Just finished watching Mario O'Hara's "Bulaklak ng City Jail" and my god, what a royal flush of wonderful performances: Maya Valdez is villainous and comic at the same time as the prison's majordomo; Zenaida Amador is terrifically butch as the "mayora"; Gina Alajar is completely natural and without her usual mannerisms as a fellow prisoner; Perla Bautista has the "Sisa" role, a crazed mother looking for her dead child--full of pathos, yet completly under control; Maritess Gutierrez and Gloria Romero in their one scene together are heartbreaking; Celia Rodriguez--the hardened whore whose one soft spot is her wayward son--even more so.
Even the tiny roles--German Moreno as a sinister jail warden, Edwin O'Hara (who usually plays rapists) as the prison chaplain; Ricky Davao as Nor Aunor's boyfriend, the various character actors and non-actors who play guards, vendors, police officers, street people--shine.
I haven't even begun talking about the filmmaking--the precise editing, the wonderful musical cuing (never too much music, never too melodramatic), the corridor compositions, the grimly realistic lighting, the endless close-ups that save money because only very small areas are lit, yet at the same time give you a sense of intense claustrophobia--you feel from all the tight shots how this is one nightmare of an overcrowded prison.
With all this going on, you'd think Nora Aunor's performance would be lost; on the contrary, they only enhance it. In the beginning, she's only one of many colorful characters; by the film's end, she's the undoubted heroine, and the miracle is, you don't quite know how she got there. Her acting here is so quiet--the showiest moments are when the camera focuses on her eyes, and you can see the fire in them. Aunor just may be the dumbest, most unthinking actress alive--and with the way she conducts her life to date, who's to say she isn't? Yet maybe she has to be, to be so incredibly intuitive--to be able to create this kind of magic, almost as if out of nowhere. She doesn't need words, she doesn't need thoughts, she doesn't need anything--she just needs silence, and those impossibly intense eyes...