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Pila-Balde

English Translation: Queue of Pails
English Title: Fetch a Pail of Water
Year of Release: 1999
Director: Jeffrey Jeturian
Screenwriter: Armando Lao
Producer: Good Harvest Productions

Cast: Ana Capri, Marcus Madrigal, Harold Pineda, Allen Dizon, Estrella Kuenzler, Becky Misa, Jess Evardone, Engelbert de Ramos, Darylynn Dajao, Amaya Meynard, Rina Rosal, Lawrence Roxas, Cris Corpuz, Edwin Amado, Rosemarie Cane, Erica Masinam

Gina lives in the slums with her laundrywoman grandmother Cion and her younger siblings, Boyet and Maria. In hopes of a better life, Gina rejects Nonoy—a fellow slum dweller who truly loves her—in favor of Jimboy, the playboy son of one of Cion’s better-off patrons, Mrs. Alano. Jimboy gets Gina pregnant, but problems arise when Mrs. Alano forbids her son from consorting with the slum folk.

The folly of declaring Golden Ages is exposed by works of this type, one that draws from the strengths of two opposed masters—Lino Brocka’s proletarian sympathies and Ishmael Bernal’s sardonic irreverence—and outdoes either option by combining both qualities. Produced after the end of the so-called Second Golden Age (roughly mid-1970s to the end of the Marcos era in 1986), the film can best be read as an update of the First Golden Age’s Malvarosa (1958, dir. Gregorio Fernandez), this time deploying the carnal allure of the sex-comedy to explore the complexities and paradoxes of class and gender politics. When exploitation threatens to become the norm even among the movie’s heroic proletariat, the narrative pulls them back from the abyss and provides them with a well-earned shot at redemption, a rare instance of an upbeat closure perfectly complementing a hard-core realist text.

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Tuhog

English Translation: Skewered; Long Take (film production parlance)
English Title: Larger than Life
Year of Release: 2001
Director: Jeffrey Jeturian
Screenwriter: Armando Lao
Producers: Available Light Productions & Regal Films

Cast: Ina Raymundo, Klaudia Koronel, Jaclyn Jose, Irma Adlawan, Dante Rivero, Nante Montreal, Raymond Nieva, Eric Parilla, Crispin Pineda, Frank Rivera, Desi Rivera, Celeste Lumasac, Albert Zialcita, Jessette Prospero, Russell Zamora, Rhett Romero, Menggie Cobarrubias

Perla endures her father’s attempts at incestuous rape. But when he takes an interest in his granddaughter Floring (Perla’s daughter by a lover who had abandoned her), Perla’s moral outrage leads to her killing her own father. An enterprising director and scriptwriter interview mother and daughter in order to make an exploitation movie titled Hayok sa Laman (Lust for Flesh), where a mother, Violeta, melodramatically seeks to protect her concupiscent daughter, Hasmin, from the depraved attentions of her father even while the girl makes out at every opportunity with her boyfriend Adan. Perla and Floring attend a screening with their friends and neighbors, and are appalled by how their narrative is trivilialized and sensationalized onscreen.

The last scriptwriting contest of the Experimental Cinema of the Philippines declared two co-equal winners, but the agency shut down before it could find producers willing to finance the projects. One of the winners, Armando Lao, managed to make a name for himself as an outstanding practitioner. His ECP-winning entry, Pinilakan (Silvered or Silvery), was updated and released during the period of unrest building up to the massive demonstrations attempting to (unsuccessfully) reinstall deposed President Joseph Estrada. One may be tempted to draw a parallel between the people-power events aimed at “correcting” the anomaly of having unpopular and dysfunctional Chief Executives—Ferdinand Marcos in 1986’s original EDSA uprising, Estrada in 2001’s EDSA II—and the parodic and cynical replication of people power subsequently labeled EDSA III. Viewed from a historical distance, Tuhog demonstrates an ability to interrogate the machinations of urban, capitalist, male gaze-dominated cinema and its disregard for the interests of its polar opposites—the rural, agricultural, feminized world of the Third-World subject. It refuses the moral streamlining that renders the typical reflexive treatment sanctimonious and predictable, and makes understandable how media exploitation manages to thrive even while it cannibalizes the misery and suffering of its sources of material. The contrasts between the cinematic polish of the film-within-a-film and the documentary plainness of the real-life narrative, as well as the generic performances of the “fictional” characters, all come to a head when the two stories’ violent resolutions lead to distressing excesses, with the Hayok sa Laman film-within-a-film characters provided with a pornographic equivalent of their real-life counterparts’ domestic happy ending. In this manner, Tuhog implicates not so much its exploitative (fictional and real-life) filmmakers as its (fictional and real-life) audience: who can resist the titillation in the three-dimensional characters’ situation, and the carnal attractions of their onscreen representations?

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1—Bridal Shower

Additional Language: English
Year of Release: 2004
Director: Jeffrey Jeturian
Screenwriter: Chris Martinez
(From a story by Chris Martinez, with script supervision by Armando Lao)
Producer: Seiko Films

Cast: Dina Bonnevie, Cherry Pie Picache, Francine Prieto, Christian Vazquez, Douglas Robinson, JR Valentin, Alfred Vargas, Pinky Marquez, Rodel Velayo, Gina Pareño, Boots Anson Roa, Lester Llansang, Angel Jacob, Gerald Lauron, Jacob Dionisio, Christine Carlos, flora Gasser, Yvette Marie Tagura, Pocholo Montes, Irma Adlawan, Bon Vibar, Grace Patricia Francisco, Basil Bolinao, Cynthia San Juan, Roher Tierra

Tates, Sonia, and Katie all work as fairly successful advertising executives under the benign supervision of Emily. It is their love lives, however, that prove problematic and potentially upsetting for their friendship. Mickey, an underachiever, is dismayed every time he bumps into one of Tates’s casual flings, although he relies on her contacts so he can annul his marriage to be able to wed her. Sonia enjoys having sex with the poor but passionate Bryan, but when she discovers she’s pregnant, she decides to settle with the wealthy but boring Juancho, despite being unsure which boy toy is the child’s father, just so she can fulfill her trophy-wife aspiration. From their superior vantage point, the two friends cast aspersions on overweight Katie’s choice of Joebert, a male stripper whom she tries to guide toward a more socially acceptable profession.

2—Minsan Pa

Additional Languages: Cebuano, Japanese, Korean
English Title: One Moment More
Year of Release: 2004
Director: Jeffrey Jeturian
Screenwriter: Armando Lao
Producer: MLR Films

Cast: Jomari Yllana, Ara Mina, Christian Vasquez, Tirso Cruz III, Rio Locsin, Dimples Romana, Criselda Volks, R.U. Miranda, Malu Barry, Dulce, Anna Fegi, Jonathan Badon, Marru Hadraki, R.R. Jacob, Natasha Denser, Ramon Villanueva, Sari Santillan, Nico Antonio, Jennifer Donaire, Kristopher Relucio, Ben Estur Jr., Gigette Reyes, Donnah Alcantarah, Ed Murillo, Dot Ramos-Gancayco, Kate Pamela Natividad, Igi Boy Flores, Adan Bolivar, Jacqueline Etulle, Roger Rayala, Teresa Tunay, Fonz, Kristopher Grundstrome, Malou Crisologo

Since his father abandoned their family, Jerry has had to play the role of sole breadwinner for his mother, brother, and sister. He earns a living as a tour guide for Japanese men who travel to Cebu for the sights as well as the women. When the influx of foreign tourists declines as a result of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, he agrees to accommodate local tourists and falls for Luna, a well-off adopted Manileña who’s engaged to her companion Alex. Jerry’s pride makes him resist his father’s attempts to reconcile with them; he punishes his younger brother as well when he catches him gambling in a casino. When Luna drops her camera into the sea, Jerry sees an opportunity to win her affection away from Alex.

The teamup of Jeffrey Jeturian with script specialist Armando Lao is comparable to the Second Golden Age’s collaborations between their mentors Marilou Diaz-Abaya and Ricky Lee, with Jeturian taking an extensive break from film directing and Lao dying prematurely (both fates of which tragically befell Diaz-Abaya). In a millennial year whose exceptionality has never been adequately appreciated, much less explicated, they came up with a pair of works that seemed generically and structurally opposed, set in the country’s contending major cities. Yet the ready-made response to those willing to find fault with either release is surprisingly simple: watch both in succession and see how one ingeniously complements the other. Bridal Shower’s seemingly frivolous pursuits collapse (normally a disparagement) onto one character’s plot concerns and ends with an ambivalently conclusive coupling, in contrast with the other characters’ resolutions. Minsan Pa meanwhile extends the dilemma of the dispossessed male in Bridal Shower: it would be commonplace in the country to find young working-class hunks who decide to return to their rural roots in order to have a better shot at success. Their objectification by higher-stationed admirers persists nevertheless, whether they like it or not, so they live essentially feminized lives, assured of patriarchal privilege but with their notion of ideal happiness permanently suspended by their social limitations. After traversing the central character’s journey marked by the melancholia of mature acceptance, what awaits the expectant viewer is a quality unique in the works of both director and writer—a happy ending, as smartly disposed and emotionally well-earned as it would be possible for fully attuned affiliates to concoct.

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Kubrador

English Title: The Bet Collector
Year of Release: 2006
Director: Jeffrey Jeturian
Screenwriter: Ralston Jover
Producer: MLR Films

Cast: Gina Pareño, Fons Deza, Nanding Josef, Soliman Cruz, Joe Gruta, Domingo Landicho, Neil Ryan Sese, Johnny Manahan, Miguel Castro, Nico Antonio, Jess Evardone

Despite her old age, Amy’s persuasiveness and her special way of recalling numbers boost her work as a bet collector for jueteng, an illegal game popular in her slum neighborhood. As she goes about her duties, she evades the cops, sits in for her boss at a rigged gambling draw, and even performs some good deeds for her community. All this leads Amy to a fateful encounter after a visit to her son’s grave on All Saints’ Day.

The early post-celluloid production that set hard-to-match standards in directorial style, with real-time storytelling, fluid long takes, and powerhouse performances demonstrating how the strengths of digital filmmaking, granting the participation of genuine talent, could be enhanced. The filmmakers allude to the limits of the medium by introducing a metaphysical element—the mother’s dead son, a reminder of dreams that will never come true—yet we only realize in retrospect how such a device, devoid of its usual tearjerker function, served to prepare us for the mother’s own near-death encounter. On Gina Pareño’s ravaged-yet-hopeful features, a rare mergence of life lessons and masterly performance, we find an epitomization of the hope and despair that the narrow, suspicious, and normativized slum spaces seek to conceal from outsiders.

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Ekstra

English Title: The Bit Player
Year of Release: 2013
Director: Jeffrey Jeturian
Screenwriters: Zig Madamba Dulay, Antoinette Jadaone, Jeffrey Jeturian
Producers: Cinemalaya Foundation & Quantum Films

Cast: Vilma Santos, Cherry Pie Picache, Richard Yap, Ruby Ruiz, Nenita Deonoso, Karen Leslie Dematera, Boobsie, Christopher Ad. Castillo, Raymund Ocampo, Abi Niesta, Zyrus Imperial, Ronaline Ronn Enriquez, Tart Carlos, Antonette Garcia, Erlinda Villalobos, Raymond Rinoza, Hazel Faith dela Cruz, Rex Lantano, Martha Comia, Jake Seneres, Ricky Pascua, Zachary Ezekiel Diaz, Angelica Luis, Mhel Seduco, Michael Bayot, Fatima Centena, Almira Alcid, Cris Garrido, Norberto Portales, Marlon Rivera, Sunshine Teodoro, Vincent de Jesus, Louie Kim Sedukis, Miguel Cruz, Bobby Contiga, Piolo Pascual, Marian Rivera, Cherie Gil, Nico Antonio, Orlando Marcos, Vida Masakayan, Marx Topacio, Afi Africa, Toni Lopengco, Eula Valdez, Rosejean Sevilla, Salvador Zapanta, Glen Elizalde

Even after becoming an unwed mother, Loida refuses to give up her pursuit of bit parts in movies, banking on the awareness that she has more talent than most of her work colleagues. Josie, their coordinator, herds them to out-of-town locales in order to work on a stressful and prolonged TV drama. The bit players maintain the camaraderie necessary for the mutual support they need at work, but Josie also awaits any opportunity for a break so she can raise the tuition money that her daughter tells her is already due.

Calibrating one’s expectation in approaching Ekstra will be the key to uncovering its reflexive charm and cultural circumspection. Vilma Santos had attained the underappreciated ability to maintain a personable presence in her films without upstaging any of her coplayers, in contrast with her rival Nora Aunor’s auteuristic skill in perceiving and seizing a work’s central mechanism in order to override it for the purpose of enhancing, if not bettering, the final product. Jeffrey Jeturian had over a decade’s worth of working through this type of material and demonstrates in Ekstra a delicacy that manages to salvage what could have easily been a devastating, melodramatic resolution. In-joke references to Aunor’s expertise, as well as spot-on parodies of TV-drama conventions, serve to enhance the affecting and all-knowing humiliation that Santos allows her character to endure. Fans of either or both stars—that is, of Philippine cinema in its contemporary entirety—need not hesitate: Ekstra will be more than enough to hold us over until its filmmaker manages to return to creative activity once more.

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1—Hihintayin Kita sa Langit

English Title: I’ll Wait for You in Heaven
Year of Release: 1991
Director: Carlos Siguion-Reyna
Screenwriter: Racquel Villavicencio
(Adapted from the 1939 William Wyler film Wuthering Heights)
Producer: Reyna Films

Cast: Richard Gomez, Dawn Zulueta, Jackie Lou Blanco, Michael de Mesa, Eric Quizon, Vangie Labalan, Jose Mari Avellana

While growing up, Carmina and her adopted brother Gabriel develop feelings for each other, much to the disapproval of her real sibling Milo. When their father dies, Milo relegates Gabriel to the status of family servant. Despite her commitment to her true love, Carmina is forced to marry the wealthy Alan as Gabriel seeks his fortune elsewhere. Years later, Gabriel has become rich himself and vows to get back at those who made him suffer.

2—Ikaw Pa Lang ang Minahal

English Translation: You’re the Only One I’ve Loved
English Title: Only You
Year of Release: 1992
Director: Carlos Siguion-Reyna
Screenwriter: Racquel Villavicencio
(Adapted from the 1949 William Wyler film The Heiress)
Producer: Reyna Films

Cast: Maricel Soriano, Richard Gomez, Eddie Gutierrez, Charito Solis, Armida Siguion-Reyna, Dawn Zulueta

As sole heir to a vast fortune, naïve Adela has all the money she needs. However, all she longs for is the love of her father Maximo, who in turn disdains her, blaming her for her mother’s postpartum death. When a stranger named David courts her, she is quickly smitten. Though Maximo warns her that her suitor is only after her wealth, she elopes with David. Soon, she realizes that this act of rebellion will teach her the harsh realities of life and love.

The presence of “the foreign” has tended to raise contentious exchanges about what exactly constitutes Filipinoness. The success of these two adaptations of Classical Hollywood movies, themselves adapted from 19th-century English-language novels (Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Henry James’s Washington Square), might confirm nationalist author Renato Constantino’s assertion, in Synthetic Culture and Development (1985), that Philippine cinema was merely “reflective” of the West. On the other hand, one may respond by pointing out that because of its universality, film is arguably the least Filipino mass medium, and therefore the valorizing of originality would be a futile pursuit. Moreover, there have been other avid non-Western moviegoers aside from Filipinos. For now, we may regard the success of these twin attempts as evidence of a cosmopolitan strain in our mass audience—a quality that enables them to find nostalgia in rural-set narratives, identify with protagonists of either gender who leave defeated yet return triumphant, and take pleasure in complex narratives, grand production values, and operatic gestures. In such a globalized mode of practice as ours, adaptations of non-indigenous material will be unavoidable; hence we can certainly do worse than have models, with Hihintayin Kita sa Langit and Ikaw Pa Lang ang Minahal as our long-standing state-of-the-craft, that may serve as challenges for future filmmakers to emulate, resist, or outdo.

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Ang Lalake sa Buhay ni Selya

English Title: The Man in Selya’s Life
Year of Release: 1997
Director: Carlos Siguion-Reyna
Screenwriter: Bibeth Orteza
Producer: Reyna Films

Cast: Rosanna Roces, Ricky Davao, Gardo Versoza, Alan Paule, Eva Darren, Crispin Pineda, Gigi Locsin, Cednic Millado, Macky Villalon, John Nielsen Apilado, Virgie Lopez, Manny Mendoza, Loraine Torrado, Cyrill Torrado, Kristofer Curameng, Sunny Castillo, Richard Melu, Dennis Selis, Marilyn Mortiz, Joseph Buncalan, Joey Luna, Irene Medez, Alex Orlanda, Peregrino Tadem, Vicky Pagaron, Jerome Gampani, John Elizar Pascua, Resty Isabel Valido, Joseph Olfindo, Jun Leyva, Ernesto Lavariño, Nestor de la Peña, Lina Trinidad, Anita Edu

Bobby, Selya’s virile but promiscuous boyfriend, disappears from her life when she tells him that she’s pregnant with his child. The desperate public-school teacher travels to his hometown to look for him but is informed by Piling, his landlady, that he just left and she has no idea where he went. Ramon, the owner of the boardinghouse and a principal at the local high school, is also undergoing a difficult breakup with his married lover. Aware of the rumors that Ramon’s gay relationship has caused in the conservative community, Piling devises a scheme where Selya can rent a room and teach at Ramon’s school. She also brings the two together, lying to Ramon that she informed Selya of his preference. A visit from Ramon’s ex causes discord in the newlywed’s life together, but this is minor compared to the sudden reappearance of Bobby.

If we count Rufa Mae Quinto as a comedy specialist, then Rosanna Roces was the country’s last sex-film star. Following the trajectory that all her predecessors aspired to achieve, she agreed to appear in distinctly serious projects, starting with two outings in the same year at Reyna Films. One of these, Ligaya ang Itawag Mo sa Akin (They Call Me Joy), met with acclaim and a slew of recognitions, despite the fact that the entry was too early-wave feminist to be considered useful for gender analysis, much less activism; even right-wing moralists would find its positions on sex work acceptable—so no wonder the elderly critics group embraced it. Downgraded in comparison was her other project, Ang Lalake sa Buhay ni Selya (The Man in Selya’s Life), which may have been misperceived as belonging on the same order as the other film, as well as a corrective to her bawdy and witty public persona. Such an oversight burdened ALBS with baggage it never intended to bear. The key is in looking over the (married) director-writer partnership’s initial collaboration, Misis Mo, Misis Ko (Your Wife, My Wife, 1988), as well as an earlier script by the same writer, Lino Brocka’s Palipat-lipat, Papalit-Palit (Changing, Exchanging, 1982): not only is ALBS queer in sensibility, as the earlier two were, it is also essentially a comedy of manners despite its occasional stroll into melodramatic territory. Roces holds her own in light-handed ensemble work, actually a more difficult performing challenge than tragic drama, while the theater-trained Ricky Davao (recently deceased) elucidates a delicate balance of desire, frustration, and hope, often in impressively modulated combinations. One of our best-achieved queer texts, sneaking and persisting under the radar, just as it should.

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Tatlo … Magkasalo

English Translation: Three … Sharing
English Title: Three
Year of Release: 1998
Director: Carlos Siguion-Reyna
Screenwriter: Bibeth Orteza
(Based on a story by Jun Lana)
Producer: Reyna Films

Cast: Ara Mina, Tonton Gutierrez, Rita Avila, Gina Alajar, Sharmaine Suarez, Eva Darren, Roy Rodrigo, Philip Lazaro, Mailes Kanapi, Kaye Congmon, Lorraine Fernandez, Reggie Gonzales, Sam Intano, Audrey Ignacio, Joel Olivera

Elsie and Tito, a newly married couple, find their union destabilized by Tito’s fiery temper and continuing attraction to his mistress, Susan. Alice, who had a discreet affair with Elsie before the latter got married, resumes their acquaintance—to the consternation of Barok, an out lesbian who pines after Alice. Elsie finds Alice hard to turn away, not only because of Tito’s abusive behavior but also because she finds out that her ex-lover has a terminal illness. Tito’s discovery of the women’s conflicted relationship induces a shift in his regard for his wife, as well as a fascination in and growing respect for the love that women are capable of providing each other.

The imaging of lesbian desire in Philippine cinema has encountered the same difficulties that beset queer folk in conservative cultures everywhere. Since women are recipients of the male gaze, their bodies are allowed to be objectified, but love or sometimes even physical intimacy between them may be permitted only up to the point where male characters have to exercise their prerogative of owning their female partners. Lesbians in Philippine cinema have been more fortunate than their counterparts in other non-Western film cultures, with some depictions departing from the usual tragic or murderous or forcibly heterosexualized (“correctively raped,” to use the right-wing oxymoron) types of characters. The fountainhead of modern queer imaging in local films would be Ishmael Bernal’s Manila by Night (1980), where the butch lesbian figure is nevertheless punished by the narrative for her drug-peddling activities. Mel Chionglo’s Isabel Aquino: I Want to Live (1990) may perhaps be the closest to a politically correct adaptation of a real-life narrative, while Sigrid Andrea Bernardo’s Ang Huling Cha-Cha ni Anita (Anita’s Last Cha-Cha, 2013) is an exemplary and charming coming-out tale. Between these two samples, Tatlo … Magkasalo (1998) proves how difficult the journey has been. Its central female characters comprise a married woman conflicted by her bisexuality, a dying lesbian unable and unwilling to let go of her now-unavailable former partner, and an openly man-hating butch woman attached to both once-and-future lovers and creating difficult triangulated relations. Yet the narrative finds a way to reconcile all these impossible desires, ironically by allowing the straight male to realize, via a process of enlightenment, that his sexual exclusion matters less than the privilege he has of observing how women capable of same-sex love work out their differences among themselves. This makes understandable how Tatlo initially generated disapproving responses among PC observers as well as critics who tend to reject genre products. More recent observers have been attuned to its upholding of queer values, along with a cautiously realistic handling of class differences, where women without men have to constantly endure borderline-poverty conditions: the movie’s social contribution consists in asserting that the realization of radically novel familial relations, no matter how short-lived, is worth the cost of suffering the rejection of patriarchal systems.

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Saan Nagtatago ang Pag-Ibig?

English Translation: Where Is Love Hiding?
Year of Release: 1987
Director: Eddie Garcia
Screenwriter: Armando Lao
(Adapted from the komiks by Gilda Olvidado)
Producer: Viva Films

Cast: Vilma Santos, Tonton Gutierrez, Ricky Davao, Gloria Romero, Alicia Alonzo, Cherie Gil, Alicia Vergel, Eddie Arenas, Perla Bautista, Joonee Gamboa, Suzanne Gonzales, Vicky Suba

When Rick unexpectedly gets his girlfriend Estella pregnant, he fears that his rich grandmother will refuse to give him a large inheritance out of disappointment. To prevent that, he convinces Estella to marry his mentally handicapped half-brother, Val. She reluctantly obliges and eventually lives with Rick’s family. But complications arise when she starts to develop feelings for Val.

Eddie Garcia’s directorial strength lay in glossy handling of complicated narratives, making him an ideal match for Viva melodramas. He also none too soon moved away from conservative male-centered material toward feminist subject matter. And with this Vilma Santos-starrer, he attained a peak of sorts with the help of an unusually inspired komiks adaptation and an equally inspired ensemble delivery. Known mainly for the line “Lagi na lang si Val, ang walang-malay na si Val” [Always blaming Val, the innocent Val], the film might be wrongly regarded as trafficking in sympathy for the mentally disabled. In fact it unexpectedly reverses the disadvantaged son’s marginal situation and makes us comprehend how he could win the loyalty and affection of his pretend-wife.

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Takaw Tukso

English Translation: Constant Craving
Additional Language: Chabacano de Cavite
Year of Release: 1986
Director: William Pascual
Screenwriter: Armando Lao
Producer: Ultravision Films

Cast: Gino Antonio, Julio Diaz, Jaclyn Jose, Anna Marie Gutierrez, Anita Linda, Lucita Soriano, Eva Darren, Tony Rubio

A solid friendship exists among Nestor, his fiancée Debbie, his cousin Boy, and Debbie’s friend Letty. But it gets shattered when a distraught Debbie elopes with Boy after she gets into a fight with her mother. The two get married but settle in the car-repair shop where Nestor lives and works. Tensions rise even further when true-hearted Letty weds Nestor and they live right beside Debbie and Boy.

Tragedy has conveniently become the coin of the realm of the senses, mainly because the medieval tendencies of Philippine Catholicism prefer that people who indulge in sexual pleasure must be made to pay—extravagantly, if possible—for their perceived transgression(s). The creative forces behind this project managed a way out of the predictability of this narrative approach by returning to the basics. It does this by grounding the material in the originary spirit of neorealism, as embodied in the frank sensuality of Luchino Visconte’s Ossessione (Obsession, 1943), a then-daring adaptation of James M. Cain’s occasionally banned crime novel The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934). With an observational expertise that would be the envy of veteran ethnographic filmmakers, Takaw Tukso (like Ossessione) envisions economically impoverished characters involved in dangerous games of seduction and clandestine assignations. Passion ultimately gets the better of their professional and friendly relations, and a comeuppance elevates the drama to the level of some of the most innovative strains in classical Greek theater.

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1—Private Show

Year of Release: 1984
Director: Chito S. Roño (as Sixto Kayko)
Screenwriter: Ricky Lee
Producer: Clock Work Films International

Cast: Jaclyn Jose, Gino Antonio, Leopoldo Salcedo, Lucita Soriano, Yvonne, Aurora Boulevard, Vicky Varga, Johnny Vicar, Bella Flores, Ella Luansing, Angie Ferro

Myrna is a young but worldly-wise lass who shows up at Ador’s live-sex den to apply as a performer. She falls in love with Jimmy, her regular partner. However, her drug habit and his kidney problems strain their relationship. After breaking up with him, he decides to return to his hometown. She grows increasingly dependent on drugs and becomes indifferent to the worsening decadence in her environment and the degradations being done to her.

2—Curacha: Ang Babaeng Walang Pahinga

English Title: Curacha: A Woman Without Rest
Year of Release: 1998
Director: Chito S. Roño
Screenwriter: Ricky Lee
Producer: Regal Films

Cast: Rosanna Roces, Jaclyn Jose, Ara Mina, Ruby Moreno, Lucita Soriano, Maureen Mauricio, Mike Magat, Dick Israel, Tito Arevalo, Lito Legaspi, Richard Bonnin, Roy Alvarez, Tony Mabesa, Alex Cortez, Tom Olivar

Curacha, a friend of Myrna’s and a live-sex performer herself, witnesses an apparition of the Virgin Mary while praying in church: the lady walks down the altar toward her, slaps her, and she awakens to the announcement of another ongoing coup d’état. Since security forces blockaded the street where she exited, she has to find her way out, only to discover that the rest of the city has also lost its bearing.

Live-sex performers function as an index of the country’s destitution, restoring pornographic spectacle to its voyeuristic theatrical origin. The act of capturing their lives in film raises a paradox—How can a society with a media industry still need live-sex performances?—that, depending on how well the question is answered, can lead to several possible conclusions. In the instance of the martial-law era’s Private Show and the post-martial law period’s Curacha, the viewer is provided with a chronicle of the country’s continuing descent into an abyss of social and moral depravity, notwithstanding an undeniable step-up in the affluence of the elite. A perceptible maturation is also suggested by the casting of the best “bold” performers of their respective periods—the heartbreakingly waifish Jaclyn Jose of the 1980s and the boundlessly voluptuous Rosanna Roces of the ’90s. Both play characters who lose all claims to dignity yet refuse to surrender to unmitigated debauchery by foregrounding the fierce and unyielding combination of talent, warmth, humor, and sensual presence that mark the Filipina as the world has come to know her.

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1—Itanong Mo sa Buwan

English Translation: Go Ask the Moon
English Title: Moon Child
Additional Language: Chabacano de Cavite
Year of Release: 1988
Director: Chito S. Roño
Screenwriter: Armando Lao
Producer: Double M Films

Cast: Mark Gil, Anjo Yllana, Jaclyn Jose, Anita Linda, Tita Muñoz, Susan Africa, Mia Gutierrez, Lucita Soriano, Fernando Morato, Cris Vertido, Resty Vergara, Gamaliel Viray, Alan Glinoga, Jing Jing Manaloto, Aljon Jimenez, Jojo Reyes, Bodjie Pascua, Archi Adamos, PETA Kalinangan Ensemble

In the course of a botched bank robbery, a teller, Josie, is taken hostage by Angel, when his partner is killed. He takes her to the isolated rural home of Juana, an elderly lady. After Josie is rescued and Angel is seriously wounded, her husband, Sammy, has difficulty coming to terms with her version of events, especially since his mother is intent on maligning the woman he married. Conflicting statements made by Juana as well as the hospitalized Angel cast further doubt not just on Josie’s narrative but on her character as well.

2—La Vida Rosa

English Title: The Life of Rosa
Additional Language: Chabacano de Cavite
Year of Release: 2001
Director: Chito S. Roño
Screenwriter: Armando Lao
Producer: Star Cinema

Cast: Rosanna Roces, Diether Ocampo, Liza Lorena, Jiro Manio, Angel Aquino, Pen Medina, Jhong Hilario, Nonie Buencamino, Vic Diaz, Albert Martinez, Aurora Yumul, Olga Natividad, Katrina Nazario, Ihman Esturco, Rey Behar, Angie Ferro, Dodie Acuña, Joe Gruta, Cris Vertido, Krystle Zamora, Jackie Castillejos, Cris Michelena, Irma Adlawan, Tom Olivar, Connie Chua, Aurora Uding

After swiping a car from a mark charmed by Rosa, Dado decides he wants to transform the vehicle into a taxicab. Their decision incenses Tiyong, their gangleader, who sets in motion a series of events that leads to Dado whacking him. Lupo, Tiyong’s right-hand person, accepts the assassination since it allows him to take over the criminal organization. Rosa and Dado, however, dream of their own racket, one that will allow them to resettle Rosa’s son and blind mother and enable them to live in peace abroad.

Recognizing when a team effort provides productive dividends over time, Chito S. Roño reattempted the same approach that had worked for him with the twin triumphs of Private Show and Curacha: get a gifted scenarist to write material for the most talented sex symbol of the era. The formula didn’t pan out the same way it did for Ricky Lee’s scripts, since La Vida Rosa falters in comparison with Itanong Mo sa Buwan, despite an undeniable upgrade in Roño’s directorial skills. Then again, Itanong Mo surpasses most unruly-woman films anywhere, its novel structure and use of flashback enabling the narrative to raise issues not just about the reality of events but also the insidious effects of media celebrity, decades before the internet made this debilitating property of modern existence commonplace. For most of its running time until its main character capitulates to the dictates of her partner’s personal interests, La Vida Rosa similarly relishes its opportunity to function as an objective correlative of its lead performer’s remarkable autobiography.

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Bakit Kay Tagal ng Sandali?

English Translation: Why Does a Moment Take So Long?
English Title: A Moment Too Long
Year of Release: 1990
Director: Chito S. Roño
Screenwriter: Orlando Nadres
(With additional dialogue by Emmanuel H. Borlaza)
Producer: Viva Films

Cast: Dina Bonnevie, Julio Diaz, Eddie Garcia, Janice de Belen, Charito Solis, Ai-Ai de las Alas, Eva Ramos, Vangie Labalan, Elsa de Venecia, Gamy Viray, Koko Trinidad, Pocholo Montes, Jess Ramos

In his bid to get rich, Ted convinces his girlfriend Niña to marry his ailing and widowed boss, Edmundo. Ted believes that once Edmundo dies, his wealth will be inherited by Niña, which she can then share with her lover. But when Ted’s plan fails, he marries his boss’s daughter after she takes over Edmundo’s company. Soon, Ted and Niña realize how their ambitions extract a price they may each be unprepared to pay.

By its capacity for depicting the plight of women under a patriarchal system, melodrama has always had the potential to cross over into horror, and nowhere in Philippine cinema has that potential been realized than in the constant discharge of blood, sweat, and copious tears manifested in this film. Along the way a curious development takes place: the characters seem to have been aware that the country’s masculinist authoritarian experiment had recently failed, so the women wind up wresting control of the narrative, and wage war, and negotiate peace, with one another. For their part, the ultimately excluded males display some strength, and never of a constructive nature, only when they’re older—which means that eventually, they die off. The director’s benign bemusement with this lurid and giddy state of affairs provides the darkly comic distance that turns the presentation into a display of what literary and cultural critics call the carnivalesque (from Soviet-era scholar Mikhail Bakhtin’s marvelous dissertation), a seriocomic mode that enables its authors to combine contradictory effects such as tears, fears, and pained laughter.

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Alyas Stella Magtanggol

English Translation: Alias Stella Magtanggol
Alternate Title: Stella Magtanggol
Additional Languages: English, Japanese
Year of Release: 1992
Director: Chito S. Roño
Screenwriter: Ricky Lee
Producer: Seiko Films

Cast: Rita Avila, Romnick Sarmenta, Maritoni Fernandez, Gardo Verzosa, Lito Legaspi, Sylvia Sanchez, Vanessa Escaño, Allan Paule, Karen Timbol, Alicia Alonzo, Tony Mabesa, Ray Ventura, Lolie Mara, Dexter Doria, Shirley Tesoro, Evelyn Vargas, Edmund Cupcupin, Turko Cervantes, Dante Javier, Lora Luna

Adopted by a devout rural couple after she was abandoned by her birth mother, Stella grows up alienated from the values of her small town. In high school, the only friendship she maintains is with Wendy, who never runs out of pocket money but has to endure the sadistic treatment of the mayor. Frustrated by the sexual abstinence of her wholesome boyfriend, Stella turns to the family driver for stud service. The latter’s wife stabs him out of jealousy and he falls off a rooftop, where he and Stella were trysting, exposing their affair to the rest of the townspeople. After her father suffers a fatal heart attack because of her scandal, her mother banishes her from home. She adopts her mother’s family name, Magtanggol, and lives with Wendy, but they have to flee after the mayor’s heavy-handedness traumatizes her friend, nearly killing her. Both women wind up in Manila’s red-light district, where Stella finds gainful employment as a nightclub singer while manipulating the blandishments of a rich suitor and fooling around with a younger lover. Her strokes of good fortune, however, are compromised by her discovery that her boyfriend turns out to have a violently jealous streak.

A rare instance in Philippine cinema where an unruly-woman tale resolves in the main character’s favor without subjecting her to death, disability, or religious conversion, Alyas Stella Magtanggol even more surprisingly claims to have been based on a real-life story. The narrative facilitates this arrangement by devising a parallel scenario where Stella’s BFF is the character who pays the price of faithfully observing patriarchal and familial demands, thus making understandable Stella’s insistence on personal independence and readiness to rebel when her autonomy is challenged. A number of other ethical dictates are upended as well, starting with the configuration of homespun rusticity as an ideal to be upheld over productive female labor, even if the only available option happens to be sex work. The expected dangers of underworld involvement make their appearance even with a supposedly benign and cowardly potentate, but the film also provides a reversal in the historically specific disaster caused by the pyroclastic mudflows of Mount Pinatubo’s 1991 eruption: the now-abandoned structures half-buried in lahar, made to represent their former occupants’ defeated aspirations, serve as useful hiding places for people on the run in ASM. When the surviving characters find themselves in the same territory during the film’s climax, we find ourselves grasping for hope among the ruins, as they do as well.

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Bata Bata Paano Ka Ginawa?

English Translation: Little Child, How Were You Created?
English Title: Lea’s Story
Year of Release: 1998
Director: Chito S. Roño
Screenwriter: Lualhati Bautista
(Based on her 1988 novel)
Producer: Star Cinema Productions

Cast: Vilma Santos, Carlo Aquino, Serena Dalrymple, Albert Martinez, Ariel Rivera, Raymond Bagatsing, Cherry Pie Picache, Angel Aquino, Rosemarie Gil, Dexter Doria, Cita Astals, Andrea del Rosario, Lucy Quinto, Menggie Cobarrubias

For years, Lea has juggled both social work and single motherhood, for the sake of her children Ojie and Maya. But things get complicated when Raffy, Ojie’s father, returns with plans to bring along his son when he migrates to the US with his new wife. Worse, Maya’s father Ding often lashes out to mask his shortcomings as Lea’s live-in partner. As tensions rise, Lea learns what surviving in a patriarchal system really entails.

All the usual reservations about middle-class feminism get tempered by a necessary qualification when situated in a Third-World context. Lea, the central character of Bata Bata Paano Ka Ginawa?, is sufficiently gender-enlightened to know that she cannot expect any treatment equal to the men she opts to live with and live like. Hence in contrast with them, she winds up having to juggle egotistic partners, nosy neighbors, judgmental colleagues (in an educational institution, at that), and freaked-out offspring, all the while scrambling to earn just enough to maintain her independence. An overlay of irony stems from the fact that the film’s setting, like the source novel’s, was more or less after a people’s movement succeeded in ousting a fascist dictatorship, though not the oligarchic, clerical, and foreign-imperialist dominions that gave rise to it. After a few decades playing catch-up with Nora Aunor despite prematurely matching her in terms of local recognition, Vilma Santos manages to come into her own like never before or since. In BBPKG? she dexterously calibrates her trademark mix of charm, vulnerability, calculation, stubbornness, and restrained lust and rage into an unambiguously intoxicating cocktail, reminiscent of Aunor at her best. As a consequence, the movie’s thematic complexities and more-bitter-than-sweet conclusions can be gulped down without much resentment.

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Caregiver

Year of Release: 2008
Director: Chito S. Roño
Screenwriter: Chris Martinez
(Based on a story by Jewel C. Castro, Chris Martinez, Chito S. Roño)
Producers: ABS-CBN Film Productions & Star Cinema

Cast: Sharon Cuneta, John Estrada, Rica Peralejo, John Manalo, Makisig Morales, Jhong Hilario, Mickey Ferriols, Lotlot de Leon, Saul Reichlin, Matthew Rutherford, Claire Jeater, Marita Zobel, Anita Linda, Monique Wilson, Ima Castro, Boots Anson-Roa, Dexter Doria, Neil Ryan Sese, Gary Granada

Sarah Gonzales has to bid farewell to her colleagues, students, and family members when her husband, Teddy, asks her to join him abroad. She will be giving up a bright career as an English teacher to work as a caregiver, in exchange for far better pay. In London, she worries about Teddy’s profligacy and discovers he has not yet been certified as a nurse. In the meanwhile, a grumpy elderly patient, Mr. Morgan, finds in Sarah’s charm and honesty the kind of attention that his family failed to provide him with.

Released during the period when local critics considered mainstream releases unworthy of their attention, Caregiver stands as proof that blind willingness to mimic Western-sourced aesthetic evaluation standards leads down nonsensical and sometimes harmful pathways. Otherwise, the type of attention lavished on artsy “politicized” exercises that regular audiences would resolutely ignore could have been directed toward a standard-issue product that could finally serve as a useful starter text in comprehending the multilevelled complexities of the country’s labor-export policy. The narrative befittingly focuses on a young mother’s travails (apropos of the statistical reality of Overseas Filipino Worker demographics comprising mostly women), from giving up her expertise in a psychically fulfilling local career in exchange for better-paying menial work abroad, ensuring that the family members who’ll be left behind will continue functioning in her absence, and contending with the several domestic and professional challenges that beset migrants Othered by their race, class, and gender. Sharon Cuneta embodied the character at a perfect juncture in her career trajectory as a mature performer capable of acknowledging all manner of predicaments, complemented by perfectly cast players including foreign actors. The film portrays its OFW characters’ triumph in bittersweet terms—a final observational truth that ultimately reflects on a system of governance that cares less for its citizens’ capacity to thrive within their country’s borders, among their own people, than for their placement in a global slave economy so as not to stanch the flow of remittances.

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Signal Rock

Additional Languages: German & Waray
Year of Release: 2018
Director: Chito S. Roño
Screenwriter: Rody Vera
Producers: Available Light Productions & Regal Films

Cast: Christian Bables, Daria Ramirez, Nanding Josef, Mon Confiado, Elora Españo, Keanna Reeves, Francis Magundayao, Archie Adamos, Sue Prado, Jomari Umpa, Ces Quesada, Kokoy de Santos, Mara Lopez, Ruby Ruiz, Dido de la Paz, Judy Ann Santos (voice)

Intoy serves as go-between of his Finland-based sister Vicky (whom he contacts via the stable reception provided by the Magasang Rock Formation, colloquially called signal rock) and his family. He also helps out various townsfolk in his capacity as jack of all trades, proud member of his community, and occasional delinquent indulged by everyone, including the police chief. When he falls in love with Rachel, however, he realizes that like his sister and the other young women of the town, she might eventually leave him to work elsewhere and marry a rich foreigner for convenience. At this point, his sister informs him that she might lose custody of her daughter to her abusive ex-boyfriend unless Intoy helps her prove that she has the means to support the child. Intoy realizes he has no choice except to call on people to return the favors he had extended them.

Intended as the middle installment in a trilogy on Biri Island in Samar province, Signal Rock distinguishes itself from its predecessor, Badil (Dynamite Fishing, 2013) by being less overtly political yet more impactful via its more extensively developed thematic discourse. Once more, the narrative is focalized via the crisis situations confronted by a young man, who this time needs to solicit the support of his tight-knit community in order to prevent his sister, a migrant wife, from being deported through the machinations of the abusive foreigner that she married. Intoy, the central character, realizes that the same forces that swept up his sister and his best friend’s girlfriend will soon deprive him of his own shot at small-town happiness, and that all he could do is ensure that the women who left maintain enough stature and equanimity so that their role as their respective families’ providers does not get compromised. Yet Signal Rock works out a persuasive critique of the Philippines’s continuing reliance on labor export, by counterposing the benefits (and excesses) of globalization with the manifold pleasures and satisfactions of homespun values and practices. The strategy may seem conventional, but the film turns out to be anything but. The emphasis on male characters, for example, proceeds from the outflow of women from the town into the world of effective overseas slave labor; the remaining citizens’ insistence on indulging in tradition locks them in a cycle of perpetual reliance on foreign-currency remittances; the perjurious claim that the entire town conspires in making is intended to save one of their own, but it also suggests where the tendency of elected officials to engage in plundering the national treasury comes from. Signal Rock is a throwback as well as a tribute to the achievement of the artists of the Marcos dictatorship, who were able to package essential and painful analyses of then-existing conditions in seemingly fun-filled, devil-may-care celebrations of the quotidian. Above all, as much as it casts a distrustful eye on the system that afflicts the most helpless among us, it also invites us to share in extolling the life force and survival instinct of these same people. It would not be such a stretch to realize that the movie embodies not just Filipino characters (literally), but the Filipino spirit itself.

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Boatman

Year of Release: 1985
Director: Tikoy Aguiluz
Screenwriters: Alfred Yuson & Raffy Guerrero
(From a story by Tikoy Aguiluz, with additional dialogue by Jose F. Lacaba)
Producer: AMA Communications

Cast: Ronnie Lazaro, Sarsi Emmanuelle, Suzanne Love, Josephine Manuel, Jonas Sebastian, Eddie Arenas, Bella Flores, Mario Escudero, Alfredo Navarro Salanga, Susan Africa, Dennis Marasigan, Cloyd Robinson, Ding Navasero

Felipe leaves his job as a boatman ferrying tourists to and from Laguna’s Pagsanjan Falls to try his luck in Manila. He ends up as a live-sex performer and falls in love with his partner Gigi. He also starts a relationship with Emily, an American woman who hires him as her boytoy. As city life consumes him, Felipe realizes that there is a price he must pay for his carnal exploits.

At the height of the people-power movement, critics of the Marcoses were eager to charge the regime with immorality, and the revitalization of the sex-film genre was meant to stand as proof. Admittedly the libertarian atmosphere of the time was cynically intended to demonstrate to foreign observers that film artists enjoyed crucial amounts of freedom and institutional support. Despite this unstable situation, the local industry did manage to yield a number of noteworthy outputs. Boatman, with its disturbing, fevered fusion of high-art aesthetics and underworld debauchery, counts as one of them. The talents behind the film overlapped with those involved in anti-dictatorship projects, so the spectacle of a commercially successful sex-obsessed product criticizing the same socio-political system that gave rise to it can now be better appreciated and evaluated in retrospect.

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Segurista

English Translations: Perfectionist; Dead Sure
English Title: The Insurance Agent
Year of Release: 1995
Director: Tikoy Aguiluz
Screenwriters: Jose F. Lacaba & Amado Lacuesta
(From a story by Tikoy Aguiluz, Jose F. Lacaba, Amado Lacuesta)
Producer: Neo Films

Cast: Michelle Aldana, Gary Estrada, Ruby Moreno, Albert Martinez, Julio Diaz, Pen Medina, Eddie Rodriguez, Liza Lorena, Suzette Ranillo, Teresa Loyzaga, Anthony Castelo, Roy Rodrigo, Manjo del Mundo, Celsar Bendigo, Evelyn Vargas, Melisse Santiago, Vangie Labalan, Pocholo Montes, Edgar Santiago, Mon Fernandez, Allan Garcia, Elan Villafuerte, Philip Lazaro, Ace Espinosa, Taka Musara, Maritess Fuentes, Tess Dumpit

To support her family devastated by the inundation of lahar from Mount Pinatubo, Karen hits upon the novel idea of selling insurance to the clients she encounters as a guest relations officer (the Philippine euphemism for bar hostess), through which she attains a level of success that makes her the highest earner in her batch of insurance agents. Her husband and daughter in Pampanga remain unaware of her less-than-savory strategy, and she knows enough about her patrons, from the example of her constantly lovelorn roommate Ruby, to keep professional distance from them even while allowing them access to her body. A number of clients, however, are attracted to her unattainability: one of them courts Ruby to get close to her while another decides to break up with his family despite her protestation. An even more dangerous obsessive, one that she fails to account for, is the person who conceals his desire for her.

Segurista is a film very much worth watching, for the most part. It starts out as a soft-core sex comedy, exceptional in the face of the usual tragic-moralistic depictions of carnal transgressions in Philippine cinema. It then takes a step forward without abandoning its observational wryness, into a laudable and women-sympathetic colloquy on social mores and inadequate disaster response, as well as on contrasts and parallels among various professions. Along the way it boasts of accomplished technique and performances, although it underutilizes the exceptional Ruby Moreno (who had made her own star turn in a 1993 Japanese masterwork, Sai Yôichi’s All Under the Moon). Its only serious misstep is when it opts for a (mercifully shortish) resolution that demonizes the lowest-ranking worker in its narrative universe—the usual exclusion of the lumpen proletariat from progressive concerns that orthodox leftists unfortunately still consider acceptable, and that has marred too many otherwise noteworthy works in the country.

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Biyaheng Langit

English Translation: Trip to Heaven
English Title: Paradise Express
Year of Release: 2000
Director: Tikoy Aguiluz
Screenwriters: Ianco dela Cruz & Rey Ventura
(From a story by Tikoy Aguiluz & Mirana Medina-Bhunjun)
Producers: GMA Films & Viva Films

Cast: Joyce Jimenez, Mark Anthony Fernandez, Susan Africa, Christian Alvear, Kent Ambos, John Arcilla, Jack Barri, Nida Blanca, Menggie Cobarrubias, Cholo Escaño, Bong Gutierrez, Jeanette Joaquin, Vangie Labalan, Rj Leyran, Bert Martinez, Ali Navarro, Robert Oliviero, Bembol Roco, Boy Roque, Shermaine Santiago, Bert Martinez

Bea, a Filipino-American visiting the Philippines without her parents, finds herself drawn to the world of gambling where her grandmother amuses herself as a senior citizen. She winds up losing the money she was hoping to save so she could live independently, and finds herself buried deeper in debt when an amount she borrows from her best friend also gets squandered on a bad bet. She hooks up with Danny, an orphaned enforcer who collects debts for Bossing, a gambling lord. Still hoping to recover, both of them splurge on funds that belong to Bossing. But their losses force them to hide out in Danny’s slum residence and work out ways to appease Bossing, who has taken an interest in Bea. Their confrontation with Bossing results in bloodshed, so Danny flees out of town with Bea to ask help from a semi-retired ganglord who also has a score to settle with Bossing.

Biyaheng Langit is atypically straightforward for a Tikoy Aguiluz film. That reflects as much on the anxieties that beset local practitioners ever since critical awareness and global validation became ideals to be cherished and pursued. It also indicates how consistently productive filmmakers can occasionally find coasting irresistible, with enough collegial support from local genre specialists to assure them that getting by has its own rewards. Pinoy action films during the late 20th century were at peak productivity, so enough personnel and actors could be conscripted to execute an undertaking with just the right amount of thrills and (courtesy of Aguiluz’s earlier specialization) ribaldry. Folks may be inclined to point out Mark Anthony Fernandez’s relation to his aunt Merle, who pioneered in bomba films, plus his father Rudy, a top action star. But the link goes farther and deeper: not only was his grandfather Gregorio an overlooked First Golden Age director, he was also a remarkable performer, although unfortunately only his supporting performances in his own films remain, and MAF proves himself fully worthy of the association. Beyond these admittedly incidental felicities (marred by the harrowing killing of Nida Blanca under resemblant circumstances), the film probes into the phenomenon of underworld-organized gambling—a concern that was already showing signs of infesting the higher seats of government by this time, and that would continue causing official vexations through subsequent administrations.

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Silip

English Translation: Peek
English Title: Daughters of Eve
Year of Release: 1985
Director: Elwood Perez
Screenwriter: Ricky Lee
Producer: Viking Films International

Cast: Maria Isabel Lopez, Sarsi Emmanuelle, Mark Joseph, Myra Manibog, Pia Zabale, Daren Craig Johnson, Michael Angelo, Arwin Rogelio, Gloria Andrade, Cherriebee Santos

In a remote village, Tonya teaches catechism to the local children while trying to repress the lust she still feels for Simon, her former suitor. Tensions rise when Tonya’s childhood friend Selda returns to the village after years of living in the city. Selda’s sexual emancipation challenges Tonya’s pious facade and soon, their clashing beliefs lead to dire consequences for themselves and the people around them.

Even in terms of its best intentions, Ferdinand Marcos’s martial-law dictatorship inadvertently managed to subvert itself. Silip, admired by the “wrong” crowd, might ultimately serve as the means by which this principle could be demonstrated. It was set in the same locale, written by the same scenarist, and screened at the same venue as the Experimental Cinema of the Philippines’s most celebrated work, Ishmael Bernal’s Himala (1982). Yet Silip re-envisions its unacknowledged predecessor’s female bonding, between the miracle worker and her brothel-operating best friend, as a quest for sexual awakening and fulfillment, and pursues this earthy project to its nihilistic extreme. The ambition itself is quite jaw-dropping, considering the reputations that the artists and the support institution had staked on the project. Not surprisingly, the Church-supported February 1986 people-power uprising ensured that the movie would never be able to contribute to mainstream cultural discourse. As a result, Silip has remained associated with the type of disreputable films that could be shown only at censorship-exempt theaters during the Marcos period and at far more dubious venues afterward. Incredible as it may sound, this may be the closest Philippine cinema has ever come to the smutty sublimity of queer poet, philosopher, and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, several of whose spiritually inflected film discourses were also infused with pornographic imagery and denounced by moralists accordingly.

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Bilangin ang Bituin sa Langit

English Translation: Count the Stars in Heaven
Additional Language: English
Year of Release: 1989
Director: Elwood Perez
Screenwriters: Jake Cocadiz & Jigz Recto
Producer: Regal Films

Cast: Nora Aunor, Tirso Cruz III, Gloria Romero, Perla Bautista, Miguel Rodriguez, Ana Margarita Gonzales, Vangie Labalan, Mario Escudero, Flora Gasser, Beverly Salviejo, Rolando Tinio, Ella Luansing, Deborah Sun, Tess Dumpit

Peasant girl Magnolia has always loved her cruel landowner’s son, Anselmo. But their relationship turns sour as Magnolia, through hard work, becomes rich, and the indolence of Anselmo’s family causes them to lose their wealth. When Magnolia gets pregnant after a drunken tryst with Anselmo, she keeps this a secret from him. Years later, a romance between her daughter and Anselmo’s son forces her to deal with the resentment she has been harboring.

In an ideal world this film would be held up as Philippine cinema’s most successful sample of progressive genre transformation, a concept derived from the ground-breaking Cahiers du Cinéma editorial “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” written in 1969 by Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni. The essay argued, among other points, that certain films, especially commercial projects, may be saddled with conventional material; yet filmmakers (such as Alfred Hitchcock) with sufficient mastery in the medium can utilize style as a means of providing critical commentary on content. Regal Films, with Elwood Perez as director, revived the wildly successful but then-already long-dormant Guy-and-Pip love team via the production company’s previous installments, Till We Meet Again and I Can’t Stop Loving You (both 1985). Perez continued to tinker with the components—usually involving class conflicts—to come up with increasingly ambitious diversions. With Bilangin ang Bituin sa Langit, he went whole-hog with an epic melodrama with period elements and fan-pleasing contrivances, including having Nora Aunor voice a mestiza singer and getting the central couple to play parents as well as their own children. No other local performer could pull off a role that required over-the-top dramatization and playful self-awareness in the same instance, and Aunor had by then attained a performing peak that seemed destined to run for as long as she could stay alive.

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Ang Totoong Buhay ni Pacita M.

English Title: The Real Life of Pacita M.
Year of Release: 1991
Director: Elwood Perez
Screenwriter: Ricky Lee
Producer: MRN Film International

Cast: Nora Aunor, Armida Siguion-Reyna, Lotlot de Leon, Juan Rodrigo, Subas Herrero, Marissa Delgado, Dexter Doria, Marilyn Villamayor, Eddie Infante, Alma Moreno, John Rendez

Pacita is a sassy nightclub singer by night, famed for her bawdy songs and repartee. But by day, she is a loving single parent to her only child, Grace, who is about to leave for Australia after bagging a college scholarship. When a shooting accident leaves Grace in a coma, Pacita’s resolve as a mother will be tested as she faces a slew of problems, not the least of which is her meddlesome and judgmental mother-in-law.

When Nora Aunor undertook the role of an unruly, obsessive nightclub performer, she had just decided to shelve her own auteur production, Greatest Performance (1989), on which she had completed principal photography as performer, writer, and director. Ang Totoong Buhay ni Pacita M. resonates with her understanding of the creative process as well as the insights she had accumulated from decades in the profession. Also by then making an impressive crossover to the legitimate stage via a couple of strenuous productions mounted by the Philippine Educational Theater Association, she apparently decided to amplify her execution of the title character in Pacita M., and only wound up proving that even when it comes to histrionic overkill, no one could do it as well as she could. The movie advances an enlightened pro-euthanasic argument, which serves the purpose of providing a useful message for those who prefer to find any.

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Otso

English Translation: Eight
Year of Release: 2013 / B&W with Color
Director: Elwood Perez
Screenwriters: Vince Tañada & Elwood Perez
Producers: Film Development Council of the Philippines & Earth Moving Pictures

Cast: Vince Tañada, Monique Azerreda, Gabby Bautista, Anita Linda, Jun Urbano, Vangie Labalan, Mark Joseph Garde, Jordan Ladra, Adelle Ibarrientos, Cris Lim, Cindy Liper, Andrew Leavold

Lex returns from Los Angeles to Manila to work on a script for an indie film. After moving to a unit in a run-down condominium, he meets his neighbors—including the sultry Sabina and her aunt, actress Anita Linda, who owns the condo—and they inspire him as he writes. But during a birthday party for Anita, Lex realizes that his observations about what goes on around him are not what they seem.

Philippine cinema has never been known for late-career swings. In contrast with what John Grierson once said of Josef von Sternberg, “When a director dies, he becomes a photographer,” Filipino directors tend to turn into religious moralizers, if not proselytizers. This probably explains why the bewildering left-field turn of a box-office enfant terrible into a full-blown exponent of semi-autobiographical explorations has left mainstream film critics—i.e., the ones organized into award-giving bodies—out in the dark, pun incidental. Elwood Perez had brought on board enough of his audience-oriented skills to ensure that Otso could still work on the level of visual pleasure. The spectacle however of an always-too-successful blockbuster director returning from retirement and not just challenging established taste-mongers, but also overturning their list of favored indie-digital practitioners, must have stung those who preferred to conduct their business with self-certain constancy. The key to the film’s unique and unexpected triumph is scriptwriter and lead performer Vince Tañada, liberated for the moment from his history-based stage material. With Otso, he committed to the fever-dream collaboration with the fervor of someone who has been given an opportunity to make history, rather than interpreting it, for a change. Perez intended Otso, which was about a scriptwriter’s travails, to be the first installment of a personal trilogy drawn from his professional experiences: it was followed by Esoterika: Maynila (Esoterica: Manila, 2014), also with Tañada in a prominent role, about a komiks illustrator; and by the still-to-be-completed and provisionally titled #Mnemonics (Vaya con Dios) (meaning God Be with You), his tribute to 1960s movie queen Amalia Fuentes, with whom he made some of his early films.

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1—Bukas Luluhod ang mga Tala

English Translation: Tomorrow the Stars Will Fall to Their Knees
Year of Release: 1984
Director: Emmanuel H. Borlaza
Screenwriters: Jose N. Carreon & Orlando Nadres
(From a story by Nerissa Cabral serialized in Pilipino Komiks)
Producer: Viva Films

Cast: Sharon Cuneta, Eddie Rodriguez, Gina Pareño, Pilar Pilapil, Tommy Abuel, Rey “PJ” Abellana, Raymond Lauchengco, Lani Mercado, Eula Valdes, Janet Elisa Giron, Romeo Rivera, Mary Walter, Eddie Arenas, Vangie Labalan, Manny Castañeda, Allan Bautista, Timothy Diwa, Mark Cruz, Luis Benedicto, Charlon Davao, Jennifer Sevilla, Heidi Gloria Santos, Cris Daluz, Nelia Rondina, George Estregan

Because she was illegitimate, Rebecca’s mother had to give birth on the street, denied a ride to the hospital by her father Roman Estrella and his legal wife. Her mother’s husband accepts her as his own daughter, but she and her brother have to endure the maltreatment of her half-sisters and their mother, who live in luxury across the street from their shanty. When her stepfather pleads for assistance for an emergency and her cruel stepmother unleashes her guard dog, which fatally attacks him, Rebecca swears to devote her life to bringing down her biological father and his family. She stops studying to work on her career as a singing sensation, but her younger brother is driven violently mad and imprisoned after her half-sister pretends to befriend him in school then mocks him in her home. Rebecca learns that the Estrellas’ businesses are failing and arranges with her lawyer to secretly purchase their residence, just as her other half-sister also goes to pieces when the man she intends to win falls hard for Rebecca.

2—Bituing Walang Ningning

English Translation: Star without a Sparkle
Year of Release: 1985
Director: Emmanuel H. Borlaza
Screenwriter: Orlando Nadres
(From a story by Nerissa Cabral serialized in Pilipino Komiks)
Producer: Viva Films

Cast: Sharon Cuneta, Christopher de Leon, Cherie Gil, Jay Ilagan, Tommy Abuel, Joel Torre, Chanda Romero, Lorli Villanueva, Vicky Suba, Lito Pastrana, Timothy Diwa, Eric Borlaza, Alvin Torres, Ronald Catahan, Gemmalyn Lingad, Rose de Guzman, Jenny Corpuz, Augusto Victa, Leila Lopez, Tony Martinez, Robert Miclat, Eddie de Leon

Dorina Pineda is so obsessed with famous singer Lavinia Arguelles that she spends her spare time and money to attend her live appearances, and sneaks out extra garlands of sampaguita (jasmine) from the handicraft shop where she works, to offer them to her idol. She also sings at casual or small-time venues, in order to better emulate Lavinia, who pretends to appreciate Dorina’s fanaticism despite finding her repulsive because of her poverty. When Lavinia, in a fit of pique, refuses to fulfill her commitment to a producer’s programs, Dorina volunteers to take her place, and Lavinia’s ex-boyfriend is pleasantly surprised by Dorina’s talent and drawn to her kindness. All of which increases Lavinia’s ire toward her still-worshipful follower.

Bukas Luluhod ang mga Tala is primarily remembered as the film that clobbered Mike de Leon’s Sister Stella L. (1984) at the box-office, in spite of the antidictatorship movement’s full-blast status. It has been read in retrospect as the film that embodied Sharon Cuneta’s “Noranian turn” (as expressed in the title of an article by Bliss Cua Lim), in which Cuneta succeeded in sustaining her box-office supremacy by adopting the rags-to-riches narratives associated with Nora Aunor, further highlighted by the fact that SSL starred Aunor’s long-term rival Vilma Santos. A more frankly commercialist undertaking than its successor Bituing Walang Ningning, BLT demands a higher level of tolerance for its overeagerness to appeal to an infantilized conception of the movie audience. Then again, this also accounts for its more effective denouemont, since its unfettering from “proper” storytelling devices provided it with leeway to harness more passionate (though predictable) circumstances. BWN, the next year’s Cuneta juggernaut, served to to underlay the essential “Dulsita” argument forwarded by Jerrick Josue David.[1] Its and its predecessor’s common historical background provides a useful context: Emmanuel H. Borlaza developed his audience-friendly approaches during the wholesome teen-idol musicals meant to provide a moral counterweight to the soft-core bomba films of the late 1960s and early ’70s; he also (more than once) assisted in the revival of Cebuano-language cinema by introducing smart reworkings of commercial genres. Viva Films, for its part, intended to foster conservative values in film material and production during the Marcos era, with Sharon Cuneta as its signature performer. This assumption served to challenge Filipino filmmakers, who were by then already used to devising ways to bypass or subvert the many restrictions that government authorities imposed on the country’s most popular mass medium. Not surprisingly, several Viva productions have proved worthier of long-term appreciation than observers initially thought. As the last of a series of Hollywood-style movie queens to stake her claim on pop-culture history, Cuneta took note of the lessons of her predecessors (hence her “Noranian” turn) and has been shaping her life according to her perception of what history expects from her: feminist responsibility then, democratic politics today, always with a well-known affection for her followers. Not only is she the only movie queen whose fan vehicles (where she ironically plays an impoverished aspirant in one and a starstruck devotee in the other) deserve to be honored, even before she upgraded to mature roles; she has also persisted in finding her way, high-profile as ever, even with the rambunctiously vexatious arrival of new media and new politics in the new millennium. Among the many other pleasures that BWN bestows are its evergreen title song and the line uttered by exasperated but self-amused drama queens since then: “You’re nothing but a second-rate, trying-hard copycat,” preferably with a glass of well-aimed cold water in hand. Cuneta had barely just begun by then.

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Stolen Moments

Year of Release: 1987
Director: Emmanuel H. Borlaza [as Maning Borlaza]
Screenwriter: Jose Javier Reyes
Producer: Regal Films

Cast: Alma Moreno, Rio Locsin, Rey “PJ” Abellana, Chanda Romero, Miguel Rodriguez, Perla Bautista, Roy Alvarez, Gigi de la Riva, Deborah Sun, Robert Arevalo, Nikki Martel, Barbara Perez, Romeo Enriquez, Lucita Soriano, Alfred Baretto, Vic Ramos, Ferdie Fernando, Naty Mallares, Geena Zablan, Vangie Labalan

Marietta endures the scolding of her stepmother, whom she resents because her foreign-based father sends some money for her upkeep to her. Fredo, her neighbor in the slum community, continues to court her although she, like many other girls, has eyes for the handsome and well-built Alex. In the company where the latter is employed, Carol, the owner’s daughter, insists on assigning Alex (whom she initially calls by his family name, Bernabe) to drive her to various occasions, to the point of eventually asking him to accompany her to social functions. They quarrel because Alex feels left out, but when he goes home drunk, Marietta attends to him and they wind up sleeping together. Finally Carol admits her attraction to Alex and he agrees to marry her even though her parents disapprove of him, while Marietta, hoping that Alex might be able to fall for her, in turn finds herself rejected by him. She then accedes to Fredo’s request that they tie the knot, and invests in the same furniture-export business that Carol founded, expressing her disappointment in Alex’s class-intimidated reluctance to help run their enterprise. Fredo and Alex meet accidentally and arrange a dinner event for their partners, where Marietta inquires into Carol’s business secrets. Carol realizes one day that Marietta has poached her investment contacts and asks Alex to talk with her—an opportunity that Marietta exploits to extend their earlier one-night stand into a full-blown extramarital fling.

Middle-class chroniclers among popular narrative artists get an unfair shake from critics, who tend to drastically conclude that they’re performing as apologists for the bourgeoisie. Ironically a new type of influential commentators emerged during the millennium, who unconsciously extended this argument by insisting on high-art values, with an even more pathetic circle of influential academe-based critics accepting this criterion so long as the products they honored depicted poverty-stricken subjects. Emmanuel H. Borlaza’s extensive career, covering commercial productions in a number of capitals, is one example of how such ridiculous requisites could have pernicious consequences: none of his Cebuano-language films have been preserved despite their strong repute. Stolen Moments demonstrates how such long-trained expertise could be misrecognized. The class conciliation that it builds toward is founded on business competition, which is forthwith dismissed as soon as one side has won, and transforms instead into a competition where the hunkier of the two male leads is the prize. The two class-divided women who drive the narrative are provided with epiphanies drawn from a realization of the cost of their aspirations: Carol, the heiress who turns her back on family wealth, discovers that working for the man of her dreams wears her out and drives him to the arms of her competitor Marietta, whose slum background in turn enables her to fight dirty when necessary—until her moral conscience makes her realize that the world where she insinuated herself will actually keep rewarding her depravity as long as she maintains a veneer of respectability. The unexpected resolution, where two strong conflicting women negotiate a workable arrangement between them, is salutary not just because of the reverse gender exclusion that it promotes, but also because a long period of military dictatorship was just dismantled by a female challenger. Carol’s acceptance of Marietta’s apology for “borrowing” her hubby,[2] although seemingly a violation of the progressive proscription on class conciliation, actually signifies the ex-heiress’s initiation into the messy but pleasurably queer ethos of working-class pragmatisms.

Note

[1] These two Sharon Cuneta studies may be considered the exemplification, and one hopes the resumption, of Philippine star studies after scholarly literature on Nora Aunor, notwithstanding institutionally commissioned pieces on foreign-celebrated auteurs and a dubiously motivated anthology on a performer who wished to be counted the equal of Aunor and Cuneta. Their publication history is as follows: Bliss Cua Lim, “Sharon’s Noranian Turn: Stardom, Embodiment, and Language in Philippine Cinema,” Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, vol. 31, no. 3 (Fall 2009), pp. 315–358; and Jerrick Jose David, “Dulsita, ang Kabuuan ng Kontradiksyon ng Imahen ni Sharon Cuneta sa Pelikulang Pilipino (Dulsita, the Total Contradiction of Sharon Cuneta’s Image in Philippine Films),” Kritika Kultura, vol. 25 (August 2015), pp. 314–343, DOI:10.13185/1656-152x.1655.

[2] Feminist studies was just catching up at this point, with scholars pointing out how equivalent Western film plots (notably Susan Seidelman’s Desperately Seeking Susan, 1985) appropriated the practice of homosociality articulated by queer-theory pioneer Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (in her Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, also 1985), wherein straight male friends temper the terror of the prospect of the intimacy of same-sex desire between them by displacing it onto women—i.e., using their female partners as objects of exchange instead of offering their own bodies to their friends.

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Gabi Kung Sumikat ang Araw

English Title: Sun Rises at Night
Year of Release: 1983
Director: Gil Portes
Screenwriter: Ricky Lee
(From a story idea by Manny Pichel)
Producers: Four N Films & Gold Lion Productions

Cast: Gina Alajar, Charito Solis, Sandy Andolong, Kristine Garcia, Edgar Mande, Juan Rodrigo, Bebong Osorio, Willy Cruz, Glenda Tuazon, William Martinez

A nightclub singer, Rosita is used to entertaining male customers and occasionally sleeping with them for the money. After a while, she falls in love with Danny, but winds up quarreling with him. Lota, Danny’s ex, searches for him to be able to reconcile with him. Via a detective, she finds out that he died after his last date with Rosita. The detective also warns Rommel, who’s apparently falling for Rosita’s charms, that a number of other people have been found dead after associating with her.

More typical of Gil Portes’s output, Gabi Kung Sumikat ang Araw furnishes strong material with less-than-satisfactory execution. Enough integrity remains to reveal certain concerns of the period, specifically the late martial-law era of the elder Ferdinand Marcos, when pent-up dissatisfaction with the regime’s mismanagement and corruption was just about to be detonated by the assassination of returning oppositionist Benigno S. Aquino Jr. The mid-plot revelation of a community of nighttime normies who transform into old people during the day could readily be read as an allegory for Communist-rebel outsiders, amplified by their wariness about being discovered. Yet the contemporary decline in rebel militancy enables the film to command an even stronger signification—as a metaphor for outlaw sexualities. The climactic onslaught of geriatric folk evokes parallels with the Spanish horror classic Island of the Damned (dir. Narciso Ibáñez Serrador, 1976), where the seemingly harmless children are replaced by initially benign elders. The situation in GKSA is arguably more distressing, since people who age are presumed to have acquired wisdom and enough apathy to let go of survival issues.

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’Merika

English Translation: America
Year of Release: 1984
Director: Gil Portes
Screenwriters: Clodualdo del Mundo Jr. & Gil Quito
Producer: Adrian Films

Cast: Nora Aunor, Bembol Roco, Marilyn Concepcion, Cesar Aliparo, Boogie Abaya, Chiquit Reyes, Marshall Factora, Brenda Duque

For five years, Mila has been living well in New Jersey as a hospital nurse and a nursing-home aide. However, she is beset with loneliness and constantly questions whether or not she should stay in America. It is when she falls in love with fellow Filipino immigrant Mon that she truly sees the situation she is in and finds the answers she has long sought out.

The Nora Aunor persona embodied the working-class Filipina, tracking the latter’s transition from local domestic to foreign care professional. ’Merika would necessarily exhibit alienation and weariness, since these are essential components of the overseas worker’s experience. The film sports a rarely encountered reality effect, drawn from filmmaker Gil Portes’s training in official (and therefore “objective”) documentary practice. Local film observers would be hard-put to find a movie whose production elements are so subtle and unobtrusive, perfectly matched as usual by Aunor’s delivery. Toward the end of the narrative, a series of editorial interventions points up the fictional nature of the material by interweaving simultaneous scenes from disparate locales. At this point, and by this means, the text’s reality-based presentation transforms into a call to empathy and attention.

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Bukas … May Pangarap

English Translation: Tomorrow … There’s a Dream
Year of Release: 1984
Director: Gil Portes
Screenwriter: Ricky Lee
Producer: Tri Films

Cast: Gina Alajar, Tommy Abuel, Ruben Rustia, Michael Baluyot, Richard Baluyot, Joy Glorioso, Lucy Quintos, Bebong Osorio, Dante Balois, Daniel Martin, Eric Lava, Tony Pascua, Beda Orquejo, Thea Cleofe, Chito Vicente, Evelyn Vargas, Josie Galvez, Mel Ladongga, Lucy Baldorado, Bes Flores, Sammy Morales

When her husband Udong becomes a contract worker in Saudi Arabia, Mering adopts an optimistic disposition despite the hardship of rural poverty. After a month without hearing from him, she tries to allay her fears for the sake of their two young sons. When he returns with nothing, victimized by his recruiter and imprisoned as an illegal alien in the country he had pinned his hopes on, she has to figure out ways to pay their creditors and survive from one day to the next, since Udong is obsessed with avenging himself on the recruiter. Nothing that the couple can do is able to stave off hunger, the contempt of unsympathetic neighbors, and the negligence of an unresponsive government system, compounded with their growing disaffection for each other.

One way of accounting for the critical negligence suffered by Bukas … May Pangarap is that it functioned too effectively as a cautionary protest film, the same way that early social-realist texts presented difficulties suffered then by our impoverished compatriots that have since been redressed, or that war films delineated conditions that no longer exist. An even more insidious factor may have been at work as well: Gil Portes did not belong to the front- or even second-rank of elite practitioners favored by local tastemongers, so he apparently could not be capable of accomplishing two vital samples in a row, no matter that they happened to cover the same topic of overseas work. ’Merika, the film with a triumphant narrative, has been the one that shows up in extensive canon listings, although Bukas can similarly boast of a storytelling triumph of its own. As an entry in the country’s yearend film festival, it has even proved to endure better than the films that out-earned and out-awarded it. As in the case of Nora Aunor in ’Merika, Portes hands to Tommy Abuel what has been far and away his defining performance; but it is Gina Alajar’s also-overlooked turn as the conflicted housewife, stressed beyond humanly endurable limits, that remains frighteningly and recognizably real.

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Playgirl

Additional Language: “Swardspeak” [Philippine gay lingo]
Year of Release: 1981
Director: Mel Chionglo
Screenwriter: Ricky Lee
Producer: Regal Films

Cast: Charito Solis, Gina Alajar, Phillip Salvador, Alicia Alonzo, Mary Walter, Al Tantay, Gabby Concepcion, Lily Miraflor, Jimi Melendez, Ernie Zarate, Deborah Sun, Emma Valeros, Joonee Gamboa, Renee Johnson

Tonya endures her profession as a middle-aged Chinatown hooker to enable her daughter to finish high school. Cindy, however, prefers to audition at singing contests despite having no talent, and hang out with her good-time pals, through whom she meets Boogie, a smooth-talking pimp. Tonya’s discovery that Cindy never completed her studies drives the latter to finding any available job. When Tonya learns that Cindy has become a prostitute, she drives her daughter away, further intensifying Cindy’s resolve to succeed in sex work.

Although he had dabbled in other aspects of film production, Mel Chionglo became best known as a production designer, prior to debuting as a filmmaker. Not surprisingly, Playgirl foregrounds this element (with Benjie de Guzman in charge), with a deliberately measured pace allowing its audience to partake of its impressively detailed environment. What got overlooked, in the initial flurry of reservations regarding languid sensibility and sordid subject matter, was the carefully calibrated treatment that inhered in Ricky Lee’s screenplay. The women realize that it may be next-to-impossible to break out of the life, but it also motivates them to redefine the terms of their relationships with men and, when afforded an opportunity, with their exploiters as well. Its compassionate dissection of mothering evokes several high points in Classical Hollywood cinema (notably King Vidor’s 1937 Stella Dallas), with Playgirl qualifying the female parent’s readiness to sacrifice by counterweighting it with an essential component of righteous rage.

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Sinner or Saint

Year of Release: 1984
Director: Mel Chionglo
Screenwriter: Ricky Lee
Producer: Regal Films

Cast: Claudia Zobel, Charito Solis, Gloria Romero, Patrick dela Rosa, Ricky Davao, Raffy Bonanza, Rey Malte Cruz, Julio Diaz, Joey Galvez

Despite being a wife to Fred and a mother to their child, Dina cannot resist her youthful restlessness. Against familial objections, she goes to Manila to pursue her studies but ends up having an affair with a classmate. When Fred learns of this, he takes his wife back to their hometown where they have another child. But it does not take long before Dina’s promiscuity gets her into trouble again.

Sex goddess Claudia Zobel died in a vehicular accident right after completing work on a film whose narrative bizarrely paralleled her peripatetic and unconventional existence, and uncannily predicted her tragic end. Based on the tabloid report of a woman who kept abandoning her well-appointed rural middle-class family for a series of dangerous big-city encounters, the film maintained the abject elements of her tale while providing Dina, the central character, with heightened self-awareness, as a sometime student of literature and occasional critic of traditional gender roles. Despite the harrowing depths of Dina’s self-degradation, the film is remarkably non-judgmental about the decisions she makes and their effects on her family and lovers—a rare local achievement in film naturalism.

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1—Nasaan Ka Nang Kailangan Kita

English Translation: Where Were You When I Needed You
Additional Language: English
Year of Release: 1986
Director: Mel Chionglo
Screenwriter: Ricky Lee
Producer: Regal Films

Cast: Susan Roces, Hilda Koronel, Snooky Serna, Janice de Belen, Eddie Garcia, Aga Muhlach, Richard Gomez, Chanda Romero, Anita Linda, Katrin Gonzales, Vangie Labalan, Ernie Zarate, Alfred Barretto

Cristy finishes high school at the top of her class, but her mother Rosa informs her that she cannot afford to send her to college, asking her instead to help her expand her food-catering operation. Cristy instead seeks help from her estranged father Julio, whose wealthy wife resents Cristy’s presence in their household. Rosa refuses to reconcile with Cristy and instead pressures her younger daughter to work harder so she can prove to Julio that his abandonment did not crush her. The older generation’s concerns intensify with the younger people as their pawns, until Julio’s undiscovered medical condition gets the better of him.

2—Paano Kung Wala Ka Na

English Title: What Will Happen When You’re Gone
Additional Language: English
Year of Release: 1987
Director: Mel Chionglo
Screenwriter: Ricky Lee
Producer: Regal Films

Cast: Susan Roces, Eddie Gutierrez, Charo Santos-Concio, Snooky Serna, Miguel Rodriguez, Mona Lisa, Marissa Delgado, Debraliz, Ramil Rodriguez, Chanda Romero, Romeo Rivera, Linda Montenegro, Raquel Villavicencio, Becky Misa, Malou de Guzman, Luis Benedicto

After raising Ampy, a mature and level-headed daughter, Raffy feels suffocated by his marriage to Ruby and wishes he could start anew with Doris, his mistress. Ampy meanwhile is perturbed when her boyfriend Don insists on going abroad for further training even after she tells him that she’s pregnant with their child. Sonny, her long-time admirer, takes a job in Raffy’s firm so he could get closer to Ampy. Ruby’s old flame Gary also starts hanging out with Ruby even though he’s still married to a mutual acquaintance of theirs. As someone who believes in propriety and keeping her feelings to herself, Ruby realizes that she has to undergo a process of adjusting to a messy and constantly changing world.

Despite some problems brought on by her attempting monopolistic control as well as by the meddling of self-appointed culture authorities led by then First Lady Imelda Marcos, Lily Monteverde was a true-blue cinema fan who made sure to introduce old-time talents, genres, and traditions whenever the opportunities presented themselves. Her success with First Golden Age movie queen Susan Roces had all the hallmarks of laudatory tributes, at a time in Philippine production history when such attempts were too retrograde for the hip crowd yet too advanced for screen-culture scholars. No matter though, since the films were warmly welcomed by their intended audiences and earned Roces a younger set of admirers. Around this time “Mother” Lily also successfully revived the Guy & Pip tandem, the country’s most successful multimedia love team; but it’s the Roces films that set the template. Both focus on conflicts in the domestic sphere, with the interests of mothers and daughters colliding with shifting social values. Nasaan Ka Nang Kailangan Kita negotiates class-crossed outings while Paano Kung Wala Ka Na confines itself to the privileged sector. Each one makes sure to arrive at a point where the women can have a satisfactory resolution, with Roces’s histrionic confidence building up as the earlier film leads to the later one. No one will commit the mistake of wishing she tackled the historical and/or working-class tragediennes on which, say, Anita Linda or Nora Aunor founded their reputations, but within the circumscribed terms that her persona observes, no one will wish that someone else had taken her part either.

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Babaing Hampaslupa

English Title: Vagrant Woman
Alternate Title: Babaeng Hampaslupa
Additional Language: English
Year of Release: 1988
Director: Mel Chionglo
Screenwriter: Ricky Lee
Producer: Regal Films

Cast: Maricel Soriano, Richard Gomez, Edu Manzano, Rowell Santiago, Gina Alajar, Janice de Belen, Liza Lorena, Leni Santos, Carmina Villaroel, Anita Linda, Mario Escudero, Vangie Labalan, Roscoe Martin, Eva Ramos, Lucy Quinto, Josie Galvez, Rosanna Jover, Sylvia Garde, Maribel Legarda, Tita de Villa, Aida Carmona, Ilonah Jean, Alma Lerma, Evelyn Vargas, Joe Jardi, Malou de Guzman, Hazel Atuel, Bing Davao, Edgar Palomar, Elaine Eleazar, Lollie Mara, Bon Vibar, Valerie Mayor, Patty Calupitan, Romy Bermudo, Troy Martino

After their mother elopes with a neighborhood suitor, Remedios assumes responsibility for her two younger sisters. She couldn’t make ends meet via farmwork, so she entrusts her sisters to relatives and migrates to Manila. She finds work as a dunk-tank girl in a carnival, where Vincent, a slumming entrepreneur, takes pity on her and recruits her for his bus company. She agrees to be a ticket conductor since it’s the only job opening at the moment, and becomes fast friends with another lady conductor as well as her route driver, Jimmy, who offers her residential space in his small family home. When Vincent finally finds a less stressful position for her, she realizes that he and Jimmy are both interested in her and resolves to pursue her pragmatism, since it had enabled her to upgrade her stature in society.

Maricel Soriano’s star persona was popularly described as taray (fierce or sassy) but its expansion in film roles necessarily transmuted into street-tough combativeness (butangera would be the closest equivalent), where its comic roots served to temper her characters’ harsh behavior. That she would turn out to be the most successful among the Regal Babies crop of young talents also indicated a perfect fit with the company’s (and its owner’s) unruly reputation, constantly running into trouble with the hypocritical moral guardians of the martial-law regime of the earlier Ferdinand Marcos. Babaing Hampaslupa provides what may be the closest to a standard version of her persona’s trajectory: a ferocious personal struggle against destitution that mirrors her real-life narrative, leading to early triumph via charm, talent, and chutzpah, with an ill-advised turn into the excesses and indulgences of the high life leading either to catastrophic loss or, as in this film, to (re)discovering fulfillment in returning to the family and community she once left behind. The moralism of this type of closure might have accounted for the apparent cold reception by conservative critics resistant to the challenges posed by genre studies, consequently missing out on a vital opportunity to connect popular culture with then-emerging trends in feminist empowerment and queer politics after the collapse of the military dictatorship.

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Developing Stories: Lucia

Alternate Title: Lucia
Year of Release: 1992
Director: Mel Chionglo
Screenwriter: Ricky Lee
(From a story by Lino Brocka)
Producers: Manila Inter-Film Productions, BBC Television, Television Trust for the Environment, One World Group of Broadcasters

Cast: Lolita Rodriguez, Gina Alajar, Suzette Ranillo, Elvira Baldomero, Jonathan Darca, Lorenzo Mara, Mario Escudero, Aurelio Estrada, Marilou Garingalao, Nanding Josef, Vangie Labalan, Mark Jason, Aida Carmona, Pocholo Montes, Malou de Guzman, Dante Balois, Eva Ramos, Edgar Santiago, Carmen Serafin, Mike Montey, Evelyn Vargas, Fred Capulong, Estrella Antonio, Reggie Lasam, Joel Lamangan, Rey Malte Cruz, Prones Gonzales, Jun dela Paz, Domingo Landicho, Renato Morado, Edna May Landicho, Nonie Buencamino, Pons de Guzman, Loida Damondon, Chie Concepcion, Kess Burias, Rody Vera, Rey Ventura, Lucy Quinto, Josie Galvez, Mari Sambilay, Ireneo Flores, Lucita Soriano, Sylvia Sanchez

After an oil-tanker spill, most residents of a fishing village migrate outward, to be able to earn a living. Since Lucia’s husband and father refuse to leave, she stays on with her family. After her husband and his fellow fishermen are gunned down for venturing too close to privately owned fish pens, Lucia decides to move her family to Manila, although her daughter Cynthia remains to be with her husband Ador, a peasant organizer. In Manila, her daughter Chedeng, who also lost her spouse in the same incident where her father was killed, is able to secure sweatshop work. Lucia however could not watch over her younger daughter Jenny, who gets drawn into the red-light district overrun by foreign pedophiles. She sends her young son to school but he gets waylaid by child hoodlums and soon partakes of their use and selling of illegal drugs. When Cynthia clandestinely asks to see Chedeng to report that Ador was abducted by soldiers and that she has become a wanted figure, Chedeng also confides her involvement in union work. Lucia’s family and neighbors are driven out of the slum area by a developer and reduced to scrounging for resellable scraps at the notorious Smokey Mountain landfill.

Lucia stands as the best-realized of the many projects left behind by Lino Brocka, after his sudden death in a 1991 vehicular accident. It exhibits his late-career preference for incident-packed storytelling, resembling Orapronobis (1989) but with the narrative driven by a woman whose heroic efforts at overseeing the welfare of her family are thwarted by the inhumane malignancy of uneven neoliberal development. Only Brocka could have bestowed full justice to this tale, but Chionglo manages with enough compensatory achievements to make the film worth one’s time. His sense of socioeconomic milieu is arguably superior to Brocka’s—no mean achievement by any measure, and essential in a narrative that barrels ahead almost without pause for its characters’ (and audiences’) recovery. Even more impressively, he extracts from Lolita Rodriguez veristic depths that she was never able to display in any of her outings with Brocka, enabling her to claim to being one of Philippine cinema’s acting greats. Anyone who still harbored doubts about Chionglo attempting a global master’s material might find further confirmation in his then-forthcoming trilogy on male erotic dancers, a takeoff from Macho Dancer (1988), Brocka’s biggest overseas hit.

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1—Sibak: Midnight Dancers

English Translation: Hacked: Midnight Dancers
Alternate Title: Midnight Dancers
Year of Release: 1994
Director: Mel Chionglo
Screenwriter: Ricky Lee
Producer: Tangent Films International

Cast: Alex del Rosario, Gandong Cervantes, Lawrence David, Luis Cortes, Richard Cassity, Danny Ramos, John Mendoza, Leonard Manalansan, Perla Bautista, Ryan Aristorenas, Soxy Topacio, Gino Paul Guzman, Maureen Mauricio, Jeffrey Suarez, Ray Ventura, Nonie Buencamino, RS Francisco, Cherry Pie Picache, Cezar Xerez-Burgos, Romy Romulo, Anthony Taylor, Leonard Obal, Gino Fernando, Frannie Zamora, Armando A. Reyes, Cherry Cornell, Edel Templonuevo, Archi Adamos, Francis Villacorta, Chie Concepcion, Roden Biag, Herbie Go, Frank Rivera

Arriving from Cebu to join his family, Sonny is informed by his mother that the family can’t afford to fund the continuation of his studies yet. His brothers bring him to their workplace, a gay bar, so he can observe them and maybe earn some money from customers who invite him to their tables; eventually the manager notices his popularity and asks him to try his luck in dancing, like his brothers. Dave, who once lived with Joel, visits the place again because he couldn’t stand being apart and accepts Joel’s married status and desire to continue working. Dennis, Sonny’s other brother, gets fired because of his drug habit and winds up jacking cars with a small gang. He also meets Bogart, an apparently homeless youth, and brings him to their residence to be fed and sheltered. The family’s links to the underworld, despite their careful conduct, leads to dangerous consequences when it shows up to haunt them.

2—Burlesk King

Year of Release: 1999
Director: Mel Chionglo
Screenwriter: Ricky Lee
Producer: Seiko Films

Cast: Rodel Velayo, Leonardo Litton, Elizabeth Oropesa, Raymond Bagatsing, Cherry Pie Picache, Gino Ilustre, Nini Jacinto, Joonee Gamboa, Joel Lamangan, Tonio Ortigas, Ross Rival, Frannie Zamora, Joseph Buncalan, Arthur Casanova, Joey Galvez, Joseph Pe, Sofia Valdez, Aila Marie, Lucy Quinto, Teresa Jamias, Jazzi Oropesa, John Wayne Sace, Jake Mendoza, Edgar Santiago, Eric Hegazy, Dante Gomez, Jonathan Paguio, Jhim Tarrosa, Dennis Coronel, Jude Molato, Marvin Lim, Patrick Suarez, Natz Ordon, Jerry de Vera, Reden Villar, Bojo Roa, Leandro Reyes, Jun dela Paz, Alex Cabudil, Marcel Geronimo, Francis Angeles, Jeffrey Lopez, Raneth Jordan, Yessa Jordan, Gino Fernando, Diding de Andres, Daniel Isherwood, Kevin Isherwood, Patrick Richardson, Lee Walco, Amid Eton, Mark Dionisio, Rey Fernando, Justine Perez, Pinky Roces, Remy Aquino Talents

Harry is introduced to a croupier’s job by his best friend James. After the latter fends off extortionists who target the gambling den, they attack him on the street and he winds up killing one of them. He and Harry then flee to Manila, where they find employment as erotic dancers. Harry’s only quirk is his refusal to accommodate American customers, since he still remembers having been traumatized by his American father. He and James live with Harry’s lesbian sister and her partner, while Harry becomes the favorite of a brokenhearted writer and successfully courts a gold-hearted female sex worker who never turns away street urchins asking for food or money. Harry’s pursuits come to a head when he finds out one day that his mother, stabbed by his father when she tried to escape his clutches with Harry, survived the attack.

3—Twilight Dancers

Additional Language: Pampango
Year of Release: 2006
Director: Mel Chionglo
Screenwriter: Ricky Lee
Producer: Center Stage Productions

Cast: Tyron Perez, Cherry Pie Picache, Allen Dizon, Lauren Novero, Ana Capri, William Martinez, Arnel Ignacio, Joel Lamangan, Jerry Lopez Sineneng, Glaiza de Castro, JE Sison, IC Mendoza, Terence Baylon, Kris Martinez, Chester Nolledo, Dennis Recto, Dino Dizon, Marvin Bautista, Harold Montano, Christian Navesis, Johnron Tañada, Topher Castro, Randy Macapagal, Jack Gabaisen, Tyrone Trias, Kryven Lacson, Perry Escano, Miggs Espina, Paolo Larosa

Rescued by Alfred from an abusive family, Dwight joins his friend to work as an erotic dancer. Since his wife disapproves of his profession, Dwight becomes instead a ballroom-dance instructor, despite the smaller income. Madam Loca, who’s fond of rentboys, takes a liking to Dwight and hires him to entertain the murderous and decadent town mayor. Dwight tells his sponsor that he’s saving up to be able to work overseas, so she conscripts him for a well-paying special assignment, which Alfred asks to join for extra income.

After Macho Dancer (1988) became Lino Brocka’s most profitable overseas release, it became possible for his confrere Mel Chionglo, conscripting one of the film’s scriptwriters, to propose another project along the same lines. The still-successful release of Sibak led to two other films also dealing with the lives of working-class male erotic dancers. The first essential point about these entries, despite some of their titles’ attempts to resemble Macho Dancer, is that they were sequels neither to Brocka’s films nor to one another (Ricky Lee, Facebook Messenger, February 22, 2025), thus lending credence to Joel Lamangan’s claim that his Anak ng Macho Dancer (Son of Macho Dancer, 2021) was the first actual sequel to the Brocka film. But a rewatch of the three Chionglo titles in succession also makes another point evident: the trilogy as a whole surpasses the Brocka film—admittedly not a tall order, considering how Brocka himself was still a few projects away from dispensing with conscienticizing foreign viewers, toward recapturing the local mass audience with a light-handed skills display, the likes of which have never been replicated. Nevertheless, the Chionglo films also perform the careful mission of reworking (a different creature from remaking) Macho Dancer, more or less following its chronological presentation: Sibak introduces the social milieu where erotic dancers attempt to redefine family and friendship on workable terms, Burlesk King focuses on the personal circumstances of the typical worker’s extensive sojourn, and Twilight Dancers inspects the sexual and political exploitation conducted by the very officials tasked with overseeing the welfare of the dispossessed. Where Macho Dancer was hesitant in suspending its judgment of the seamier elements of the underworld, the trilogy embraces the entire gamut of so-called perverse sexualities and prohibitions, the better to cast in relief the instances when these options are exercised at the expense of Others. The universe they reveal is peopled by characters who’re loud, theatrical, violent, inclined to camp and drama, with genuinely affecting backstories even when they function as villains, an acquiantanceship worth making when one is in need of intensive rehumanizing.

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Iadya Mo Kami

English Title: Deliver Us
Additional Language: Ilocano
Year of Release: 2016
Director: Mel Chionglo
Screenwriter: Ricky Lee
Producer: BG Productions International

Cast: Allen Dizon, Eddie Garcia, Aiko Melendez, Ricky Davao, Diana Zubiri, Rolando Inocencio, Allan Paule, Ana Feleo, Elora Españo, Tabs Sumulong, Carlo Juan, Brian Arda, Leo Sarmiento, Jess Evardone, James Pascual, James Alanis, Mark Nino Brinsuwela, Minerva Torrejos, Bongjon Jose

Father Greg, a young priest, is transferred by his order to a far-flung diocese, where he learns that the small town is dominated by Julian, an overbearing landlord. He carefully navigates his way around the place, especially since Carla, with whom he had a child out of wedlock, followed him to work out their relationship. The womanizing Julian, whose tolerant wife also takes a shine to the priest, discovers Father Greg’s secret and discusses the situation with him over drinks. When Julian is discovered murdered afterward, Father Greg’s life takes a spin that he barely manages to handle.

Mel Chionglo’s entire career proved most productive in his collaborations with Ricky Lee, yet his last film remains an enigmatic entry, since neither talent had exhibited any leaning toward the spiritual. Yet with Iadya Mo Kami, they managed to advance the strongest religious text in Philippine cinema, ironically by focusing on a cleric teetering on the precipice of moral collapse, more concerned about the human cost of his actuations than about his standing in heaven. Chionglo pulls off this feat by infusing the film with a strong undercurrent of melancholy, allowing the ravishing beauty of the mountain setting to do the necessary work of seducing the audience. Topnotch performances abound, with special attention to Allen Dizon’s quietly authoritative delivery and Aiko Melendez’s fire-and-ice reading of an unpredictable yet fearsomely secure political wife.

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