(The film will soon be available through the Cinema One channel, with English subtitles)
If I remember right I saw Mario O'Hara's Bulaklak sa City Jail (Flowers of the City Jail) on its opening run back in 1984 and thrilled to the story of Angela Aguilar (Nora Aunor), a hapless woman jailed for 'frustrated murder.' Based on Lualhati Bautista's novel of the same name, sequences stayed in memory--Angela's first night reception (where her cellmates practically raped her); the attempted escape through an old mansion's garden statuary; her pursuit by police through Manila Zoo. I remember the lurid red of the nightclub where Angela sings, the bleak glow of cellblock lights, the deep shadows of the zoo.
And I remember how in screenings and various Betamax and VHS recordings since how those colors have faded, the image blurred, been accompanied by questionable translations (Caged Blossoms?), how watching the film in a special screening at the Hong Kong Film Festival felt like looking through a muddied window--and this was the only surviving 35 mm print!
Thanks then to ABS CBN's digital restoration for bringing those colors back--the lurid reds, the bleak glow, the deep shadows.
Again one is struck by the opening sequence of tight shots at the nightclub--an impressionistic flurry of poured beer and gin, cigarettes perched on lips, ashtrays and salted peanuts, hand caressing skirted thigh, faces gazing at each other and at Angela singing "I've Got a Crush On You."
Cut without explanation or apology to a typewriter clacking out 'AGUILAR, ANGELA,' the platen rolling to reveal 'PERSONAL IDENTIFICATION criminal fingerprint card.' Suddenly the singer who had been crooning under warm red spots flinches under the jail's harsh incandescents, looking like a deer in headlights while guard and convicts stare. The tight shots continue, passing from one face to another, their expression hostile if not hungry.
Much of the film is shot that way and one can think up a number of reasons why: easier to eliminate the stares of extras (Nora being at the height of her celebrity), easier to dress sets, easier to light. But O'Hara's closeups also evoke the claustrophobia of prison life, how a convict (or not a convict--some languish in jail for months, waiting for sentencing or even trial) can only survive when she narrows her focus to what's in front of her. When Angela learns she's pregnant she confides to Juliet (Gina Alajar) that she hopes to miscarry. Unspoken: a child would be a burden here.
Arguably Angela has been myopic all her life. In the club she only had eyes for her lover Cris (Ricky Davao); on first entering prison she only sees unfriendly faces. O'Hara's camera occasionally pulls back for a glimpse of other women's lives: the aforementioned Juliet, jailed for estafa (fraud); Viring (Perla Bautista), whose daughter is taken from her as the result of a crackdown (there was a riot at the men's prison, and a 12 year old boy was killed); Lena (Celia Rodriguez) who turns tricks to support her beloved son Jun (Jack Alejandro); cellblock 'mayor' Tonya (the inimitable Zenaida Amador) and her lieutenant Barbie (the intimidating Mitch Valdez). The camera's eye is Angela's, who stands as mute witness to these women as their stories prompt her (gently gently--O'Hara is rarely if ever insistent) to widen her gaze, look beyond her own predicament.
And Angela learns to speak up. First for herself (turning down the proposal of prison guard Paquito, a.k.a. Cowboy (Tom Olivar)--there might be immediate benefits, but the man looks like a sadist) then for others, especially Patricia (Maritess Guiterrez). In Patricia's brutal initiation Angela sees her own, takes the younger under her wing--yes it helps that Patricia is from a wealthy family but that's the thread of sad realism Lualhati Bautista weaves into her melodrama: in Philippine society money helps, sometimes more effectively than the established legal system.
A word on Bautista's story: have not read the novel (not easy to find and listed on Amazon at a pricy $40) but the screenplay (with some rewrites from O'Hara) adds substance to the characters--Angela's attitude towards her unborn child undergoes a gradual shift, helped presumably by the example of Viring's attachment to her daughter and Lena's dedication to her son. The various vignettes manage satisfying mini-arcs of their own--Viring's breakdown in the absence of her child (yet another of the many forlorn Sisa figures wandering through O'Hara's films); Lena's cynicism fractured when she learns her son has landed in the same jail. Tony Aguilar's varied music score, chastely applied, highlights mood (O'Hara is a veteran radio actor and knows a thing or two about musical cuing).
O'Hara keeps the film moving briskly, the plotlines cunningly interwoven, orchestrates a royal flush of wonderful performances (can't think of a single weak actor--even TV talk show host German Moreno as an ominously wordless prison warden stands out). Nora Aunor's Angela is the lead and she's wonderful but not ostentatiously so; she enters the jail like a lamb to slaughter, only later finds her strength--and when she does only flexes that strength when necessary. Early in the film Barbie approaches Angela with Cowboy's proposal, which the latter brushes aside; Barbie threatens her with a countdown: "One. Two--" "Three," Angela finishes, eyes downcast voice firm: who is this tiny woman with the outwardly meek disposition and hidden iron will?
O'Hara keeps mostly to closeups but will cut to an overhead shot of Angela stripped naked or Cowboy tearing Viring's daughter away from her grasp. He uses corridor compositions to stress the narrowness of the women's world: a hallway wide an eternity long. When a convict stabs a prison guard in the gut she has to get past three barred doors to freedom: O'Hara's camera watches from one end of the hallway as she runs through all three, the wounded guard's gun firing each time.
O'Hara punctuates the dialogue with indelible images: the concave bowl of a spoon sticking out of a guard's spine; the convicts celebrating an escape by banging their tin plates on the bars; Angela's tearstreaked face as she sits in a pool of blood, looking up at police flashlights and begging for mercy.
Then there's Juliet's quest to see her son. She flees down the length of a metro train station; a police officer aims his handgun, fires, and suddenly Angela wakes--arguably one of the most haunting cuts in Philippine cinema. Was Angela remembering what was said about Juliet's fate? Was this Angela's nightmare recreation? Or was it a telepathic flash, the sudden sympathetic rapport across time and space between two fugitives from society?
It's not a perfect print, despite the colors and clarity: Angela's escape through a garden statuary is truncated, and we're missing the scene where she finds out she's pregnant (the film on IMDb has a running time of 1 hour 50 minutes; this copy runs for 1 hour 44 minutes, or some six minutes short).
As for the Manila Zoo manhunt (womanhunt?): critics back in 1984 ridiculed the sequence but when I ask folks about the film that's the first thing they remember. I think it's O'Hara at his most noirishly streamlined attempting something baroque and grotesque--where Angela in escaping finds herself in a primeval jungle, Manila before a city was ever established, and still she encounters chainlink fences steel doors rusted iron bars. It's an evocative metaphor, O'Hara suggesting Manila itself as a prison--has always been a prison, only with more room and greenery, its creatures just as cruelly caged; when the animals smell the scent of Angela's pain and coursing blood they shriek and roar, as if welcoming one of their own.
A word if I may about the women: on a basic level I think it worked to have women as primary protagonists in a noir melodrama-thriller--the common belief being that they're physically smaller and weaker and hence more vulnerable, particularly Nora as Angela; one of the prime pleasures of the film is in upending those notions one by one. At least it worked back in 1984; should be an archaic device today only 1) good noirs are still hard to come by and 2) good films with women in leading roles are still hard to come by (the operative word here of course being 'good').
But O'Hara's film (presumably channeling Bautista's novel) does more than put a woman in the lead role--it tells a range of women's stories, from the victimized to the empowered, even those empowered who cross one line or another. These are flawed women who can point out at least one virtue in themselves, virtuous women who hide at least one flaw inside (Angela for one suffered from ignorance and excess timidity, worked hard at overcoming both)--people in short doing the best they can with what they have against what challenges they face.
And they care. They come together. By film's end O'Hara and Bautista's prison women become a small sorority of sisters bound by their shared suffering, willing to work for a cause--in one particular case at least attend a child's baptism to stand as godmother.
What else to say? Not just one of the best films of 1984 but one of the best I've seen this year--these past several years.
First published in Businessworld 11.22.19
2 comments:
But the critics in 1984 were not as impressed. In fact they gave their nods to Sister Stella L including the best actress prize. How could they turn blind on the merits of "Bulaklak sa City Jail"???
Which is something I've said before about movie awards--I can rarely if ever believe in them as signifiers of merit. Sister Stella L is well crafted and politically daring, and Bulaklak is in a popular genre--that's what probably spoke to critics then.
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