comparison was never more applicable than to Bona. Gardo (Phillip Salvador) is reminiscent of the many gorgeous louts or exploiters that mesmerise Fassbinder’s hapless protagonists, and lead them to abject ruin. It is not any innate talent or charisma of Gardo the actor that generates an obsessive response, it is raw desire. Gardo’s own desire for himself – a whole wall of his tiny shack is a shrine made of collaged headshots; the desire of the filmmaker, who often composes Gardo with the erotically charged passivity of martyrs in Christian iconography; and, above all, the desire of Bona and the other women in the film.  The scenes where his two neighbours laugh admiringly at Gardo’s manhood as they undress him after a beating in the rain, and when Bona bathes Gardo like a mother her naughty son (Gardo repeatedly compares Bona to his dead mother), are unprecedented in popular cinema in their expression of frank female desire.

Both scenes have cultural associations that might signpost a reactionary resolution to the film and its heroine. Gardo being undressed by members of the opposite sex after a drenching inevitably invokes Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958), the classic study of erotic obsession and an allegory of film viewing that ends with the leading lady being killed violently – twice. The selfless mother/brutalised son dynamic would be even more familiar to the Philippines’ Catholic audiences as images of the Virgin Mary and her sacrificial son – statues of both are shown being venerated in the opening procession. As the named heroine of a film melodrama, Bona might be expected to suffer a dismal fate – death, perhaps rejection or neglect.  Brocka had treated women and their relation to the cinema before in Stardoom (1971, an update of Luchino Visconti’s 1951 Bellissima), and it did not end well.

Bona is very different, perhaps reflecting a changing political mood. Bona is not a victim of fantasy; she generates it. She has seen what Filipino women can expect from society in her own home, where they work all day and are dominated by a brutal patriarch while a male American TV announcer blares advertising bromides.  Bona’s relationship with Gardo exists as it suits her. Once she realises that she is being used and made ridiculous, she ends it. Far from being a mere nobody in the crowds, as the opening section suggested, she is responsible for the very film we see (as of course Aunor herself was as producer of the film). Bona ends the moment Bona calls time on the fiction. Not before she hits back at the feckless man who exploited her, giving him a drenching he will not forget. And if one Filipino subaltern could fight back, why not everyone else?  

Bona (1980 Philippines 85 minutes)

Prod. Co: NV Productions Prod: Nora Aunor (as Nora Villamayor) Dir: Lino Brocka Scr: Cenen Ramones Phot: Conrado Baltazar Ed: Augusto Salvador Mus: Max Jocson Prod. Des: Joey Luna

Cast: Nora Aunor, Phillip Salvador, Raquel Montesa, Rustica Carpio, Marissa Delgado, Venchito Galvez, Nanding Josef, Spanky Manikan, Archi Adamos, Rene Hawkins, Joel Lamangan