Bilangin ang Bituin sa Langit (Regal Films, Inc., 1989) has a lush yet aching beauty that seems to saturate as you watch it. I’m not just talking about visual beauty. I’m speaking of dramatic beauty, the exquisite moment-to-moment tension of characters who reveal themselves layer by layer, flowing from thought to feeling and back again, until thought and feeling become drama. Director Elwood Perez made a rare movie that evokes not just the essence of a great Filipino melodrama, but the experience of it. We are also enveloped, at every turn, in the hidden pulse of his characters’ motivating passions.
The union of art and sensation, intellect and feeling, mass appeal and aesthetic refinement is something the movies are uniquely able to promise and occasionally, when a filmmaker possesses the right mixture of calculation and compassion, able to deliver. Perez is fiercely devoted to his actors. From the moment you see her here, Nora Aunor exudes a new, womanly radiance. As Magnolia de la Cruz, Aunor does full justice to a heroine who loves deeply and helplessly. Tirso Cruz III delivers a beautiful nuanced performance. He seemed a tad opaque in the opening scenes, but peels back the layers of his character as the film progresses.
In Bilangin ang Bituin sa Langit, Ricardo Jacinto, in a glorious demonstration of all that cinematography can be, floods the screen with color. Lutgardo Labad's score punctuates key moments with expert precision, complimenting the tone of the characters’ voices and the traumas written on their faces. By observing and even, to some extent, exaggerating, Perez gives the film an emotional impact that could not have been achieved by conventionally realistic means. And this, in effect, is what Bilangin ang Bituin sa Langit accomplishes for its characters. It rediscovers the aching, desiring humanity in a genre too often subjected to easy parody or ironic appropriation. Elwood Perez has given us a compelling love-letter to cinema itself.