The Miracle Of MILAGROS

Milagros

Marilou Diaz Abaya's Milagros (Merdeka Film Productions, Inc.) is an intelligent and meticulously directed film, with outstanding individual performances by a sensitive but restrained cast, and a wealth of production values seldom seen in Filipino movies. Admittedly, it is difficult to thoroughly understand and enjoy the film, especially if one comes to it with set expectations picked up from the usual film genres to which Filipino moviegoers have been exposed. The most outstanding character of the film after all, is its refusal to provide the conventionalized subject matter and techniques canonized by years of unexamined practice by a parochial film industry. The name Milagros is an allusion to the 1982 Ishmael Bernal classic Himala, where a young woman turned miracle-maker is killed by a gunshot that is never explained in the narrative. Milagros, as her name suggests brings about miracles when she moves in with a family in the small town where Cirilo (Ramon Reyes), the father she never really knew died, leaving debts that had to be paid somehow. Like Bernal's miracle-maker, Milagros also dies from a gunshot, a miracle-maker who could not heal herself. What she is able to do is push the four men and the two women whose lives she touches to an awareness of themselves and their relationships to other people. Lagring's trek up the slope of Mount Banahaw is both her Way of the Cross and her Transfiguration.

Is Milagros then a religious allegory? The emphatic answer is no. The film refuses to yield a coherent religious theme, at the same time that it resists the realist verdict that here is a hedonistic tale, ineptly told, about a girl who has no compunctions in shacking up with an entire family of males. For the narrative is discontinuous in spite of the presence of carefully delineated characters, each of them fully individuated in the performance by an outstanding ensemble of actors composed of Dante Rivero as Mang Nano, Joel Torre as Junie, Noni Buencamino as Ramonito, Raymond Bagatsing as Bennet, Elizabeth Oropesa as Miding and Mia Gutierrez as Arlene, Junie's humorous and affectionately drawn wife. The pleasure of observing these characters and projecting into their lives would seem to insist that individual lives be strung up with a theme or moral lesson but Rolando Tinio's screenplay resolutely resists it, giving instead a decentered narrative. Diaz-Abaya's intentions about the telling of Milagros' story are clarified by her handling of Sharmaine Arnaiz's performance in the title role. Arnaiz projects a young woman utterly guileless and almost incredibly listless, thereby disabusing suspicions that we are confronted with a congenitally immoral woman, or worse, with a nymphomaniac. The character being presented is one we have not yet encountered in any other Filipino movie. Diaz-Abaya and Tinio invited us to regard Milagros as an otherworldly woman, with Arnaiz's beauteous candid face projecting an angelic woman who gives herself to men, without lust and without reservation. When she offered her very life to pay back what her father owed, and that her single memory was the man's promise of taking her up to Mount Banahaw to wait for a UFO, we begin to divine in Lagring, a Christ-figure who would have us ponder flesh and spirituality, and guilt and transcendence.

Directed By: Marilou Diaz-Abaya
Screenplay By: Rolando S. Tinio
Director Of Photography: Eduardo "Totoy" Jacinto
Musical Director: Nonong Buencamino
Film Editor: Jess Navarro
Production Design: Len Santos
Produced By: Merdeka Film Productions, Inc.
Release Date: April 9, 1997