FOR a film with an ending that doesn’t make sense and passages of animation that are wanting in technological refinement, Tuos remains one of the most powerful films about the woman in this nation. Like the pact or tuos that’s told as broken in the narrative of the film, this work by Roderick Cabrido breaks many rules not in the sense of breaching them, but by transforming the many ways we know about myths and women, about folklore and feminism.
When all arts fail, transformative cinema is the best gift artists can give to a nation whose stories are dying, isolated and binukot/“wrapped” from the more mundane stories about progress, political change and state-formation processes. The director of Tuos and all those who collaborated to make the film—the cinematographer, the music and sound designer, scriptwriter and many others—form a triumvirate of discoveries with the two leads. Barbie Forteza and Nora Aunor complete the magical triangle. Before critics and fans protest about my inclusion of Aunor as a new find in film, let me backtrack and retell this film from my side of magic.
Tuos is a story of the binukot, a figure shrouded in distant lore and mystery, bounded by location and perceived tradition. Found among the communities (we, ignorant lowlanders, love to call them tribes) in the Panay Bukidnon, which extends from Capiz to Antique and parts of Iloilo, the binukot is a woman who, at an early age, has been selected as special among the women in the community. She is, in a sense, preserved and protected: she is not allowed outside and, thus, is kept away from the sun. She turns pale or white-skinned, depending on how you see the effect of seclusion, and her hair is expected to turn golden. She is carried in a huge basket so that her feet will not touch the ground. She is not allowed to work and, thus, maintains soft hands and soft skin until she is married. She is, in marriage, one of the most special brides. Her dowry, according to Dr. Maria Christine Muyco, a scholar who has done extensive studies on this phenomenon, is not a price but a gift.
Dr. Alicia Magos, one of the pioneering scholars on the binukot, gives her the label a “kept woman,” which pulls away the term from the contemporary meaning of a sexual object to a female, an indigene, who is a subject.
Perhaps, we can learn a lot from the work of Muyco, entitled Binukot at Nabukot: From Myth to Practice. In this paper, Muyco, whose field is Ethnomusicology and Dance Studies, explains the many contradictions about the binukot. Among these contradictions is the fact that the woman “inclosed” can be married off. Outside and now in the eyes of the public, she participates in the world of the common tao even as she retains her power as shaman and as keeper of tales.
In Tuos, the director chooses to insist and persist with one fact that scholars claim to be opposite: the binukot tradition is on the wane and, in many parts, vanished. The selection of a new female to be isolated is at the core of the film and the older binukot even faces the greater problem of relevance and use. Be that as it may, the film gains for us an awareness of the symboling that women have in our culture. That Cabrido decides to sentimentalize and exoticize the binukot—words that Dr. Jason Jacobo, literary scholar and colleague, uses in our conversation to describe that role—does not fully diminish the power of the film. We shall look for the weaknesses in the other aspects of the film.
Visually, the film makes use of the sweep and seclusion of the Panay Bukidnon, to capture the situation of the subject matter. The film opens with a forest, unusually verdant amid the claimed aridity of our landscape. A view of a house is then given, oddly angled for us, as if we are observing, our perspective disturbed. Inside, a blue tone dominates an otherwise bleak interior. It is a big house but one that is marked by poverty, as well. Desolation and a quaint grandeur seem to battle for reminiscence. It is as if the house had been once a seat of power.
An old woman runs the household, her voice loud and threatening. She is Pina-ilog, a binukot. She deals directly with her young granddaughter, the most beautiful of them all, who is being prepared to be next binukot.
The granddaughter belongs to this, the present generation. She shows this in the way she talks and walks and sings with her friends. With her grandmother, however, she is constantly reciting the lore of the mountains, for she, as the future kept woman, will be the repository of these tales to be chanted. She is Dowokan and she does not want to be a woman enclosed.
The pact or tuos is about to be broken by Dowokan, who is in love. It is at this point that the ethnography of the binukot is about to be broken. The binukot can marry and be a nabukot. But perhaps, there is, indeed, a gap between ethnographic documenting and cinematic storyteling, and the twain of truth and drama need not meet?
In the breaking of the pact, the old binukot gets sick. She is perceived to have been punished by the spirits. Dowokan feels the guilt. They take her grandmother to the clinic. In the clinic, Pina-ilog confronts the spirit and subjugates it. In the story of Cabrido, the triumph of the binukot is temporary; the old pact must be followed.
Cabrido, a young filmmaker, is a master storyteller. In a daring decision, he tells an epic tale in the form of animation. One cannot describe the flow from live action to animation as seamless because the film never feels segmented. In Cabrido’s narrative, the characters of the epic inform the fate of those living. The myth doesn’t remain a memory. It lives on in the present. The monsters at the other side of the world can haunt the living persons in this world. The dog that, in the epic, can sense things or see elements human beings don’t see, becomes the dog of the household. There is a moment in the animation when the dog jumps out right out of the drawing and into the real world. Although this has been done before, the effect remains magical.
Cabrido is, thus, a find.
Barbie Forteza, playing the young girl now facing what seems both the punishment and power of isolation, is another major find. She has proven to be capable in Marquina and received a Gawad Urian nomination. Her Dowokan, however she humanizes the person, is an enchanting character: she is modern but with access to the old. She is moved by the demands of tradition but acts out things that slowly aims to break the pact. Her tears at the sight of her grandmother weakening enable us to look back at histories when ancient beliefs were laws and there were those who were breaking them. No young actress as lovely as Forteza has ever shown an understanding of a role in such an acute manner that the joy of her character is also the hurt of the same being.
One feels Cabrido has, indeed, exaggerated the role of the binukot to the point of mystification. We are ready to forgive him for this flaw and more as we celebrate a film festive with metaphors about a world that is fast disappearing. The film supplies a music chanted as if the words are meant to not only convey meaning, but also convince us of the efficacy of a story whose impact is real when told in the right way.
The third discovery, as I have warned you, is Nora Aunor. The great actor needs no rediscovery, we all know that. And yet, in this role, she profounds a role that is not within the acting range that we are familiar with. This is a very different Nora Aunor, a physical performer displaying, almost flaunting, a newly found power in her body. She gestures and loud notes come from the body frail only because her role asks her to be so, but, otherwise, imbued with a constitution ready to do battle in the spirit world.
Nora Aunor dances in Tuos. She performs what could be the closest to the tigbabayi, or the solo woman dance, where Aunor as a shaman is doing the Binanog, a dance that mimics the movement of the hawk. While in Thy Womb her Shaleha dances the igal as an ordinary person, in Tuos she is the extraordinary woman. As Pana-ilog, she is no more the bystander who moves to the gong but the central figure for whom the instruments are played. Arms stretched and fingers turned up, an inward concentration, and that gaze that has memorialized many roles from healers to singers of the most mundane of songs—these are all found in this latest character of the actor.
The complexity of the binukot as recovered from the field requires a performance from an actor with the same, if not more tested, complexity. This is Nora Aunor’s role for her age, for the actor has reached an age where she is fit in terms of temperament and intellect to image for us a woman who, following the words of Muyco, is both text and performed chanting.
A film with Nora Aunor is still the best film industry news. And what is a Nora Aunor film without those so-called moments? What is a Nora Aunor film without the classic confrontation scene? Tuos and Cabrido do not dissapoint us. Taken down from the hinterlands and brought to a clinic, Pana-Ilog is followed by the monster. They fight inside her room. This is a confrontation scene unlike any other she has done. Those had been with lesser mortals; Nora Aunor faces this time an elemental.
One may find the scene absurd but when the combat ends, the camera focuses on the lower portion of Pana-ilog. This is the peak of Aunor’s physicality as we see her legs spread apart, a female form in full violent display. There is no need to see that wondrous face and those legendary eyes. Her body has spoken; her femaleness has screamed.
And what is a Nora Aunor film without the unforgettable quiet moments, when words liquefy into silence? In another scene, Pana-ilog is ready to face the monster. She peers into the woods, into an enchanted horizon. The camera brackets the face of Aunor framed by twigs and leaves. If this is a face worshipped for its capacity to mount a solemn procession of ambivalence and inscrutability, then there is nothing to talk about. She has done those faces many times, the expressions undoubtedly collected in many analysis and descriptive essays, insanely memorized by fans and plagiarized by imitators. But the face of Pana-ilog is of a different origin. It is a face that could look into the universe of magic and myth. Those eyes can sense things where we think there are none. Behold, therefore, that face twisted as it forces an entry into the portal of the unseen. The eyes burn the space between her, the woman hidden, and the enemy of all indigenous women revealed. Tears begin to well from those eyes but they are not tears of any human sentiment, but tears of rage. These are eyes that can speak with terror because there is no more terrifying than being a woman separated from the rest but not made sacred, kept away from the sun but still human. The ritual world and the epic stories have prepared the binukot; the world of loss and redemption, the extraordinary fame that has marked Nora/Ate Guy/Superstar from the rest of us, have also prepared and nurtured the actor. The golden voice is gone, we know it. The lines for her character in the film are very minimal; the body has taken over. Nora Aunor, the actor, triumphs once more very much like the kept woman who is stronger, because she has been sheltered, with a power all her own because she keeps the records for the clan, speaks for them, the community that has shielded her from public scrutiny. In her face we know she knows the power in her femaleness. She has been isolated, purified so she could cleanse the darkness of impurities. The lines are blurred, the distinction thinning. Who cares? Nora Aunor is the binukot; the binukot is Nora Aunor.
In Tuos, Nora Aunor is both the dancer and the dance. What could this actor not do with her body? What could this woman, this singer, not chant even when the voice is gone?
Jema Pamintuan is credited for the music, which doesn’t merely serve as bridge and background but a character unto itself. Sound design, integral to the whole film, is by Monoxide Works and Bryan Dumaguina. Story and screenplay are by Cabrido, the director, and Denise O’Hara and Ralston Jover. The screenplay is by Denise O’Hara. Steff Dereja is the production designer. Mycko David is the cinematographer, the source of all the arresting visuals, which include the gripping closeup shots of Nora Aunor.