Bakit Bughaw ang Langit? (Why is the Sky Blue?, Mario O'Hara, 1981)

The court of public opinion

Mario O'Hara's Bakit Bughaw ang Langit? (Why is the Sky Blue? 1981) opens with panoramic views of Manila. We see Babette Gomez (Nora Aunor) and her family arrive at an apartment complex; movers unload furniture carry it into their new home. O'Hara's camera watches as the family settles in and we come to know each member-- imperious Sofia (Anita Linda) presiding over the operation; sullen Nardo (Mario Escudero) carrying out his wife's orders; beautiful Lorie who barks like her mother, but at a lesser volume; quiet Babette-- their other daughter-- skittering about doing as much of the heavy lifting as the movers.

We meet the neighbors: Marta (Melly Mallari), owner of the "sari-sari" (grocery) store at the complex entrance; Cora (Alicia Alonzo) and her unemployed husband Domeng (Rene Hawkins); Luring (Metring David) with a sideline selling clothes and her son Bobby (Dennis Roldan). Only courtly old Mang Jesus (Carpi Asturias) seems to notice Babette; they talk of the tiny cacti she's raising, and she notes (without any irony) that succulents flourish on very little care and water. Luring offers Sofia clothes and her life's story-- she's raising Bobby on her own and needs to watch him all the time because he can't care for or defend himself (he's a young adult with the mind of a child) so she can't go out to earn a living. Sofia makes a proposal: instead of paying for the clothes, maybe Babette can come feed Bobby while Luring is gone.

And so Babette finds herself with a plate of food at Luring's door looking in (you think of little girls in fairy tales peering into dark dens, wondering at the silence). She finds Bobby upstairs, chained, sets the food before him; he hunches over the plate, eating with his fingers. Later, Babette asks Bobby for his basketball-- to clean it, she explains; Bobby hands the ball over after some hesitation. For the first time O'Hara cuts to a closeup-- of Babette's face then of Bobby's (before this the picture has been all long and medium shots). They have somehow connected.

I sketched the first third to give an idea of how patiently O'Hara develops his premise, builds on detail after detail, uses a self-effacing near-invisible style until before you know it an entire microcosm is laid out before you, the desires needs ambitions failures of its inhabitants glittering like so many constellations. This is Filipino drama at its most understated, where the yells shrieks chatter fade into the background and the bond between shy Babette and childlike Bobby assumes center stage with minimum fuss. You could easily imagine the story included in Dekalog, Krzysztof Kieslowski's ten-part housing development drama, only the characters speak Tagalog and the script (by Lydia Collantes Villegas and O'Hara) doesn't resort to the ironic twists or metaphysical in-jokes of Kieslowski's masterwork-- life taken straight, no chaser.

Bakit Bughaw doesn't have the overwhelming immediacy the stench of street gutters found in perhaps the greatest Filipino film on urban realism, Lino Brocka's Maynila sa Mga Kuko ng Liwanag (Manila in the Claws of Neon, 1975), but does have a look consistent with its theme and sensibility. Almost the entire film takes place inside the complex, rows of buildings round a central courtyard; O'Hara makes you feel the massive scale, the way the buildings dominate their inhabitants. With Jose Batac, Jr. (who did Brocka's Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kulang (You Were Weighed and Found Wanting, 1974) as cinematographer, O'Hara achieves a kind of visual bleakness, an unspectacular glow seeping not from sunlight but from naked fluorescent tubes or brute arc lamps. O'Hara filters this light through barred windows and bounces it off concrete walls, giving you little sense of greenery or open space; the impression is of claustrophobic enclosure-- of a prison you enter through a darkened hallway, guarded on one side by Marta's "sari-sari" store (it's a measure of O'Hara's mastery of space that you eventually have an idea of the complex's layout). When at one point Bobby evades Babette and runs out into the outside world it's as if he's attempting  escape; Babette chases him down like a convict after a fellow convict-- she's afraid of reprisals. When she does find him, their laughter comes as a surprise, a spontaneous response to the absurdity of their shared situation.

Not just the prison metaphor; once in a while the community holds a 'court of public opinion,' where a quarrel or scandal spills out of one apartment and everyone gathers around to enjoy the spectacle. When, say, Cora screams at Domeng for bringing home his mistress, or when a serial rapist claims a new victim and the men blame hapless Bobby, the people surround the grappling combatants yelling their opinions at full volume. The case is worked out to everyone's satisfaction (the winners brag, the losers put blame elsewhere-- in Cora's case, on the mistress), the parties suffer identical penalties: insults, laughter, utter humiliation.

Then there's O'Hara's direction, the way he handles drama in a more visual way compared to say friend and mentor Lino Brocka. Late in the film Babette and Sofia quarrel, and the camera follows Babette to the stairs. Sofia has already disappeared into the second floor which should be the end of matters but Babette had to add one more thing, and Sofia comes roaring back down furious, the camera rushing up close in anticipation of what's about to happen.

Then cut. Sofia's hand whips across Babette's face, the edit emphasizing the suddenness of Sofia's act-- as if we had blinked and just in time caught the escalation in violence, framed to fully appreciate the trajectory of Sofia's open palm from one end of the screen to another.

Mother and daughter exchange more words and it's conventional shot/reverse shot editing, only O'Hara frames the image so that the handrail angles towards or away from one woman or the other like an aimed gun barrel, suggesting (parodying?) the duel of words.

Finally, hair pulling. Which spills out into the streets. Which gives O'Hara a chance to catch all in a long shot, establish the larger arena on which the battle is now fought, with neighbors gathering. Again the conventional shot-reverse shot, only so crisply done you can't help but laugh when a neighbor sticks his head in the apartment door pulls it right back out and yells "she's got a knife!" O'Hara's editing delivers a punchline even with nothing overtly funny said-- basically O'Hara's humor at play, his observation that even in moments of high drama you'll find grotesque comic touches. We're seeing not two masters onscreen but three: Nora Aunor and Anita Linda working off each other, and Mario's camera underlining the escalation between the two, only to boil over into chaos.

Against this teeming background Bobby and Babette draw close. We've seen the tentative origins of their relationship-- affection growing out of Bobby's need for a surrogate mother and Babette's need to pour love over something other than cacti-- we're aware of what the neighbors are like, and flinch at the prospect of their eventual exposure. A hairdresser accuses Babette of caring for handsome Bobby because she can't find a man otherwise; Marta's no-good son is attracted to Babette, jealous of Bobby. Even we wonder: is Babette thinking of taking advantage? Would it be wrong if Bobby responded?

O'Hara handles matters with delicacy knowing that a misstep could lead to bathos or worse. He's helped by a terrific cast (Anita Linda, Metring David, Mario Escudero to name but a few), most of all by Aunor and Roldan.  O'Hara considers Roldan the finest Filipino actor alive; in this picture you see why. He has a freshness and modesty impossible to fake, a rapport with the audience that keeps them on his side no matter what (when Babette orders him to strip and he pulls his shorts off, the scene is made funnier by the fact that he clearly has no idea what his nakedness is doing to Babette).

Aunor by this time has been called one of the Philippines' finest actors in far showier performances. In Bakit Bughaw, she takes her archetypal role-- the oppressed, darkskinned little Filipina-- and plays it with a startling lack of self-consciousness as if inventing the character on the spot (which if you've seen Ikaw ay Akin (You're Mine, 1978), Fe, Esperanza, Caridad (1975) and Ina Ka ng Anak Mo (You're Mother to Your Son, 1979) you know isn't true). Aunor matches O'Hara's immense patience, gathering detail until her character feels as believable as any real person-- is more believable because her artistry evokes more than any mere sum of parts. You feel as if you knew someone like this, that this was perhaps based on (for all you know) your next-door neighbor (which is one of O'Hara's secrets-- that his characters are always based on someone he knew or met in one of his daily walks about Manila). This film, of which there is officially no print left in existence, is one of Aunor's finest performances, one of O'Hara's best works, and one of the great unknown-- perhaps forever lost-- treasures of Philippine cinema.

(First appeared in the now-defunct Criticine website, 8.28.11; edited 4.20.24)