Nida Blanca
What made her such a memorable, wonderful actress? Her smile, which was unique; it had a queer twist to one side, as if it wanted to become a sneer, something worthy of a femme fatale like Barbara Stanwyck in a noir thriller. It didn’t, not quite; it was accompanied by a pair of eyes that could open wide in surprise and wonder, or narrow into an intense, laser-beam stare. The problem with those eyes--or the glory of them, whichever way you saw it--was the twinkle you saw in them; it was a twinkle that told you she was only kidding, that the almost-sneer is just a put-on, that the tough-girl image is merely a façade to defend herself from a very tough world.
That twinkle--so impish, so full of mischief--set the tone for most of Blanca’s performances, I think. It let you in on the joke, made you an intimate accomplice to her secret world of feisty tomboys, comely Visayan lasses, light-footed comediennes. You weren’t looking up at her from below; you were up there on the big screen beside her, dancing with her, laughing with her, exchanging witty wisecracks that made the world--and the two of you--fall in love.
Even towards the end she made you laugh--in Tikoy Aguiluz’s “Biyaheng Langit” (Paradise Express, 2000), she was Joyce Jimenez’s grandmother, and is scolded for her gambling addiction. Blanca’s reply went something like this: “please understand, this is the only pleasure left to me since my husband (in the film) died…anyway, life itself is gamble; who am I to deny otherwise?” Aguiluz himself takes a small gamble in casting Blanca, known for her wholesome image, in an erotic thriller. It’s a gamble that pays off--even as grandmother, Blanca’s smile and twinkle come into play; you can see that this is a grandmother capable of fun, a grandmother capable of mischief, a grandmother perfectly capable, despite her gentleness and well-meaning, of getting her granddaughter into deep trouble.
But if her comedies made us laugh and fall in love, her dramas also moved us. In Lino Brocka’s “Miguelito” she was the mother of Aga Muhlach, who played the title role. The film is really Muhlach’s: he spends the most time onscreen, he is the focus of the story, and he is the one required to react dramatically to the news that he is a bastard son of one of his father’s mistresses. It’s not a successful performance, I think; Muhlach flails all over the place when he means to be intense, acts remote when he means to look openly vulnerable. He was too raw, too unrefined at the time (despite all of Brocka’s reputed skill with first-time performers) to capture the growing insecurity and angst of an upper-class adolescent who learns that he isn’t one after all.
But Blanca was perfect--quiet and understated, she played a woman cruelly shoved aside to avoid scandal, a woman who meekly accepted her role as non-entity in the life of her son for the sake of the boy’s future.
Then the unthinkable happens. Miguelito has learned of his bastard origins and has sought her out, coming to her humble shack just when she is preparing dinner. She turns and there he is: the one person on earth she wants to see the most, the one person on earth she never wants to see--because if she does it means Miguelito knows the entire sordid, scandalous truth.
In any lesser drama, Blanca would have brought down the roof with a fireworks display of tears and hysterical screaming; instead, she goes on preparing dinner, the trembling in her voice and hands being the only sign of her agitation. She’s kept her love and feelings to herself for all these years, her calmness seems to tell us; why should she crack now?
In Jeffrey Jeturian and Amando Lao’s “Sana Pag-Ibig Na” (If Only This Were Love, 1998), Blanca plays Gerald Madrid’s mother, an otherwise happy, contented creature until her husband dies, and she learns that he had a mistress.
The focus again is elsewhere, on Gerald Madrid as a young boy who meets his dead father’s mistress and befriends her. It’s a tiny little drama, well-written and acted, rather small-scale and careful. What lifts it above the run-of-the-mill television drama is Amando Lao’s cleverly structured plot and gift for characterization and--again--Nida Blanca.
Blanca acts--and Jeturian directs her--as if she’s never seen a drama before where the wife learns of her husband’s infidelity: Blanca’s anger here is fresh, raw, intense. More, Blanca (and Jeturian in casting her) seems to bring into her anger not just the sense of a wife and mother betrayed; she also brings into her anger the sense that this is NIDA BLANCA being betrayed. This is the beloved Waray girl, the feisty, tomboyish galwagaw (wacko), the mischievous, fleet-footed comedienne who danced into everyone’s hearts so long ago--and continues to do so now. She does the betraying, if anyone does; she’s the one who breaks hearts, if anyone. What made him do this to her? What made him choose a younger beautiful woman? Can’t he see how young she still is inside--how beautiful still? How can he be so blind?
Blanca’s anger ultimately suggests a woman’s anger at the ravages of time, at the process that puts lines in one’s face and spots on one’s hands and pain in one’s back so that the body bends closer to the ground--closer to the grave itself. Blanca doesn’t just rage at her husband’s betrayal; she rages at the process of aging and corruption and ultimately, at death.
