Canon Decampment: Lino Brocka

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Tubog sa Ginto

English Translation: Gold-Plated
English Title: Dipped in Gold
Additional Language: English
Year of Release: 1970
Director & Screenwriter: Lino Brocka
Adapted from the serialized komiks by Mars Ravelo
Producer: Lea Productions

Cast: Eddie Garcia, Mario O’Hara, Lolita Rodriguez, Jay Ilagan, Hilda Koronel, Marissa Delgado, Jimmy Morato, Veronica Palileo

Businessman Don Benito goes to great lengths to conceal his homosexuality. But one night, he crosses paths with the handsome Diego and they become lovers. Benito decides to hire his lover as his driver so they could continue their affair. Along the way, Benito’s wife Emma and his son Santi learn of his secret. Worse, Benito discovers that Diego’s motives are more sinister than he had let on.

The breakout film that would make Lino Brocka a force to reckon with already cast his weaknesses and strengths in stark relief. The hot-button material of same-sex desire would gain increasing topicality in years to come, although the treatment in Tubog sa Ginto, regarded as shockingly new during its time, would seem current only to those who still believe that moral discomfort should be minimized in popular culture. Eddie Garcia was not new to the character, either: he’d portrayed the role of a closeted manly man about a decade earlier, in Tony Cayado’s comedy Kaming mga Talyada (We the Pansies, 1962); but his and Brocka’s fierce-spirited attack made Tubog sa Ginto more definitive than Brocka’s several subsequent attempts at repudiating his own homophobic prejudices. Refusing to be upended by the novelty of Garcia’s role—which still endures as a benchmark for male performance—Lolita Rodriguez and Jay Ilagan provide credible support as the wife and son who cope with their family head’s devastative desire.

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Stardoom

Year of Release: 1971
Director: Lino Brocka
Screenwriters: Lino Brocka & Orlando Nadres
Producer: Lea Productions

Cast: Lolita Rodriguez, Eddie Garcia, Hilda Koronel, Walter Navarro, Jimmy Morato, Caridad Sanchez, Lotis Key, Tita Muñoz, Mario O’Hara, Edmund Cupcupin, Mary Walter, Ruben Rustia, Veronica Palileo, Joonee Gamboa, Celeste Legaspi, Estrella Kuenzler, Marissa Delgado, Joseph Estrada, Eddie Mercado, Gloria Romero, Daisy Romualdez, Jeanne Young

Toyang’s primary realization is that her hopes will keep getting dashed. As a starstruck collegian, she hopes to be discovered for the movies as her classmates acknowledge her standout beauty, but the nuns who teach her disapprove of such plans. When her father dies and leaves their family destitute, a film producer contacts her with plans to launch her as a star, but World War II forces him to flee. She marries a man whom she thinks is wealthy but he turns out to be some well-off family’s driver, so she neglects their elder son. When her husband forces himself on her and she gives birth to another son, fortune immediately begins to smile on the kid and Toyang displaces onto him all the dreams she failed to fulfill for herself. What she failed to anticipate is that the showbiz world is filled with lust, intrigue, and treachery, which her son Joey now has to face up to, with or without his mother’s (often unwelcome) help.

Lino Brocka described his tenure with Lea Productions in unflattering terms. As the most active studio during the period between the First and Second Golden Ages, Lea certainly had none of the luxury of slating noncommercial (mostly neorealist) products for foreign film-festival exhibitions, even as it struggled for the industry dominance that Regal, Viva, and the Marcos government’s Experimental Cinema of the Philippines later enjoyed. Apparently without being aware of it, Brocka wound up with crowd-pleasing expertise—a skills set he readily set aside when he attempted to replicate the “quality production” processes that the old studios used to proffer their favored filmmakers. Stardoom may now be revaluated as Brocka’s road-not-taken, fortunately only until he rebelled against another set of limits: that of polished realist protest filmmaking unofficially stipulated as his ticket to successful Euro filmfest domination. Observers who were equally admiring and scandalized by his return to audience-friendly strategies toward the end of his career would have found his roots in his Lea phase. We might be even tempted to state that these early films’ reliance on generic play preempted the sanctimonious bourgeoisification of the characters in his “serious” breakout texts. Both mother and son’s cynical willingness to weaponize their bodies as a means of escaping the multilayered oppression of slum life in Manila betoken a step forward from the moralistic attitude toward perverse promiscuity in Tubog sa Ginto, an early indication of Brocka’s capacity for critical self-regard that he upheld throughout the rest of his career.

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Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kulang

English Title: Weighed but Found Wanting
Year of Release: 1974 / Color with Sepia
Director: Lino Brocka
Screenwriter: Mario O’Hara
Producer: Cinemanila Corporation

Cast: Lolita Rodriguez, Mario O’Hara, Christopher de Leon, Eddie Garcia, Lilia Dizon, Hilda Koronel, Rosa Aguirre, Laurice Guillen, Alicia Alonzo, Joseph Sytangco, Ernie Zarate

While most townspeople mock madwoman Kuala, the equally derided leper Berto sees in her a second chance to have a family. Junior, the mayor’s son, befriends the two as he becomes increasingly critical of the many excesses of his father’s and friends’ lifestyles. When Kuala gets pregnant with Berto’s child, the ostracized couple, with Junior as their only advocate, have to find ways to defend themselves from the hypocritical interventions of the townsfolk.

Independent cinema was redefined for the future with Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kulang; prior to Lino Brocka’s coming-of-age text, the term “independent” had referred to the mostly performer-owned studios that successfully challenged the 1950s’ vertically integrated system of producers who monopolized the means of distribution, consequently discouraging competition, by also owning their theaters. After a long-term studio contract had run its course, Lino Brocka rounded up reform-minded financiers, engaged the talents of personalities from theater and “serious” cinema, drew an ambitious narrative from his small-town upbringing, and embarked on speaking tours in schools and offices across the country. He was rewarded with a sleeper hit and a slew of industry prizes although, as even observers during the time pointed out, the film was too self-serious to take to heart. Tinimbang Ka’s delightful slice-of-life satire eventually devolves into a high-minded moralistic assault on hypocrisy, wherein an entire town is virtually forced to genuflect before its martyred Others and an angry young man handsomely lifts up an infant who might represent a future that they still have to earn. Essential viewing for wide-eyed indie-film aspirants who wield Brocka’s name as their messianic ideal and fixate on his mid-career European successes, discounting his later self-critical adjustments.

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Maynila: Sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag

English Title: Manila in the Claws of Light
Alternate Title: The Nail of Brightness
Year of Release: 1975 / Color with B&W
Director: Lino Brocka
Screenwriter: Clodualdo del Mundo Jr.
Adapted from the novel Sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag by Edgardo M. Reyes
Producer: Cinema Artists

Cast: Bembol Roco, Hilda Koronel, Lou Salvador Jr., Joonee Gamboa, Tommy Abuel, Tommy Yap, Lily Gamboa, Pio de Castro III, Pancho Pelagio, Danilo Posadas, Jojo Abella

Julio leaves for Manila to look for his childhood sweetheart Ligaya. Once there, he becomes a construction worker but is exposed to exploitative labor conditions. He loses his job and ends up in the company of male hustlers, but eventually he crosses paths with Ligaya. Their reunion proves to be bittersweet, however, as she divulges the tragic fate she suffered since she left their hometown.

To be fair, many of the problems evident in Maynila stem from the movie’s source novel, an impassioned semi-autobiographical pro-labor account that still impresses the type of left-leaners who regard its portrayal of weak helpless women and sex-crazed exploitative Chinese as minor setbacks that the novel’s searing social perspective overrides. This trend among progressive artists of the time may have been rooted in the colonial bias against East Asians that worsened during World War II and the Cold War, and led to objections by Chinese-Filipino community leaders and to critiques by major scholars like Caroline S. Hau. The artists’ intent may have been well-intentioned—i.e., to foster suspicion of foreign domination by using a minority as a sample; yet the fact that the said minority has become vulnerable to violent reprisals, like the rash of kidnappings for ransom during the 1990s, shows how fundamentally flawed this line of thinking was. By adding an extended sequence—originally running for nearly a quarter of the film’s total running time—where lead character Julio Madiaga gets drawn into the gay-for-pay underworld of male prostitution, Lino Brocka added homophobia to this list of injuries, but was ironically denounced for it by the novel’s more-homophobic-than-thou supporters. Nevertheless Brocka at this point had enough conviction and skill to focus on the plight of the appealing and always-wholesome young man overwhelmed by the big bad city, creating an unforgettable impression of beauty and wonder from all the filth and squalor of the reality he had sought to capture. Despite the aforementioned limitations, Maynila’s appeal has remained so overwhelmingly transcendent that several observers through the years uphold it as the best Filipino film of all time.

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Insiang

Year of Release: 1976
Director: Lino Brocka
Screenwriters: Mario O’Hara & Lamberto E. Antonio
Producer: Cinemanila Corporation

Cast: Hilda Koronel, Mona Lisa, Ruel Vernal, Rez Cortez, Marlon Ramirez, Nina Lorenzo, Mely Mallari, Carpi Asturias, Joe Jardi, Danny Posadas, Tommy Yap

The relationship between Tonya and her daughter Insiang becomes strained with the arrival of Dado, who becomes Tonya’s young lover. In truth, Dado had long been lusting after Insiang and manipulates his arrangement with Tonya so he could live in the same house as the two women. After he rapes Insiang, he convinces Tonya that it was her daughter who seduced him. Insiang plots her own revenge against her mother, Dado, and her feckless boyfriend Bebot, still unaware of how her scheme would also transform her own character.

Although it was overshadowed by the scope and political daring of the previous year’s Maynila: Sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag, Insiang demonstrated Lino Brocka’s capacity for self-critical reassessment. Confining the dramatic highlights to the domestic sphere, he finally found a means of focusing on women’s social and sexual privations, extracting career-peak performances from Mona Lisa and Hilda Koronel in the process. This time the reservation regarding the title character being too beautiful for the milieu she lives in can be more easily justified by the reduction in scale: the mother’s and daughter’s contrasting personalities meld effectively with their reckless competition for the affection of the slum superstud, who turns out helpless in the face of their womanly onslaughts.

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Jaguar

Additional Language: English
Year of Release: 1979
Director: Lino Brocka
Screenwriters: Jose F. Lacaba & Ricky Lee
Based on “The Boy Who Wanted To Become ‘Society,’” from the book Reportage on Crime by Quijano de Manila
Producer: Bancom Audiovision Corporation

Cast: Phillip Salvador, Amy Austria, Johnny Delgado, Anita Linda, Menggie Cobarrubias, Mario Escudero, Jimmy Santos, Deborah Sun, Aida Carmona, Dexter Doria, Cloyd Robinson, Tonio Gutierrez, Roi Vinzon, Cloyd Robinson

Poldo’s dream of living amid luxury comes true when Sonny, whose father owns a publishing company, turns him from security worker to personal bodyguard. The playboy Sonny gets into a tussle with his friend, Direk San Pedro, over Cristy, a nightclub dancer that Direk had discovered and was building up for the movies. Although Sonny succeeds in convincing Cristy to leave Direk for him, she winds up falling for Poldo. When Direk attempts to extract revenge on Sonny, Poldo has to defend his boss by killing Direk. From hereon, Poldo’s dream suddenly transforms into a living nightmare.

The commendable aspect of Lino Brocka’s career is easy to pass over in favor of the early triumphs that introduced him to European film-festival audiences: most of his subsequent films, mistaken for and downgraded as supposed recyclings of his earlier material, are actually rectifications of his youthful missteps in the admittedly slippery arena of identity politics. Jaguar picks out a lumpen character, an on-the-run former bodyguard who wound up killing his boss’s friendly rival, the very type who would have harassed Julio Madiaga and probably participated in lynching him at the end of Maynila: Sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag (1975). By carefully distilling an actual crime story from literary journalist Nick Joaquin, and getting a pair of Joaquin’s younger colleagues to refashion the material into a contemporary narrative, Brocka wound up with an entry that provided a few firsts. From the point of view of Philippine film productivity, Jaguar’s well-received qualification at the Cannes Film Festival competition section was only incidentally significant: it introduced a credible and versatile action star in Phillip Salvador, and initiated a genuine “noir” look via the shadows-and-fog tenebrism of Conrado Baltazar, the best cinematographer during and beyond his unfortunately short moment.

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Bona

Year of Release: 1980
Director: Lino Brocka
Screenwriter: Cenen Ramones
Adapted from the same author’s teleplay written for Babae (Woman) series
Producer: NV Productions

Cast: Nora Aunor, Phillip Salvador, Marissa Delgado, Raquel Monteza, Venchito Galvez, Rustica Carpio, Nanding Josef, Spanky Manikan

Slum resident Bona is such a fan of bit player Gardo that she doesn’t hesitate to help him out after a band of men gang up on him for violating the sister of one of the men. Her father beats her up for staying out all night so she returns to Gardo’s shanty and lives there in exchange for assisting him. She witnesses how he can’t resist temptations to drink and womanize, but one night he opts to sleep with her, raising her hopes about their arrangement. When she realizes that he counts her as just another of his conquests, her demeanor toward him and her stature in his life darkens.

Bona was the first film that provided insurmountable evidence that Nora Aunor could read the proverbial phone directory and still come up with an intelligent, credible, humane, and insightful performance. Lino Brocka was similarly functioning at the peak of his abilities, although the material that he had chosen nearly tripped him up despite his casting of some of the best supporting players of the period, mainly because the narrative’s queer potential went over his head. Both artists learned to be more discerning about identifying promising intellectual properties, after virtually saving each other from near-disaster; but their subsequent respective choices of superior media projects never resulted in another collaboration of this order. Of the few other reflexive films she performed in, Bona remains Aunor’s showcase, with another production of hers, Greatest Performance (which she also wrote and directed), having the potential to show all the other Second Golden Age filmmakers how her extraordinary personal narrative could have been put to better use, if she had opted to complete the project. One sample of how insistently encompassing Aunor in Bona has been lies in how the only other star-reversed reflexive project of the period, Emmanuel H. Borlaza’s Bituing Walang Ningning (Viva Films, 1985), needed to identify its villain as a “superstar” in order to clear the field, in a manner of speaking.

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Cain at Abel

Year of Release: 1982
English Title: Cain and Abel
Director: Lino Brocka
Screenwriter: Ricky Lee
Producer: Cine Suerte

Cast: Christopher de Leon, Phillip Salvador, Carmi Martin, Cecille Castillo, Baby Delgado, Mona Lisa, Ruel Vernal, Michael Sandico, Venchito Galvez, Tonio Gutierrez, Bey Vito, Joe Jardi, Fred Capulong, Jumbo Salvador, Greg Sta. Inez, Naty mallares, Dante Balois, Ryan Soler, James Acuesta

Señora Pina blames her eldest son for the heart attack that befell his father and treats him as a scoundrel, withholding the support he needs to run the family hacienda efficiently; as a result, Lorenzo or Lorens hangs out with influential but outcast members of their town. When his younger brother Ellis arrives with his new girlfriend Zita and announces his intention to drop out of college, Pina decides to replace Lorens with Ellis in order to dissuade the latter from marrying Zita. Becky, Lorens’s wife, is upset because Pina already coddled their housekeeper when Ellis impregnated her, in order to have a grandchild by her favored son. Becky reaches her tipping point when she learns that Pina intends to designate Ellis as her sole heir, in effect precluding their children from the fruits of Lorens’s years of labor. Becky’s confrontation of Pina turns violent, but Ellis’s attempt to push the pregnant Becky away results in a tragic accident that Lorens counts as Ellis’s blood debt. Matters between the brothers keep escalating, with their friends and loved ones becoming collateral victims of their resentments and retaliations.

The action-film genre was the country’s most popular movie category, until the Marcos Sr. regime’s opportunistic provisions of exemptions from censorship made sex films even more profitable. Lino Brocka’s tremendous empathy with victims of domestic abuse and social injustice made the action genre ideal for the skills set he cultivated alongside his preferred circle of performers and technicians. In Cain at Abel, he proceeds from a seemingly carefully knit pattern of professional and familial relations that start to tear along the lines of toxic interactions induced by a phallic mother playing favorites between her two differentially neglected and emotionally stunted sons. The members of this tragic trinity insist on imposing their version of righteousness on one another, realizing too late that their anger and hatred have plunged the town they rule over into modes of distrust, secrecy, and frequent shootouts. Underappreciated when it first came out, the film deserves to be celebrated as evidence of Brocka at peak technical ability, alongside the emergence of Phillip Salvador as our most capable male lead actor; a film he produced and headlined around this time, Ako ang Hari (I Am King, 1981), just as satisfyingly turned out to have been Mike Relon Makiling’s personal best, although it could no longer be found.

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1—Bayan Ko: Kapit sa Patalim

English Translation: My Country: Clutching a Blade
English Title: Bayan Ko: My Own Country
Year of Release: 1984
Director: Lino Brocka
Screenwriter: Jose F. Lacaba
Based on “A Strike” by Jose F. Lacaba and “Host or Hostage” by Jose N. Carreon
Producers: Malaya Films & Stephan Films

Cast: Phillip Salvador, Gina Alajar, Venchito Galvez, Ariosto Reyes Jr., Bey Vito, Aida Carmona, Khryss Adalia, Nomer Son, Paquito Diaz, Raoul Aragonn, Rez Cortez, Claudia Zobel, Carmi Martin, Mona Lisa

Desperate to maintain his only source of income, printing press laborer Turing has no other choice but to turn his back on his co-workers when they launch a labor strike. His problems grow when his wife, Luz, experiences a difficult pregnancy. Pushed to his breaking point when the hospital refuses to release his wife and newborn unless he can cough up some payment, Turing agrees to join a burglary gang but winds up facing worse consequences than he initially imagined.

2—Orapronobis

English Translation: Pray for Us
English Title: Fight for Us
Additional Language: Latin
Year of Release: 1989
Director: Lino Brocka
Screenwriter: Jose F. Lacaba
Producers: Bernadette International Association & Special People Productions

Cast: Phillip Salvador, Dina Bonnevie, Gina Alajar, Bembol Roco, Abbo de la Cruz, Ginnie Sobrino, Pen Medina, Joel Lamangan, Gerard Bernschein, Ernie Zarate

Freed political detainee Jimmy visits a rural town to investigate the massacre of alleged rebels caused by the Orapronobis vigilante cult. He soon meets ex-girlfriend Esper and their love child Camilo, even as he learns that the military actually supports the cult’s activities. But when Esper and Camilo are suddenly apprehended by the cult, Jimmy’s investigation turns into a personal crusade.

Associates of Lino Brocka date his full commitment to nationalist politics alongside the anti-dictatorship movement that emerged after the 1983 assassination of Senator Benigno S. Aquino Jr. In fact, his political awakening was such a turnaround from his earlier less-progressive orientation that it resulted in a pair of hard-hitting topical films, both written by Jose F. Lacaba, that were banned by two successive presidential regimes. The first, the Marcos-era Bayan Ko, demonstrates the risks that attend advocacy filmmaking; not only because it made Brocka a target for repression, but also because its guerrilla-filmmaking style and predilection for melodrama make it most definitively a product of its time. Fortunately—for the film, not the title country—the Philippines has retained several characteristics that render Bayan Ko as timely as ever. Brocka had become such a filmmaking expert that the movie could risk offending formalism-obsessed viewers yet move them at the same time—thus turning into an ironic anomaly in its director’s filmography: a work whose achievement, despite itself and Brocka’s track record, lies in an impressive stylistic consistency rather than in well-wrought raw material. Not long after accomplishing one major collective project in the dismantling of the Marcos dictatorship, Brocka found himself leading the charge against Marcos’s supposedly democratic successor. Not only did many of his former allies find Orapronobis, the embodiment of his disillusionment with the Corazon Aquino government, too much too soon, in spite (or maybe because) of its technical prowess; critics who prided themselves on fairness regarded its conflation of discrete historical personalities and events improper, to put it mildly. In an interview, Lacaba recalled how Brocka, presented during this period with possible radical options, expressed a preference for anarchy. Brocka’s intention to tackle an adaptation of José Rizal’s material would have been a tantalizing prospect, considering recent speculation on Rizal’s own political growth. As it turned out, all that fate has left us are the likes of Bayan Ko and Orapronobis: films that are accomplished in articulating their maker’s social conscience and that simultaneously exemplify his long-overdue awakening to the medium’s potential to impact an audience.

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Miguelito: Batang Rebelde

English Translation: Miguelito: Rebel Child
Year of Release: 1985
Director: Lino Brocka
Screenwriter: Jose Dalisay Jr.
Producer: D’Wonder Films

Cast: Nida Blanca, Eddie Garcia, Gloria Romero, Aga Muhlach, Liza Lorena, Beth Bautista, Rey “PJ” Abellana, Ronaldo Valdez, Robert Arevalo, Mario Montenegro

Auring is set free after serving fifteen years in jail for a crime she did not mean to commit. She now aims to get justice and reclaim Miguelito, her son from an affair she had with town mayor Venancio. Soon, Miguelito learns the truth about Auring and finally meets her. But their reunion can possibly be cut short by Venancio’s desire to keep things the way they were before Auring’s interference.

Unassailable proof that despite his defensive pronouncements, Lino Brocka was capable of recognizing where he may have faltered and how he might be able to stage a rebound. Small-town politics, angry young man, wronged woman, corrupt official of a father: this was Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kulang (1974) all over again, except that this time, the exercise could hardly be bettered. The teen at the center is torn between his understandably resentful mother and his nurturing legal parents; his father’s political valences point to beyond-personal abuses that wound his immediate constituency; and coolest of all, our hero is able to count on the ready and efficient support provided by a gangster and a couple of, well, former virgins. Though predictable, the moral tragedy at the close of this trajectory—the sacrifice of innocent victims, as in Tinimbang Ka—occasions a catharsis that this time is fully earned, no longer directed against hapless-though-hypocritical small-town inhabitants. It also provides a more pointed anti-authoritarian critique, inspired by the then-raging anti-Marcos protest movement, to instill hope—both in the responsiveness of a people in crisis, and in the self-aware abilities of a major Filipino filmmaker.

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Babangon Ako’t Dudurugin Kita

English Translation: I Will Rise and Crush You
English Title: Sweet Revenge
Additional Language: English
Year of Release: 1989
Director: Lino Brocka
Screenwriter: Joen Chionglo
Adapted from the serialized komiks by Gilda Olvidado
Producer: Viva Films

Cast: Sharon Cuneta, Hilda Koronel, Christopher de Leon, Bembol Roco, Mona Lisa, Ruben Rustia, Tom Olivar, William Lorenzo, Tony Tacorda, Jimmy Reyes, Pocholo Montes, Gina Perez, Fred Capulong

Because of filial piety, Salve obeys her father’s request to marry a man with a bright future, which he saw in Alfred. Via, a rich lady with political ambition, believes that Alfred will have greater success as her life partner. They arrange for Via’s feckless cousin to date-rape her, to provide Alfred with an excuse to leave her. After her father dies from witnessing her heartbreak, she works for a series of abusive employers. Finally, she winds up homeless and unconscious in the rain, where Rod, a gangster who grew up in poverty, brings her to his home and shows her the strength she had in her all along.

The most memorable collaboration between the country’s biggest directorial name and its biggest star, circa the late 1980s, was also a crucial juncture in their individual journeys. He was attempting to meld political commentary with popular appeal, effectively abandoning the commerce-vs.-art binary he insisted on for most of his career, while she was bent on dumping her wholesome-teenybopper persona for good. It was an all-too-unexpected shift for either of them, so no one took any notice except for her mass followers. Sharon Cuneta should have had more exciting future projects if Lino Brocka’s car didn’t make that fatal swerve along a desolate stretch of road on his way home after meeting with prospects for future projects. Even the transformations he required of her—a Smoky Mountain scavenger in an earlier project, Pasan Ko ang Daigdig (I Carry the World, 1987), and a feminist avenger after this, in Biktima (Victim, 1990)—provided her with offbeat imagery that she still occasionally tried out afterward, with upgraded performative skills though lesser fierceness. Babangon Ako’t Dudurugin Kita remains a satisfying watch and the ideal appetizer for Gumapang Ka sa Lusak (Dirty Affair, 1990), Brocka’s next (and sadly final) peak achievement, while all the Cuneta movies not long afterward have been just as watchable … but that dream Cuneta-Brocka project will just have to reside in our imagination.

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Hahamakin Lahat

Alternate Title: Hahamakin ang Lahat
English Title: All Be Damned
Year of Release: 1990
Director: Lino Brocka
Screenwriter: Ricky Lee
Producer: Regal Films

Cast: Vilma Santos, Snooky Serna, Gabby Concepcion, Eric Quizon, Dennis Roldan, Maritoni Fernandez, Perla Bautista, Ruben Rustia

Two married couples play out a tragic game of love and obsession in a small urban capital. Lucinda uses her influence as the town mayor’s wife to help out her cousin Theresa, although in fact she aims to rekindle her affair with Theresa’s hot-headed husband Renato. She goes to the extent of arousing her philandering husband’s interest in Theresa and setting up the latter with her own boy-toy blackmailer, all in order to isolate Renato and claim him for her own. When she pleads for help with her biological father, whom she had refused to acknowledge all her life for abandoning her mother, she realizes how similar they turned out to be in their ruthlessness and readiness to exploit other people.

Overshadowed by the fireworks display of Gumapang Ka sa Lusak, Hahamakin Lahat has nevertheless maintained over the years as evidence that even given vastly reduced resources, Lino Brocka could still shine through with his artistic and political integrity intact. He happened to be operating at a juncture where a post-Marcos trend he started—of badmouthing elected officials for their willingness to engage in corruption—became a profitable theme in commercial Philippine cinema. He’d also successfully extracted an all-time-great performance from Lorna Tolentino for playing a postfeminist character, a strong manipulative woman, in Maging Akin Ka Lamang (If You Were Only Mine, 1987), and managed an equivalent feat here with Vilma Santos.[1] His insistence on never losing sight of the cause of the downtrodden might make even the major entries in his body of work predictable, but whenever he ventures to overlay the proceedings with filmmaking skills never beheld before or since on local screens, an attentive viewer will have no other choice except follow, in anticipation of the marvelous revelations he constantly conjures up with ease.

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Gumapang Ka sa Lusak

English Translation: Crawl through the Muck
English Title: Dirty Affair
Year of Release: 1990
Director: Lino Brocka
Screenwriter: Ricky Lee
Producer: Viva Films

Cast: Dina Bonnevie, Christopher de Leon, Eddie Garcia, Charo Santos, Bembol Roco, Allan Paule, Francis Magalona, William Lorenzo, Perla Bautista, Anita Linda, Lucita Soriano, Timmy Diwa, Maureen Mauricio, Ernie Zarate, Tess Dumpit

Rachel has become the mistress of unscrupulous mayor Edmundo Guatlo. Rowena, the mayor’s wife, pressures him to find a way to silence his paramour, since he soon has to launch his congressional campaign. In promising to leave him and his wife in peace during the campaign, Rachel extracts a promise from Edmundo that her boyfriend Levi will be freed from jail. Edmundo however contracts Levi to assassinate the mayor’s rival, upon which the mayor’s henchmen kill him and abduct Rachel’s parents. Jonathan, a slum teen who likes to hang with his better-off peers and who develops a crush on Rachel, calls upon his friends to find ways they can help Rachel.

Final and tragically insufficient evidence that Lino Brocka was capable of building on not just his early material, but on his own revision of said material. Gumapang Ka sa Lusak was meant to be a sequel to Jaguar (1979), which itself was a culmination-of-sorts of his problematic approach to the socially dispossessed. As it turns out, Gumapang Ka reintroduces the (renamed) Jaguar character briefly, only to see him snuffed out, and proceeds to follow his girlfriend, now the drug-addled mistress of a corrupt and ambitious mayor. The Jaguar type is also reprised, this time as a fun-seeking teen still too attached to his better-off pals. With this “reunited” (though mismatched) couple, Brocka steps into postmodern practice for the first time, boldly and winningly, his fearlessness finally finding an aesthetic component. He whips into the mix all the genres he had ever attempted, tosses in a few reworked historical personages, and builds up a frenzy where all the major players find their comeuppances in a deadly power game. And lest anyone think this could not be further improved on: he made the movie to please not his Euro-festival crowd, but the local mass audience, who responded excitedly as early as Gumapang Ka’s extended trailer screenings, and remembered to pay their respects not long after, during Brocka’s funeral wake.

Note

[1] Lino Brocka’s generally sure hand with female actors imbued him with an indispensable expertise during an age when female stars exceeded the impact of their male counterparts. Aside from capstone performances of Nora Aunor (in Bona), Lolita Rodriguez (Stardoom), Mona Lisa and Hilda Koronel (Insiang), Nida Blanca (Miguelito), and Dina Bonnevie (Gumapang Ka sa Lusak), to name the titles included in this list, he also directed Chanda Romero’s personal best in the still-unrecovered Mananayaw (The Dancer, 1978), a film once feared to have been lost to posterity but still awaiting overdue recovery at present from Philippine government officials.

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Á!