‘Tuos’: Myth and the communal self

One of the most anticipated films in this year’s Cinemalaya is Derrick Cabrido’s Tuos, starring the one and only superstar, Nora Aunor.

It’s a beautifully shot but conceptually flawed mythopoetic film, set in the mountain fastness of central Panay, where the Karay-a-speaking Panay Bukidnon people live. The story centers around the characters of an aging binukot, the grandmother Pinailog, and her granddaughter and heir apparent, the teenaged Dowokan.

As the appointed time nears for Dowokan’s initiation into the role of their village’s binukot or “kept maiden” (the repository of their community’s ancestral knowledge), the conflict between tradition and modernity, the old and the young, comes to the fore: the boy-infatuated Dowokan wants to lead her own life, and not simply accede to the privileged but solitary existence that’s been decreed for her by the village elders. She wilfully sleeps with her boyfriend and therefore violates the pact that her people have immemorially kept with the spirits of their land, and as a consequence her grandmother needs to confront the malevolent specter that the binukot tradition has served to appease.

This is an affecting story that aspires to authenticity by, among other things, worlding itself in the haunting upland environs of the Panay Bukidnon people, and by interspersing the filmic narrative with the chanting of passages from Tikum Kadlum, the first book in the ten-book epic saga of this indigenous community, currently being published, one volume at a time, by the University of the Philippines Press. It’s this book that ostensibly inspired this film’s writers, and while it undoubtedly commends this project in all sorts of ways, perhaps this is also where its fundamental problem lies.

All the books in this epic corpus are interconnected, their characters forming genealogies that span several generations of heroes and heroines—and their adversaries. This film’s tone is fundamentally one of horror, reducing the character of the monster Makabagting to the role of a sex-starved and ravenous demon, because the price he exacts for the destruction of his sacred bamboo is the abduction of the offending datu’s children. This may have indeed been in this book’s story, but what this feature film ruinously foregoes is the crucial narrative detail that this monster takes the datu’s daughters in order to give them to his spinster and childless sister, Amburukay, who raises them as binukot in a golden tower located inside her secret forest cave.

In other words, the epic’s vision is complex, from the get go: while it recognizes duality (good and evil, for example), by blurring and “interimplicating” these opposites it may be said to ultimately yearn toward transcendence and unity. If only the writers had looked at the second book, they would have realized that, as against the outward evidence, Amburukay is far from villanous: she is actually the one who undergoes her own heroic journey (in search of a personal treasure—her golden pubic hair— that’s been stolen from her by the thieving hero, Labaw Donggon), and reveals that her motives are kind and benevolent, despite the gruesomeness of her form (and so, this vision also urges a keening away from the surface, toward depth). At the end of this book she abdicates all selfish claims and secures a good life for her two daughters—the peerless Matan-ayon and Surangga-on.

Tikum Kadlum is also not just a magical black dog who admonishes his master (the covetous Datu Paiburong) against cutting down the sacred bamboo in the middle of the enchanted forest: his role is echoed by other similar characters in the other books, for he articulates the taboo—the folkloric motif of the “one forbidden thing”—that is essential in many mythic stories, the transgression of which is inevitable because it is only through it that life’s journey can commence. In myth as in modern fiction, stasis doesn’t make for any narrative interest; a troubled paradise is the only paradise worth imagining or indeed “living” in.

Cabrido’s film also disturbingly sexualizes the monster, which is another reductionism on one hand (not everything dark and mysterious needs to be eroticized), and on the other completely overlooks the fact that there is in this world a feminine monstrous (actually, primal) principle as well, Amburukay, whose golden pubic hair embodies the pre-Christian idea of an entirely natural and precious sexuality. In the series’ second book, in her quest to recover it, she engages in an interesting ritual of humorous if slightly masochistic “self-intimacy”: she squats on a rock by the river delta and ceremoniously slaps her vulva, which is supposed to produce a certain sound in avid response if the stolen hair is indeed located somewhere up that particular waterway. It may be difficult to imagine this now, from our perspective as Christianized lowlanders, but yes, in our archipelago there was a time when sexual matters could indeed be described so openly—and funnily—in the chanted epics and tales that both carried communal wisdom and functioned as the primary means of entertainment.

Finally, there’s the matter of tuos itself—the film’s lovely title—that pertains to the “pact” or “vow” between families in this preliterate world. In the absence of scripture, this people found a way of investing memory inside actual things—worldly objects that signified beyond their physical forms, whose radiance suffused their everyday existence. This act of meaning-making was of a piece with their reverential attitude toward nature, that they knew was animated by the same Spirit dwelling inside themselves: thus, It cannot be a source of horror alone, but also of awe, rapture, gratitude, love, and all the other qualities that defined their humanity, which is coextensive with the divine.

It’s important to remember that written words are signs as well, except that they have the tendency to stand apart from creation. This isn’t the case with these natural and meaning-endowed objects, which abide fully inside their natural contexts even as they come to embody realities that refer to truths glimmering beyond their shapes.

We may therefore think of tuos as a kind of “mystical mnemonics,” for a people whose consciousness is situational, sympathetic, and participatory, rather than abstract and individualistic. It’s in this light that we can say that the binukot role is not primarily sacrificial and propitiatory (as against this film’s erroneous claim): it made sense within such a consciousness, in which the ego—if it could be said to exist at all—was always already subsumed into the collective or communal self.

While this film’s central story is indeed a compellingly modern and relatable one—Dowokan coming into her own, and refusing to sacrifice herself in the name of tradition—what would have been a more interesting and dramatic story is just how she could have been “formed” so differently, as a subject, in contrast to the rest of her family. In other words, if her grandmother had been shaped by the stories of her past, what are the stories that shaped her consciousness: Did she go to a Christian school, where she read fairy tales? Had she seen Tagalog movies, with their wide-eyed stories of love against all odds? Just how thoroughly bilingual is she, which would imply a split in her consciousness (already her dialogues are peppered with English and Hispanized words, which indicate an increasingly syncretized reality)?

And of course, literacy itself creates the individual subject, because reading/writing is a solitary experience, that repeats the self to itself, word after inwardly enounced world. Oral knowledges, on the other hand, have no real authors, and are by definition outward, communal, and performative. In several scenes we see Pinailog performing her binukot role, in earnest. While there could have been any number of dramatic ways to show Dowokan coming into her own as a modern “self,” sadly, this film barely touches on any of them.

There are so many profound implications, therefore, in any artistic project that seeks to reference and embody the richness of our country’s ethnic diversity. Cabrido’s Tuos, while falling short of its promise, nonetheless deserves to be commended for the obviously well-meaning effort. Despite the linguistic hurdles, the performances are inarguably superb: by Aunor (as expected), and by the pretty and charming Barbie Forteza, who announces herself as a major new talent with this film. The “animated” sections are likewise memorable and visually beautiful, accompanied as they are by a hauntingly chanted score—by Bayang Barrios and Banaue Miclat.

A deft directorial hand is also clearly in evidence in so many of the village scenes, including a breath-taking panoramic shot of the mountain trail, as the infirm and diminutive grandmother is poignantly carried off inside a wicker basket down from her highland home to the hospital of the nearest town, which happens to be on the coast. There, with the help of modern technology (in the light of an electric bulb), she vanquishes the shadows of the rabid monster, and conceivably releases her granddaughter from the cruel and backward “pact.”

She is also shown finally walking into the sea—an unwittingly propitious and meaningful gesture, since the Panay Bukidnon’s epic world, as distinct from their landlocked real one, mostly revolves around the ocean. This reminds us how like most other indigenous peoples in our country, they must have been coastal inhabitants once upon a time, who were displaced and driven up- and inland by successive waves of conquest and Christianization.

Of course, we’re left delightfully heartened by Cabrido’s ultimate scene, a “meta” denouement that attempts to express his work’s self-reflexivity: the animated black dog—here, the emissary between the mythic and real worlds—walks across a progressively empty screen (that’s shown to be inside a small movie theater); soon enough it walks up to kiss the hand of a man sitting near where the camera (this scene’s point of view) is perched.

The message homes marvelously in: storytelling is an unfinished human project, and cinema, like all art, aspires to the power of the loftiest story of all, which is myth. — BM, GMA News

The Cinemalaya Philippine Independent Film Festival runs until August 14, 2016. Go here for the screening schedule.