Gina: I feel more settled & less of a martyr

MANILA, Philippines - There is no way you can avoid Gina Alajar in the TV circuit.

She is the scorned wife (one of them anyway) of  a Datu in GMA 7’s epic-serye, Amaya and she figured in a remake of Pasan Ko Ang Daigdig and Machete — among others — for the same TV station.

Addressing students visiting the set of Amaya, Gina said her role was straight out of Philippine history. “I am not much of a history fan but this role gave me an idea of how Filipinos lived before the coming of the Spaniards.”

In her early 50s now, Gina is single mother of three sons who had a taste of her showbiz life. She was a child star and her adulthood came much, much later. She came face to face with life when she (re) entered the movies at age 17 and became wife and mother at age 18.

 Many years back, I recalled her facing interviewers in a talk show and answering sensitive questions.

No, she was not bothered that she was not known as a box-office star although her last starrer, The Delia Maga Story by Carlo Caparas, was a runaway box-office winner. “Yes, I am aware that theater-owners have a say on the kind of movies they would exhibit in their theaters and they usually have suggestions on the stars producers should hire to recoup their investments,” she had said. “But you can’t argue against formula movies. They make money for the producers and they are good business for theater exhibitors. However, I need not figure in those formula movies although I find myself in some of those predictable projects. But making movies is also about good craftsmanship. It is also about the fine art of acting and not always primarily about making oodles of money. In most of my movies, I sometimes sacrifice the fees I deserve to be identified with film projects you believe in.”

One such project which came her way was the Gil Portes film Mulanay, which was about a country doctor’s foray in an underdeveloped barrio.

The film title was taken from a name of a place in Bondoc Peninsula near the borders between Quezon and Bicol. The name was adopted as a working title. But stuck in that small town in an underdeveloped barrio called Patabog for more than two weeks, the director — obsessed with unique names as striking as Gallipoli — decided to make it the title of his output.

But for Gina, the sojourn to Mulanay town, which took more than three hours by land and another 30 minutes by boat 15 years ago, was like a trip to eternity. “I took a nap thrice on the road and we’re still not there,” related Gina. “When we finally took the boat ride, nobody knew what time we would get to the barrio.”

But Mulanay was not just the title of the film she was doing; Mulanay was also an education.

In this barrio, one dispensed with one’s customary comforts of the city: There wasn’t enough power to keep the movie cameras going; supply of ice didn’t last because owing to its limited supply, it was consumed quickly by the inhabitants.

As for entertainment, the videos were making good business. A boy with a back-to-back placard (“Now Showing” on one side and “Coming Soon” on the other side) roamed the barrio like the proverbial town crier and come early evening, houses of video-owners enjoyed SRO crowds in their living room.

For the first time in her life, Gina and her co-star Jaclyn Jose did not get those familiar stare movie stars were wont to get in the big city.

Indeed, this was one place where McDonald’s and Jollibee would not dare give a franchise right, where SM would not dare build a shopping center extension. It was a place strange to the Internet. It was a barrio where the young migrate and never come back, a place where there was a small thin line between piety and politics exemplified by those church-going sinners in Brocka’s Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kulang.

Nevertheless, this barrio in the outskirts of Mulanay could pass for the setting of Ishmael Bernal’s Nunal Sa Tubig, where love, lust and liberation mixed with various dosage of the dominant social ill called poverty.

Director Portes pointed out the barrio was part of Bondoc Peninsula but owing to its present depressing economic state, it was also known as Bondoc Pininsala (literally Ruined Mountain). The director recalled waking up early morning to take a walk only to find some barrio folks relieving themselves on covered footpaths.

Could Gina relate to such a place, which was the setting of one of her very substantial film outputs?

She certainly could, she had said. “I grew up in a small house where bathrooms were not luxurious by today’s standards. But if ever there was a lesson I’d learned shooting that movie, it was the fact that you couldn’t have comforts all the time and that you have to appreciate what you have.”

Once upon such an encounter, Gina reflected on her art and life with some detachment.

She bagged her first film assignment at age eight in the movie called Ang Kaibigan Kong Santo Niño where she had to slug it out with more than a thousand contenders for one of only four children’s roles.

Guts was what she had at that time. Among the child actor-hopefuls who came to audition, they would later be scraped down to 500, then 250 and suddenly there were only 10 of them.

In the last round, she was made to imagine a letter-opener as fried chicken and — showing her brand of acting at that desperate time — she actually chewed the object to make the acting realistic.

“When any of my old movies are shown on television,” she said, “I cringe at my awkwardness. Was it a scene from Little Brown Girl that I actually embraced real fried chicken dripping with oil just because I didn’t know what to do with my hands?”

Reviewing her years in the movies, she classified her acting stages into the child actress years, the teenage (awkward) period and the passable (refined) stage.

“I liked to think that I became a better actress after motherhood,” she once pointed out.

It was an understatement because she had bagged more than 14 awards when she said that 15 years ago.

She garnered two trophies as a child star: One for Ang Kaibigan Kong Sto. Niño (FAMAS) and Wanted: Perfect Mother (CMMA). She bagged three Best Actress awards from Urian (Brutal, Salome and Kapit sa Patalim) and one each from CMMA (Andrea) and Metro Manila Film Festival (Shake, Rattle & Roll). The last came from the Film Academy of the Philippines (Kaya Kong Abutin ang Langit) and one each from Urian, CMMA and FAMAS (all for Biktima).

She was the struggling singer Kathy in Moral, the guilt-ridden Cynthia in Brutal by Marilou Diaz-Abaya or the unforgettable child-woman in Salome directed by Laurice Guillen. Lino Brocka farther honed her acting prowess when he got her as the dissident’s wife in Orapronobis and an ill-fated worker’s wife in Kapit Sa Patalim all of which made waves in film fests abroad.

Here are her impressions of unforgettable roles:

“It was impossible to forget my part in Brutal. That sodomy scene in Salome was something else again and that murder scene in Kapit Sa Patalim. Also that suicide scene from Gil Portes’ Bukas May Pangarap where I went through the ritual of closing the windows before I ended my life.”

Cineastes, who would think thrice before watching Caparas films even for curiosity, reportedly sneaked into the movie theaters to watch Gina essay the role of the ill-fated Delia Maga who suffered the fate of Flor Contemplacion.

Like it or not, Gina has played a broad range of film roles that defined the most bizarre, the most violent, the most erotic and on one hand and in the case of her role as the midwife in Mulanay — the brave and the noble in human existence.

When she was just starting, Gina admitted she took to her parts mainly by intuition. “Those were my intuitive acting years,” she pointed out.

When she tried the acting workshop, she realized she did not have to drain herself emotionally to get the same result. “The workshop taught me the basic acting technique because not all the time you could cry or get angry with the same intensity that the director was wont to demand from you. If I were asked to cry, I thought of the sad things, which happened to me. But if you run out of things to dig from within you, I think of my favorite songs to stimulate my emotions. I need to relax before a take. But first and foremost, you have to master the tools of acting because simple intuition isn’t enough.”

But to Gina, there was nothing like being handled by first-rate directors.

From directors, she expected them to be in control and patient at the same time. On the set, she wants to finish taxing parts with a certain feel of lightness on the set. She could not forget the late Brocka who would make her laugh in between takes of the massacre scene in Orapronobis and Kapit sa Patalim.

Portes, who directed her in Andrea and Birds of Prey — among others — was one person she could  work with in all levels.

“Gil knew me inside out. He knew that I hardly complain and with that movie set in this forsaken barrio depicted in Mulanay, the least trouble that he needed were superstars demanding luxury treatment in depressed areas.”

She was also in awe of other directors who handled her. “Lino taught me how to act straight from the heart; Laurice taught me how to make the most of my body as an acting instrument and Marilou taught me the value of spontaneous acting by constant rehearsals, how to make the memorized lines come naturally. I credit all of them for what I am now. That they trusted me with those sensitive roles was something I would always remember regardless of how the films fared at the box-office.”

Even if well-made films did not always translate into box-office triumphs, she remembered those films for something that they had imparted to the moviegoers.

She had pointed out in the past. “I am proud of Orapronobis, Kapit Sa Patalim, Salome, Moral and Brutal because I find joy in being part of a film that gave us all a lesson. I watch other good pictures to pick up something and be compelled to think — regardless of whether they are about love, friendship or family relationship. I like a film if it gives me something I can adapt to my own life. I do not dislike a film just because I disagree with its message. I also watch film to see other people’s point of view.”

They had said that Gina’s private life — with her own share of stormy and tempestuous love and married life with real-life, ex-husband Michael de Mesa along with her rise and fall and rise in showbiz — would make a good film but that is beside the point.

Emerging stronger and the wiser for whatever it was that took place in the past, Gina — mother, wife and actress — knew her place in the sun and will not balk from the challenge.

She reflected once: “With every film and TV assignment, you learn a lot. The Gina Alajar then and now? Well, for one I’ve grown older. But as you go along, you learn to appreciate what comes your way. At this phase of my life, hindi na ako masyadong mapaghanap. That probably explains why I feel more settled and feel less of a martyr. Coping with life is one real-life role that I feel I was able to essay very well, thanks to the Lord who I think is the ultimate director for all time.”