TINIMBANG KA NGUNIT KULANG (Lino Brocka, 1974)

Taking its cue from a firm and unforgiving biblical adage about final reckoning, Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kulang depicts hypocrisy and false piety -- sometimes in solemn tones, sometimes in not-so-serious satire -- within a small provincial town in the middle of 1970s. Set in San Ignacio, Nueva Ecija, a fictional but no less actual town, the worst of human excesses and weaknesses bubbles just beneath the surface of specious religious trappings. We see the womenfolk in their mantillas rise and fall to the directions of the priest, their lips prayerful and their faces expressive of ardour, but cut to their homes and headquarters, we find them practicing a perverse kind of Christianity, one that is caught up in sheer appearances alone. For every religious occasion observed by the camera, there seems a scathing equivalent of incriminating excess.

For each funeral on display, the deceased about to be lowered into the grave, there is a rather comical scramble for a photo opportunity. For each mass on Sunday, menfolk gather outside the church in a huddle, boasting about their skirt-chasing, womanizing and sexual exploits. (It is all out in the open that the youths form a funnily similar gaggle of their own, with nascent braggadocio, taking after their fathers). For every wake, there is a beehive of gossip among those who style themselves as the town’s religious (The Association of Christian Works), while everyone else gathers in a boisterous gaggle, playing chess and bingo and gambling, drinking and toying with the village idiot. It is easy to recognize them as an ensemble character of sorts.

Working in tandem with scriptwriter Mario O’Hara, a collaborator for several films by then, director Lino Brocka constructs a seemingly damning but ultimately hopeful moral fable about a Filipino town that may not be too far removed from a contemporary one more than thirty years later. Against these worldly corruptions emerge unlikely characters who may hold out hope for recuperation and redemption: Junior, the teenage son of a wealthy family whose name may suggest the legacy of his sinful forebears; Kuala, the village fool whose bitter and painful past explains her lunacy; and Berto, the leper who lives unwillingly exiled in the margins of society. 

At 35 years old, Brocka accomplishes what we see in retrospect as his first masterpiece in only his fifth film, displaying self-assured direction and instinctive eye for detail. With the contrasts between goodness and depravity, he seamlessly combines lyrical passages, often those that contain Junior, Berto and Kuala, with compositions brimful of chaotic characters that he reserves his satirical barbs for. We see here the incipient touches of a social commentator that would treble years later. What is astonishingly surprising, Brocka’s greatest accomplishment in this film, however, is that he pulls off an adroit juggling act detailing each of his varied characters.

Plaudits must go to the perfectly-cast performers foregrounded by this film. Lolita Rodriguez plays Kuala with almost childlike innocence, belying a past that sees her traumatized by an abortion and abandoned by her lover (Cesar, Junior’s father). Mario O’Hara portrays Berto the leper with empathy, equal parts wise, when counseling Junior about the facts of life, and recognizably human, in his hours of need. As Junior, Christopher de Leon provides the youth’s perspective well, unjudging and innocent, still redeemable. As though awakening to the world for the first time, he boldly observes what is otherwise a bewildering vortex of wrong exemplars around him: spurned by his adolescent love (Evangeline, played haughtily by Hilda Koronel), wrongly influenced by a father (played with swaggering gusto by Eddie Garcia) whose womanizing knows no limit, and his boyhood pals, who have learned too well from their fathers. 

But the most essential parts of this film remain those that involve Brocka’s holy triad (Junior, Kuala, and Berto, almost constitutive of a hermetically sealed family): this aspect of his film is a little sentimental, true, but ultimately reflective of social paradox — that society’s only hope lies with those that it has exiled. Away from the forked tongues of society—those that may do them in in the end— Brocka’s brave and intrepid characters provide the voices of innocence and reason, their scenes together depicting a pastoral poem whose definitions may have become pure anachronisms in this day and age.

reviewed: May 15, 2009

TATLO, DALAWA, ISA (Lino Brocka, 1974)

A dialectic tension between immediate generations is at work in this portmanteau film composed of three stories. Three unrelated stories that demonstrate different yet predictable outcomes, underscoring director Lino Brocka’s predilection for neat, schematic endings. Working with three different scenarists, Brocka directs all three segments, taking on this project after the success of his much-praised masterwork, Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kulang, which was released earlier in the same year. 

In Mga Hugis ng Pag-asa, Noni (played sympathetically by Jay Ilagan) undergoes the arduous pains of rehabilitation in a center for drug reformers. While it touches on Noni’s familial and filial problems and his subsequent descent into drug use, the film spotlights the almost inhuman, almost dubious methods the center utilizes to turn troubled lives around. There is adequate cursing and screaming – and, to a certain extent, release— to recall the unconventional techniques of Arthur Janov and the scenes of sadistic rehabilitation in A Clockwork Orange.

The second entry in this triptych is Hello, Soldier, a compassionate tale that depicts the lives of a mother and a daughter in the slums of Manila and the return of the former’s American soldier lover. It’s 1963, 17 years after they last parted ways at the end of the Second World War, and his return is meant to formalize his adoption of their daughter, Gina (Hilda Koronel). She is a willing would-be adoptee, dreaming of all things American—her bedroom walls covered with pinned Americana— and being lifted out of a life of poverty. On the day of his visit, with his American wife, Lucia, Gina’s mother, chooses to get drunk for the first time. The obvious and strident overtones of colonialist legacy – and the specters of neo-colonialism—are in evidence here, most especially in Lucia’s drunken anti-American tirade (a great bravura performance by Anita Linda). 

In the final episode of this omnibus, Bukas, Madilim, Bukas, the limits of self-sacrifice are tested by matriarchal tyranny in an old Spanish family. Atang, (played with just the right measure of stricture by Mary Walter), the seemingly crippled matriarch, controls her household with an iron fist. Her despotic control of her household sees her daughter, Rosenda (played superbly with conflicted nuance by Lolita Rodriguez), devoting her life to nursing her mother. No househelp, let alone any outsider, is welcome unless the old woman approves it. Enter Miguelito (Mario O’Hara), the gardener, a seemingly guileless youth from the province who befriends Rosenda and awakens her sexuality. This narrative reverses the filial dynamics in Karoly Makk’s Szerelem (Love) and hints at noirish elements of intrigue and seduction. 

reviewed: May 18, 2009 

INSIANG (Lino Brocka, 1976)

Reminiscent of Georges Franju’s Blood of the Beasts, though not as stomach-turning and not as willfully controversial, Insiang’s opening sequence showing the barbarous assembly-line butchery at a slaughterhouse serves effectively to foreshadow a grim and violent denouement. Set in the cramped warrens of Tondo, Insiang uses its neorealist sensibilities to depict the dark destiny of its title hero. 

Insiang, played with quiet strength by Hilda Koronel, is the unwanted daughter of Tonia, a middle-aged woman who cavorts with younger men. One such man is Dado (Ruel Vernal), the slaughterhouse worker who is using the older woman to get to her daughter. Insiang, in the meantime, is being worn down by the advances of her boyfriend, Danny (Rex Cortez). And yes, he promises marriage.

In Insiang, the men are up to no good. There is a relatively minor character, a man with a pure heart, admiring Insiang from afar, but most of the men here have beady eyes and fire in their loins. Director Lino Brocka, working from a script by Lamberto E. Antonio, takes a page from the worldview of Shohei Imamura, a Japanese director who in films such as Insect Woman and The Pornographers portray strong and crafty women. Imamura’s women toy with their lust-heavy, sterile-minded men. In Brocka’s film, Insiang may ultimately fall prey to her pursuers but she is no bleeding heart about to fall paralysed in a state of inaction and catatonia. 

Insiang’s way of getting even, however, beggars our sense of credulity. Her mother, Danny and Dado are all marked for revenge, but not in the way we expect it. Insiang is not the emotional victim, but the calculated mind who wakes up to her powers of sexual persuasion. Instead of lashing out emotionally like many victims do, she subtly controls Dado, her ravisher, with more of what he wants. Can she endure being raped over and over again? While biding her time, Insiang allows herself to be sexually used, waiting to be discovered by her mother, who she knows will not take Dado’s infidelity lightly. The subtle manipulation, this neat and intricate sort of vengeance, seems too hard to believe. It seems to have transcended its neorealist foundation to another category, another genre altogether. Granted, it’s a well-made film, it was the first Filipino film to be shown at the Cannes Film Festival (in 1976), but its reality is sheer cinematic reality – only to happen within the parameters of fictive film.

Reviewed: May 17, 2009

ANG TATAY KONG NANAY (Lino Brocka, 1978)

For director Lino Brocka, cinema is the art of compromise. Each film of his own choosing was matched with two or three – often commercial – projects thrust upon him. Filmmaking is, after all, big business: immense money is involved and taking on what producers and financiers dictate is every director’s Faustian bargain. In Ang Tatay Kong Nanay, there seemed to be a happy meeting of minds: it’s a commercial project, a vehicle for the comedy king, Dolphy, and yet its thematic concerns were easily close to Brocka’s heart.

Made in 1978, a hectic year for the director fielding film assignments left and right (Mananayaw, Gumising Ka, Maruja, Hayop sa Hayop, and Rubia Servios are the other voluminous works he churned out that year) Ang Tatay Kong Nanay still retains the hallmarks of a Brocka creation. The acting is first-rate and the story is as polished as it can be for a mass audience. But it’s easily the superb acting performances, particularly by Dolphy and Nino Muhlach, that carry this film and make it memorable.

Ang Tatay Kong Nanay, in not so many words, is Brocka’s valentine to the unsung fringe of society that he belongs to: the homosexual. Dolphy plays Dioscoro Derecho, a middle-aged gay hairdresser who, as the film opens, lives a simple independent life: a parlorista by day, and a cross-dressing gay by night. He lives for the occasional beauty contest for gays and the boisterous company of his like-minded friends. Complications arise when Dennis (Philip Salvador), a much younger man for whom Dioscoro carries a torch, turns up with his infant son. 

Dennis leaves as soon as he arrives, plunking his son in the care of the long-suffering gay. The infant grows up to be Nonoy (Nino Muhlach), an inquisitive boy who knows Dioscoro as his only parent. As Nonoy starts to ask worldly questions, Dioscoro is forced to go straight and hide his double life. Further twists are afoot, when Dennis returns for a visit and Nonoy’s biological mother makes a bid for the young boy’s custody.

Brocka crafts his film like a melodrama, perhaps not as highbrow as Fassbinder, but perhaps along the lines of Douglas Sirk, aiming for the heart first and foremost. There are enough moments to make you reach for your hankies, always helped along by a well-worn musical motif in the background, a lullaby sung by Dioscoro and Nonoy to each other, with its affirmative lyrics of companionship. Dolphy’s dual performance, as both a gay and straight man, gives this film its comic divertissement. Nino Muhlach deserves what he was called back then, the Wonder Boy, essaying a sympathetic role, his eyes ever full of innocence, and yet instinctively stopping short of cloying. Lino Brocka, in the meantime, takes Orlando Nadres’ story and maps out the difficulty of binary lives. There ought to exist no dichotomy in the realm of human emotions. The third and other sexes are as human as those hardwired to be straight, and perhaps uniquely equipped to encompass all human instinct—paternal as well as maternal.

reviewed: May 19, 2009

MAYNILA SA MGA KUKO NG LIWANAG (Lino Brocka, 1975)

Long before the outside world attracted and absorbed the diasporic swell in the millions, the lure of the big city has held an irresistible promise for the Filipino as restless migrant. Manila as the land of milk and honey, Manila as the fascinating symbol of sensory pleasures, such images have burned recurrently and obsessively in his mind. Underneath the hypnotic facade of the metropolis, its allure of sight and sound, however, nothing could be further from the truth. Yet to this day few appear deterred by reality and the urban influx continues. Everyone is thus familiar with nubile women from the sticks recruited unsuspectingly into urban brothels. Everyone is quite familiar with the housemaid raped, ironed or bludgeoned. Everyone has heard about factory workers locked up in their working places or living in unlivable dormitories. Here is the Brocka classic -- a classic often regarded as the preeminent film on any canonical list of Philippine cinematic treasures -- that recounts the circumstances of one such tragic story.

As the film opens, Maynila Sa Mga Kuko's story has long begun in earnest. At the corner of Misericordia and Ongpin, Julio Madiaga stakes out an apartment above a storefront with a signage emblazoned Chua Tek Trading Store. His long journey from a distant fishing island to Manila has brought him here, where he suspects his girlfriend, Ligaya Paraiso, is being kept against her will. In flashback after flashback, interspersed with Julio's bitter exposition, we are given an idyllic back story, their life of simple poverty but of simple, unfettered happiness too – only to go terribly wrong upon the arrival of a city woman who sweet-talks the womenfolk with prospects of education and well-paying jobs in the big city.

Maynila Sa Mga Kuko, however, is more about the brutalizing impact of the metropolis on Julio than the tragic fate of Ligaya. In order to survive, Julio takes on all kinds of menial and degrading jobs, as a construction worker and as a male prostitute. At firsthand, he witnesses urban corruption and squalor in all their grisly details: the death of his fellow workers in construction accidents, the schemes of the money-grubbing foreman, the subjection of his friend’s sister into prostitution. Julio is slowly accumulating the inhuman provocation of the city. In the meantime, people around him rationalize the advantages of the city, its preferable fate to their life in the countryside. Although the city teems with unsavory characters and shady goings-on, Julio meets some of the living pulse of the city -- all human but all invariably ground down by harsh life. Little by little, the bright neon is fading: this city has little saving grace.

Brocka, adapting Edgardo Reyes novel of the same title, depicts a miserabilist city, and there is little question what tragic trajectory its story is tracing. Brocka does little to hide its allegorical leanings: Ligaya Paraiso, translated as Happiness Paradise, stands for each man’s pursuit of happiness; Ah Tek, the China man who may be responsible for the disappearance of Ligaya, can be read in the vernacular as atik, or money, the driving force that subjugates helpless and powerless fates.

The figure of Julio Madiaga and the milieu that surrounds him remain current in this new century's urban landscape. As I type this down, another man dies at a construction site. An entire factory of workers is discovered living like vermin. Shantytowns of migrant Filipinos are burned down in some corner of Manila. Has it really been 34 years since Brocka committed their tragic silhouettes to film?

Title in English: Manila in the Claws of Neon
Reviewed: May 20, 2009