Nora Aunor: Filipina Superstar

Still a major player in Filipino television and film at seventy-one, Aunor was born into poverty—as a child, she sold bottled water at train stations—but hit it big in her teens as a singer, and from 1967 to 1989, she hosted Superstar, a weekly prime-time musical variety show. Aunor was “the first Filipina actress with brown skin and small stature to become a movie star,” notes Vera, and she has been beloved all these years “for playing countryside maidens, domestic helpers, laundry women, water carriers—humble figures her millions of fans could identify with, and whose eventual rise to fame and fortune they could celebrate.”

On Friday, filmmaker Isabel Sandoval (Lingua Franca) will be at New York’s Metrograph to introduce the new restoration of Bona that premiered in Cannes, screened at the New York Film Festival, and screens once more this Friday in Toronto. Metrograph is pairing Bona with Lupita Aquino-Kashiwahara’s Once a Moth (1976), and the two-film miniseries Nora Aunor: Filipina Superstar will run well into next week.

Aunor was in her late twenties when she played—with riveting conviction—Bona, a teen who skips classes and eventually drops out of high school to bring sodas and sandwiches to Gordo (Brocka regular Phillip Salvador), a bit player in cheap movies who once answered one of her fan letters with a glossy, autographed eight-by-ten. Bona hangs around sets where Gordo begs for walk-on parts, and in time, she leaves her middle-class family for Gordo’s tumbledown house in the slums of Manila.

Gordo hardly notices. A spoiled man-child, he has Bona scrubbing his floors, cooking his meals, and heating his baths before he heads out to drink and dance and then return in the wee hours with his latest hook-up. Bona’s willful subservience to this lout is a mystery to her friends and family, and her father seems to think he can beat it out of her. Bona is often read as a blunt indictment of male bravado, and it is, but it’s also a disquieting study of cinema’s power to mesmerize.

The point is driven beyond Bona’s devotion to Gordo. Both Noel Vera and Oggs Cruz point out that in the breathtaking opening sequence, Bona is first spotted among an ocean of bobbing heads throbbing around a dark wooden statue of Jesus during Manila’s annual Feast of the Black Nazarene. Bona is, as Cruz puts it, “sandwiched” between the religiously devout and the towering movie-theater marquees lining the streets, making explicit the parallel between faith and fandom.

In another scene, one that might be mistaken for a throwaway, a cluster of slum dwellers gathers on a muddy street, enthralled by an American movie flickering on a tiny television screen—in color, too, as someone murmurs. One woman shoos away her husband when he approaches with the baby she’s been neglecting. “It’s almost over,” she snaps, but he dumps the infant in her arms and leaves. She stands there, ignoring the heavy lump she holds while staring straight ahead into the narrow tunnel of faint light.

In Once a Moth, Aunor plays Cora, a young nurse preparing to leave her middle-class home for the U.S. It’s the summer of 1969, and Cora’s plans are big news in her village, warranting a big party and a respectable mention in the local newspaper. Cora and her boyfriend (Jay Ilagan) are hoping he’ll be able to join her once he lands a gig with the U.S. Navy.

The village is located near the Clark Air Base in Pampanga, and in the very first scene, young boys scramble in the forbidden fields over which U.S. fighter jets practice diving and strafing. The boys are looking for bullet casings and scrap metal to sell when three of them are mown down. Aquino-Kashiwahara’s fury at American recklessness and disregard for Filipino life is palpable, and while Once a Moth is hardly subtle, it’s infuriatingly effective.

Toward the end, as Cora’s family gathers in their living room in the wake of a tragedy that’s struck too close to home, the television carries live Neil Armstrong’s first step off the Apollo Lunar Module. Speaking to no one in particular, Cora’s grandfather asks, “Do they also own the Moon?”