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Kuwento ni Mabuti's trailer opens with geography, a mountain range
shrouded in mist, those spiritual peaks that lock the rarely seen heart of
Luzon. Nueva Vizcaya is a landscape somewhat different from the southern
origins of its lead actress Nora Aunor who was born in volcanic Iriga
surrounded by lakes. What does Aunor make of filmmaker Mes de Guzman's part of
the world?
Playing the role of a poor, good-natured Ilocano
folk healer, one of Aunor's tasks is simple and telling. Her portly figure
treads through dry shrubs and cuts through tangles of vine. She stops where the
water trickles, blows one end of a long rubber tube and places it under a
shallow stream. In a province threatened by the unrelenting onslaught of armed
conflict, illegal logging, mining and dam projects, will water run upstream and
reach home?
These mountains contain and define Mabuti's
world and we are almost certain that she will breath her last here, even as her
children opt to do business in town or leave for Dubai in desperation. When she
leaves the trail and makes a trip to town, her world is jolted. The killing of
a rebel in a military checkpoint thrusts a bag of cash into her hands. What
would she do with all that money? Who should have it? We can all diverge on
what we would do if fate finds us in a similar situation, but what haunts
Mabuti? And how is she haunted? The last questions are important because it
unveils the seat of a hinterland's conscience, etched in Aunor's performance,
an artist's marvelous and earnest response to the abode of the spirits, the dry
wind and the dark clouds. Beyond the question of what is right and what is
wrong is a hidden worldview that is less understood and yet speaks to our
modern times.
Ilocano folk healers are specialists. There are
those who specialize in gynecological folk treatment, sprains and dislocations,
and then there are the privileged few with supernatural powers who cure snake
and dog bites. Called "mannuma," they channel the spirits through a
stone, accurately depicted in the film, which tells how far the venom has
traveled in the bloodstream. Mabuti's sanctuary after all is not completely
verdant; the hills are mostly denuded and the people not all that free from
toxicity. For one, we are suspicious of the village captain and all that
maddening coin-counting in his office. Civilians are caught between an armed
conflict. There is indolence. And dogbites. And then there is death. And more
dogbites. Mabuti, like all mannumas, can never charge payment and can only
accept tokens and gifts. And so what to do with this bag of cash? In a nation
rocked by war and corruption, what money does to Mabuti and what she does with
it can provide a critical if not interesting parable to our times.
De Guzman's tale, like Diablo
and Of Skies and Earth, is once again
grounded in masterful folk telling and local knowledge. It is charged with
mystery and yet carefully paced. What I love about Mes de Guzman's body of
work, all set in Nueva Vizcaya, is how, in exploring moral questions, he
combines the timeless to the temporal, the sacred to the secular, the heavenly
to the mundane (Mabuti's grand-daughter is named Kate Winslett). It is a
perfect material for world-class actress Nora Aunor whose flowing career has
taken the qualities of a river. From the sand dunes of Ilocos to the
water-borne Badjaos of Tawi-Tawi, she is the complete vessel that transports us
through our diverse landscapes and languages, the unseen realms of marginalized
voices. In Mabuti, the actress does
not hide the real scars on her throat that has silenced her singing voice. And
it is with this shared silence that she gathers us all to experience a quiet
understanding of ourselves. You touch the river of her body of work and you
touch the mystery of distance and source. From waters to spiritual peaks, what
more can you ask from a people's artist?
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