The enduring appeal of Maruja

MANILA, Philippines - When Heart Evangelista, yet sans a wedding ring in her finger, proclaimed  (for all the world to know) on Startalk, that nothing can ever separate her from her senator paramour. Is she tempting fate? And when she pitched her birthday message to her estranged family “wherever you are,” I felt a stab of pain.

What is it with youthful love that makes one restless, reckless and resolute to the point of throwing prudence and piety to the four winds? And this made me remember one of the greatest love stories ever told in Philippine comics, which generated three films and a television series, that of Maruja and her beloved, Gabriel.

Maruja, first published in Pilipino Komiks in 1966, is considered one of Mars Ravelo’s masterpieces. It had a very ancient storyline of star-crossed lovers with meddling parents complicating their romance, as in the famous legend of Pyramus and Thisbe from Ovid’s Metamorphosis. Here, Maruja Isabella Sevilla was the daughter of landed gentry, who fell in love with the son of a cochero. Her parents forced her to marry Rodrigo, captain of the guardia civil, but on the eve of the wedding, she committed suicide.

In 1967, our grandmother took my ate and me to the decrepit Vilrey theater (later razed to the ground by a fire) in Calumpit to see the first Maruja film from Lea Productions, directed by Armando de Guzman, starring the Queen of Philippine Movies, Susan Roces, opposite the very handsome Romeo Vasquez, who later married the other queen, the feisty Amalia Fuentes. The film closely followed the plot by Ravelo, who personally chose Susan for the role. She was nominated for her performance in the movie for the FAMAS Awards, but unfortunately lost to Marlene Dauden for her performance in Kapag Puso’y Sinugatan.

The movie was remade a decade later in 1978 by FPJ Productions, with the title Gumising Ka Maruja, megged by the great late Lino Brocka, topbilling Susan again, but this time, with the director’s favorite leading actor, Phillip Salvador. Still pegged on the theme of timeless love, Susan reprised her role of Maruja, and her reincarnation, Nina Concepcion, a movie producer, who bought the mansion where Maruja died in 1890 (the Lacson ancestral home in Bacolod City), which was haunted by lost souls, including Maruja’s mother, played again (as in the first film) by the great Mary Walter.

The funeral scene shot in torrential rain with spectral silhouettes in black gowns and umbrellas was a tribute to the production designer, Mel Chionglo and art director Don Escudero. To this date, the creepy crescendo of the foreboding whisper, “sa libingan, sa libingan…” with Ernani Cuenco’s musical scoring, still haunts me. This time, Susan won the Best Actress trophy of the 1979 FAMAS for her dual role as Maruja and Nina.

After almost two decades, Maruja was once again resurrected by Viva Films in 1996, directed by Jose Javier Reyes, starring the then popular love team of Carmina Villarroel and Rustom Padilla, who later got married, and all too soon, separated. Maruja and Gabriel were both reincarnated, but to add zest to the story, the lovers’ souls were doomed to suffer another century if they would not be reunited in the nick of time. Since Rustom has reassigned his gender, as BB Gandanghari, will he consent to another remake, this time, doing the role of Maruja? And if Zoren Legaspi will be his Gabiel, then this will really be for the books.

In 2007, the giant network ABS-CBN bought the rights to make Maruja into a TV series, and  released Nasaan Ka Maruja? The storyline of this Saturday afternoon soap still hewed to the concept of reincarnation: Maruja and Gabriel were reborn as Cristy and Ross (played by Kristine Hermosa and Derek Ramsay).

Two years from now, the immortal Maruja story will be celebrating its golden year. There is ample time for writers and moviemakers to revisit this tragedy and give it a new lease and further twist. After all, the phenomenal Twilight saga, a series of four vampire-themed fantasy romance novels about another Isabella (Bella Swan) by American author Stephenie Meyer was inspired and loosely based on classics like Austen’s Pride and Prejudice; Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet; Bronte’s Wuthering Heights; and Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables.

Youth tempting fate and defying time through the vast universe in the name of love will always be here to make every day Valentine’s.