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1—Brutal

Additional Language: English
Year of Release: 1980
Director: Marilou Diaz-Abaya
Screenwriter: Ricky Lee
Producer: Bancom Audiovision Corporation

Cast: Amy Austria, Charo Santos, Gina Alajar, Jay Ilagan, Perla Bautista, Johnny Delgado, Joonee Gamboa, Nello Nayo, Robert Tongco

Monica is accused of killing her husband Tato and his two friends. Clara, a feminist journalist, believes that there is more to the crime than meets the eye. Since Monica has become too traumatized to talk, Clara gets in touch with Monica’s mother, Tato’s family, and Monica’s best friend Cynthia. As Clara gets closer to finding the truth, a disturbing revelation will determine Monica’s fate.

2—Moral

Additional Language: English
Years of Release: 1982
Director: Marilou Diaz-Abaya
Screenwriter: Ricky Lee
Producer: Seven Star Productions

Cast: Lorna Tolentino, Gina Alajar, Sandy Andolong, Anna Marin, Juan Rodrigo, Michael Sandico, Ronald Bregendahl, Lito Pimentel, Mia Gutierrez, Laurice Guillen, Dexter Doria, Claire de la Fuente, Amy Austria

Four college women become friends with different goals and pursuits. Joey leads a dissipated lifestyle as her way of dealing with an overbearing mother and with her unrequited love for a politically committed activist. The talentless but ambitious Kathy sells her body to attain her dream of fame as a singer. Sylvia longs to work things out with her husband after he leaves her for a gay-bar dancer. Maritess sets her dreams of writing poetry aside to be full-time wife and mother to an old-fashioned male chauvinist. With each other’s support as well as criticism, the ladies try to cope with their respective situations.

Brutal, the first overtly feminist Filipino film, might be showing signs of age by now, but that’s a reflection on how far feminism, or more accurately a variety of feminisms, has journeyed. One might imagine a third- or even late second-wave proponent arching an eyebrow today at how the more transgressive character, the coed call girl—who lives alone, speaks her mind, and insists on her terms even when it comes to sex—is forced to bow before the squarish values of the domestic-violence survivor; or, moreover, how the middle-class journalist is privileged with framing the narrative via her investigative research. Yet the same elements that incited enthusiasm and appreciation among viewers then are still palpable: the cinematographic, almost televisual flatness that facilitates the fluid deployment of flashbacks and flashforwards, the sharp attunement to pop culture, the on-the-mark coaching of performers.[1] Marilou Diaz-Abaya’s follow-up effort, Moral, is that rare occurrence: a commercial project that successfully demonstrates a conceptual abstraction. Inspired by her mentor, Ishmael Bernal, Diaz-Abaya sought out answers to difficult questions whenever her circumstances allowed her, and with producer Jesse Ejercito providing carte blanche, Ricky Lee was able to draft for her a one-of-a-kind narrative that fused Marxist dialectics with dramatic logic, all while observing an ever-evolving process of change through conflict. The result was a multicharacter plot that branched out in unpredictable though never less-than-satisfactory ways—as close to feminist epistemology (the use of gender politics to restructure human knowledge) and radical aesthetics as our mainstream movies have been able to get. Yet the final output has remained as approachable as Brutal, the team’s previous collaboration; this was due to Diaz-Abaya’s elegant, masterly handling, an object lesson in how plastic skills acquire value only in terms of their usefulness in thematic, histrionic, and literary applications. Diaz-Abaya endured a whole set of bum raps throughout her career, but no other non-writing director paid as much attention to the development of material as she did. On the strength of these two early projects, it was no surprise that she managed to garner the admiration of the best writer-directors in the industry.

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Karnal

English Translation: Carnal
English Title: Of the Flesh
Year of Release: 1983
Director: Marilou Diaz-Abaya
Screenwriter: Ricky Lee
(From the legal narrative “To Take a Life” by Teresita Añover Rodriguez)
Producers: Cine Suerte & Yalung Group of Companies International

Cast: Phillip Salvador, Cecille Castillo, Vic Silayan, Charito Solis, Joel Torre, Grace Amilbangsa, Crispin Medina, Ella Luansing, Joonee Gamboa, Rolando Tinio, Vangie Labalan, Gil de Leon, Rustica Carpio

A storyteller narrates a tale her mother told her. Narcing returns to his hometown of Mulawin with his wife Puring. Soon, Puring, who looks like her late mother-in-law, attracts her father-in-law’s lascivious attention. Puring’s fate worsens when her friendship with a deaf-mute laborer is mistaken for an affair. When Narcing finally intervenes in favor of his wife, he winds up killing his father and landing in jail. Narcing escapes and hides with Puring but the long arm of the law and the shadow cast by tradition will not allow them to live in peace.

At the point where Marilou Diaz-Abaya resolved to impress observers as a directorial stylist, she enlisted her long-term collaborator, Ricky Lee, and reworked a sensational journalistic account into a period narrative. The project harnessed a number of elements associated with theater classicism—timeless and placeless settings (actually a rural town in the 1930s) for stylized performances with elements drawn from Greek tragedy: hubristic hero and his patriarchal nemesis, an omniscient single-person chorus with her occasional direct-to-audience speeches, vengeful townfolk who torment the central couple, and so on. The technique of appropriating universal strategies is typically associated in contemporary local cinema with the “low” genres of comedy and horror, so to find them used fairly successfully in a high-art project raised issues of adaptation and appropriation, proof that Diaz-Abaya regarded entertainment as capable of bearing discursive ambition.

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Sensual

Additional Language: German
Year of Release: 1986
Director: Marilou Diaz-Abaya
Screenwriter: Jose Javier Reyes
Producer: Regal Films

Cast: Barbara Benitez, Charito Solis, Lito Gruet, Chanda Romero, Rolando Tinio, Tony Mabesa, Hero Bautista, Lara Jacinto, Vangie Labalan, Cris Daluz, Josie Galvez, Arvie Antonio, Sarah Alonzo, Romeo Enriquez, Ella Luansing, Crispin Medina, Reiner Uckely, Lyn Francisco, Amy Leah, Filipinas Adnono, Charry Velarde, Marivin Choco, Dante Figueroa, Agnes Vergara, Lucy Baldorado, Elena Santos, Ming-Ming Talens, Donna Pineda, Leslie Reyes, Liza Muñoz, Rhea Flores, Dahlia Delgado, Cherry Vibar

Preparing for college in Manila, Niña grows up in a once-prosperous but now-impoverished rural household. Turing, her mother, insists on discipline and sensible behavior, but her grandmother Lola Senyang indulges her granddaughter’s every whim as well as her own, despite doctor’s and financier’s warnings. Niña develops a close friendship with her childhood friend Elsa, which eventually leads to physical intimacy. But a handsome scion, Ariel, arrives from his foreign sojourn and begins courting Niña, who’s intrigued by him but is warned by Turing of the incompatibility of their class status and resented by Elsa, who fears losing the only person she loved.

A precursor of the next phase of Marilou Diaz-Abaya’s filmmaking career, Sensual exemplifies her readiness to tackle inadequately developed material with the full force of what may have been the most impressive technical arsenal of any Second Golden Age talent. In subsequently abandoning her specialization in women-themed subjects, however, she also gave up a few non-tech skills that no other woman filmmaker in the country had been able to match: an intimate understanding of feminine dilemmas and the conflicted sentiments that heterosexual attraction induces. An additional expertise in depicting lesbian intimacy served her well in her subsequent efforts, notably Milagros (1997). It may be too late to acknowledge her as our primary queer Filipina director, but her record speaks for itself. Sensual adds to these endowments an additional treat—an attempt by cinematographer Conrado Baltazar to appropriate the painterly polychromatic approach of Romy Vitug and succeeding magnificently in his first try. Who knows what further direction he planned to take, whether with Diaz-Abaya or any other director, if fate had not intervened on another movie set two years later?

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May Nagmamahal sa Iyo

English Translation: Someone Loves You
English Title: Madonna and Child
Additional Language: Chinese
Year of Release: 1996
Director: Marilou Diaz-Abaya
Screenwriters: Olivia M. Lamasan, Ricky Lee, Shaira Mella Salvador
Producer: Star Cinema

Cast: Lorna Tolentino, Ariel Rivera, Claudine Barrretto, Stefano Mori, Emman Abeleda, Archi Adamos, Cita Astals, Lilia Cuntapay, Cris Daluz, Renato del Prado, Jaclyn Jose, Vangie Labalan, Alma Lerma, Michael Macasio, Gina Pareño, Tom Taus, Rolando Tinio, Gamaliel Viray

Unable to afford caring for her out-of-wedlock son, Louella brings her child to the parish priest for adoption. After a few years of saving money as a nanny in Hong Kong, she uses her employers’ decision to migrate as an occasion to return to the Philippines. Nestor, a police officer who held a flame for her, encourages her to look for the son she gave away. The orphanage where they hope to find him was demolished to make way for highway construction, so they proceed to the next place where the wards were brought. Conrad, a trouble child about the same age as Louella’s son, hums the same lullabye she used to sing to him as a child. Despite a few doubts brought up by Nestor, Louella takes to Conrad, who in turn readily accepts her as his long-lost mother and turns into an exemplary resident of the orphanage. The day she finishes preparing the documents necessary to reclaim her offspring, the orphanage director brings up unsettling news that poses a challenge for Louella and the family she was hoping to form.

Admirers of Marilou Diaz-Abaya’s discursive film treatments must have been taken aback when she came up with a straightforward genre exercise. Except for its moderate budget and use of popular performers, May Nagmamahal sa Iyo shared the same properties that her earlier potboilers exhibited. Yet the passage of time has demonstrated how the film affirmed its director’s unwavering commitment to critiques of class and gender, in addition to her ability to uncover a kernel of truth that may have been difficult to accept but that has since proved essential in our citizens’ confrontation with the detrimental impact of labor export on the family unit. This amounts to a redefinition of what constitutes a real family, with blood relations becoming a secondary, if not dispensable, consideration, and with the country’s women tasked with moving toward this inescapable shift. One can only further admire Diaz-Abaya’s militancy (an unexpected decriptor that can only be perceived in retrospect) when the narrative’s singularly villainous character happens to come from the social class that she represents. Star Cinema has been the most insistent chronicler of overseas Filipino workers’ concerns, with films preceding and succeeding May Nagmamahal; ironically, its least financially successful entry turned out to be the most forward-thinking of the lot, and may now be unreservedly taken to heart by the audience who once hesitated to approach it.

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Milagros

Additional Language: English, German
Year of Release: 1997
Director: Marilou Diaz-Abaya
Screenwriter: Rolando Tinio
Producer: Merdeka Film Productions

Cast: Sharmaine Arnaiz, Dante Rivero, Elizabeth Oropesa, Joel Torre, Raymond Bagatsing, Nonie Buencamino, Mia Gutierrez, Rolando Tinio

Nightclub dancer Lagring learns that her estranged father Cirilo has died. Upon hearing her mother worry about paying off the debts he had accumulated, she unexpectedly volunteers to pay these off by working as a maid for their landowner, Nano, and his three sons: married photographer Junie, blind Ramonito, and playboy Bennet. Her alluring charms cause discord among the four men, but she aspires to someday visit the holy mountain of Banahaw.

Marilou Diaz-Abaya bid farewell to women-centered discourses in Philippine cinema with this controversial, demanding release—not surprising, considering her track record in rejecting easy answers to vexed questions. Her subsequent focus on men’s issues never fared as successfully, and several observers consider Milagros a precursor to her comparatively fallow period. Even then, a lesser achievement by Diaz-Abaya’s standards could still yield popular and critical acclaim, as evident in several of her post-Milagros films, notably José Rizal (1998). The first, most urgent issue about Milagros is its refusal to acknowledge feminist political correctness, beginning as it does with a young sex worker who volunteers to repay her late father’s debts, and agrees to a form of indentured slavery by servicing an all-male household. The seeming sordidness is held at an aesthetic distance and enables Diaz-Abaya to build up to a spiritual culmination, with a pilgrimage to mystical Mount Banahaw as the title character’s object of fulfillment. From a career packed with a wide range of approaches to outcast women’s characters—witness Baby Tsina (1984) and Sensual (1986) for a comparative sampling—Diaz-Abaya unsurprisingly manages to endow her wise, stouthearted tragedienne with ironic loverly treatment. An ecstatic finale has had audiences cheering, wondering, protesting, and weeping, sometimes in succession.

Note

[1] One of my pet peeves, elaborated at length elsewhere in this publication, is all about the obsession with originality, expressed in accusations of plagiarism—fortunately less of an affliction today than it used to be. One of the risible charges raised against Brutal by a recently deceased former member of the local critics group was that it filched the structure of Ingmar Bergman’s Aus dem Leben der Marionetten (From the Life of the Marionettes, 1980). In contrast, when De stilte rond Christine M. (A Question of Silence, 1982), by subsequent Oscar winner Marleen Gorris, was screened in Manila, no one brought up the question of why its basic narrative elements closely resembled those of Brutal. Such is the scourge of postcolonial mentality.

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La Paloma

Alternate Title: La Paloma: Ang Kalapating Ligaw
English Translation of Alternate Title: Paloma: The Wild Dove
Additional Language: Spanish
Year of Release: 1974 / B&W
Director: Joey Gosiengfiao
Screenwriter: Wilfrido Nolledo
Producer: Juan de la Cruz Productions

Cast: Celia Rodriguez, Orestes Ojeda, Vina Cansino, Mona Lisa, Tommy Abuel, Michael Murray, Angelina Ocampo, Ruel Vernal, Juanito Romulo, Ricky Belmonte, Ruel Vernal, Angge

Following instructions sent her in a letter from her aristocratic lover, Paloma, a famous actress, sets out for his distant manor with her loyal servant. Upon arrival, she discovers that Don Lorenzo de Leon has died; moreover, he was married, and his widow Anida understandably resents her presence. Lorenzo’s mother however insists that she stay on. Joel, an itinerant musician, offers to teach Paloma guitar-playing, but Anida asks him to tend to her garden. The dysfunction between Lorenzo’s mother and wife, with Paloma drawn in, leads to a court case over the disposal of his wealth, that invites the attention of the residents of the town.

The critical consensus on La Paloma upon its release was that it was a noble attempt that somehow fell short. One could more readily see today how the harshness was unfounded. As the closest to an art-film project of the youthful and irreverent Juan de la Cruz Productions, it dared to regurgitate several elements of First Golden Age journeyperson Gerardo de Leon’s Lilet (1971), even appropriating the monochromatic properties of his earlier achievements; notably, that film’s star, Celia Rodriguez (playing La Paloma’s title character), was involved in a long-running press war with Rita Gomez, whom the cognoscenti favored for the same year’s Pagdating sa Dulo (Reaching the Top), Ishmael Bernal’s official debut. La Paloma’s superiority to Lilet would be easier to maintain today, primarily because the campy approach honed by the Juan de la Cruz team trumps the self-conscious seriousness that plagued Manong Gerry since his emergence from the 1950s as a respectable figure. The screenplay furnished by novelist Wilfrido Nolledo revels in the comic-gothic possibilities of the material, imbuing his female characters with wit, cattiness, and a readiness to discard their façades of modesty when hot and hungry hunks wander into view. The older maestro himself was aware that a new generation was emergent and capable of work that experts of his generation could only dream of accomplishing; if only our film critics had been just as prepared.

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Underage

Year of Release: 1980
Director: Joey Gosiengfiao
Screenwriter: Toto Belano
Producer: Regal Films

Cast: Dina Bonnevie, Maricel Soriano, Snooky Serna, Jimi Melendez, Mark Gil, Gabby Concepcion, Bella Flores, Celia Rodriguez, Domingo Sabado, Lucita Soriano, Lily Miraflor, Mila Ocampo

After their mother’s death, teenage sisters Celina, Cecilia, and Corazon are taken by their aunt out of their rural home and into a boarding house in the city. Once there, Celina catches the eye of the school heartthrob, Cecilia bonds with her much older teacher, and Corazon develops feelings for one of the male boarders. But a grave incident will test the girls’ maturity despite their young age.

At his peak, roughly during the late 1970s through the early ’80s, Joey Gosiengfiao was considered the primary purveyor of Pinoy film camp. But “camp” then was popularly misunderstood, since in its original sense, it has to be performed in earnest then read against the grain by its audience in order to attain authenticity. Similarly, Gosiengfiao’s significance had been too eagerly preempted. The fact that his films were usually profitable signaled to left-leaning culturati that he’d been implicated by his own drive for box-office success and the enthusiastic patronage of producers. More than the strangely celebrated Temptation Island, which came out during the same year, and 1978’s accomplished though still misogyny-mongering Bomba Star, Underage proves he was capable of reflexive satire, gleefully skewering as it does the conventions of the poor-little-rich-girl formula. It tinkers with enough of the elements—three nymphets rather than the usual overgrown naïf, plus genuinely menacing villains—to also make it an admirable sample of how a genre can be upheld yet transformed by infusing it with elements from seemingly incompatible sources: comedy, the musical, and the sex film, in this instance.

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Mababangong Bangungot

English Title: Perfumed Nightmare
Additional Language: English (overlaying Filipino)
Year of Release: 1977
Director & Screenwriter: Kidlat Tahimik
Producer: Kidlat-Kulog Productions

Cast: Kidlat Tahimik, Mang Fely, Dolores Santamaria, Georgette Baudry, Katarina, Hartmut Lerch

Kidlat takes his jeepney out of his rural hometown to go on a trip to Cape Canaveral in America and meet his idol, rocket scientist (and former Nazi official) Wernher von Braun. But he ends up in France and Germany, where the modernized surroundings initially leave him in awe. However, the longer his journey takes, the more he realizes that the modernization he admires comes at a price.

The only case in this list of a famous Philippine film virtually unknown in its own country of origin is the exception that proves the rule. Mababangong Bangungot has been taken to heart by a number of foreign observers. These included the Berlin International Film Festival (which gave it critics’ prizes) to Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope Studio (which distributed it in the US), as well as a handful of prestigious commentators including Fredric Jameson and J. Hoberman, who commended it for its complex yet playful portrayal of postcolonial dreams and realities in the Third World. In this respect Mababangong Bangungot was more than just ahead of its time: it represents independent cinema’s less-traveled road, its foreign triumph mimicked by latter-day local aspirants to Kidlat Tahimik’s stature. Unfortunately its populist sentiments and gentle humor are regularly displaced, in today’s typical indie output, by academically esteemed alienating devices such as long and deliberately uninvolving takes, oblique lines of dialogue, obscure class-entrenched issues that often mask conventional approaches—and consequently the wholesale rejection of the native audience’s values and preferences.

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Tatlong Taóng Walang Diyos

English Title: Three Godless Years
Year of Release: 1976 / Color with Sepia
Director & Screenwriter: Mario O’Hara
Producer: NV Productions

Cast: Nora Aunor, Christopher de Leon, Bembol Roco, Orlando Nadres, Peque Gallaga, Mario Escudero, Yolanda Luna

As the global conflicts of World War II intrude upon the peaceful existence of a rural town, Rosario bids farewell to her boyfriend Crispin before he joins some local guerrilla fighters. One night, she is raped by a half-Filipino Japanese officer named Masugi. She initially rejects his apologies but learns to love him later on, and bears his child. When victorious American troops defeat the Japanese, Rosario and the two men who love her face the harsh consequences brought about by the war.

Since Mario O’Hara’s only earlier film, the feverishly envisioned although distressingly misogynistic Mortal (1976), had been legally suppressed and had never been recovered until recently, Tatlong Taóng Walang Diyos effectively functioned as his default debut for several decades. Because of the remarkable performance of local film artists during the year of its release, its merit was definitely largely overlooked. Its all-forgiving humanist perspective on the contending parties during World War II may be too solicitous to possess useful critical value: noble Japanese-Filipino and earnest pro-US guerrilla compete for affections of true-hearted (though easily confused) barrio lass. This willingness to tackle difficult historical questions positions Tatlong Taón on the same plane of ambition as 1976’s major achiever, Eddie Romero’s Ganito Kami Noon…Paano Kayo Ngayon? (As We Were). Unlike the latter, however, Tatlong Taón not only proffers an even more traditional take on gender roles, with the woman, representing the nation as usual, victimized by her contending lovers’ ideological differences. It also gives the parish priest unnecessary moral ascendancy and, more problematically, depicts the women-led rural mass as an unrecognizable (because Western-style) lynch mob. Nevertheless O’Hara’s propensity to inspect the darker side of humanity’s psyche would be a recurrent source of strength in a quite distinguished career as Pinoy film auteur.[1]

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1—Condemned

Year of Release: 1984
Director: Mario O’Hara
Screenwriters: Jose Javier Reyes, Mario O’Hara, Frank Rivera
Producer: Golden Dragon Films & NV Productions

Cast: Nora Aunor, Gina Alajar, Gloria Romero, Rio Locsin, Dan Alvaro, Leni Santos, Connie Angeles, Ricky Davao, Toby Alejar, Sonny Parsons, Len Santos, Alicia Alonzo, Romnick Sarmenta

Yolly sells flowers in the tourist district of Ermita while her brother Efren works as a henchperson for Connie, a criminal mastermind. Efren decides to blackmail Connie after discovering how her son turned out to be a violent killer, but her ruthlessness results in his death. Yolly grieves for the only family member left to her, and resolves to avenge the loss of her brother.

2—Bulaklak sa City Jail

English Translation: Flower at City Jail
English Title: Flowers of the City Jail
Year of Release: 1984
Director: Mario O’Hara
Screenwriter: Lualhati Bautista
(Based on her novel serialized in Liwayway, 1982–83)
Producer: Cherubim Films

Cast: Nora Aunor, Gina Alajar, Celia Rodriguez, Perla Bautista, Maya Valdes, Zeneida Amador, Maritess Gutierrez, Gloria Romero, Shyr Valdez, Ricky Davao, Bella Flores, German Moreno, Tom Olivar

Angela is jailed for allegedly trying to kill the wife of a man with whom she has fallen in love. While pregnant with the man’s child, she, along other female detainees, experiences the inhumane conditions of prison life. One night, Angela manages to escape and has to deliver her baby while hiding in the city zoo. But after being apprehended by cops, Angela contemplates what lies ahead for her and her newborn.

Mario O’Hara would turn out to be the filmmaker most closely associated with Nora Aunor, both of them smart, playful, temperamental, stubborn, self-destructive. So much so that most of his major Aunor-less projects resonate with her absence: Bagong Hari (New King, 1986) starred the actor to whom Aunor played elder sister and avenging angel in Condemned (1984); Fatima Buen Story (1994) would have been perfectly cast with her in the title role; and Pangarap ng Puso (2000) benefited from Aunor’s adoptive daughter’s performance. To demonstrate the various ways in which their collaboration can be extended: Bulaklak sa City Jail grows beyond its potentially exploitative women-in-prison theme when regarded as the midpoint of an Aunor noir series, following the twisted thriller Condemned and preceding the happily concluded Tatlong Ina, Isang Anak (Three Mothers, One Daughter, 1987), where the then-infant Matet de Leon, subsequent lead of Pangarap ng Puso, is introduced. The sensible viewer is therefore advised to proceed to the rest of O’Hara’s and Aunor’s marvelous oeuvre, where even the rest of their uneven output separately and together manage to complement each other. As a bonus, try tracking down the now-rare Aunor-directed Greatest Performance (1989), which she also produced and wrote, a paradoxically unfinished-yet-complete, subsequently shelved movie, where she gives her best O’Hara performance, with O’Hara the absent element this time.

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Bagong Hari

English Title: The New King
Year of Release: 1986
Director: Mario O’Hara
Screenwriter: Frank Rivera
Producer: CineVentures

Cast: Dan Alvaro, Carmi Martin, Joel Torre, Robert Arevalo, Perla Bautista, Celso Ad. Castillo, Elvira Manahan, Glaiza Herradura, Ruel Vernal, Lito Anzures, Max Laurel, Toby Alejar, Joel Lamangan, Greg Sta. Inez, Becky Misa, Dante Balois, Jerry O’Hara, Don Pepot, Gil Arceo, Greg Rocero, Bobby Henson, Jojo Gamay, Yno Gonzales, Ding Franco, Buddy Aguilar, Liza Lorena

Living with his devoted mother, Addon Labrador pursues a regular working-class existence with his girlfriend Rina, despite his several skills in combat. His estranged father, however, betrays the provincial governor to work as a henchman for their town’s ambitious mayor. When the governor feels threatened by the mayor’s electoral bid, her son Rex takes matters in hand. After Addon agrees to win a gladiatorial showdown with the reigning underworld “king” in order to raise funds for his mother’s operation, Rex kidnaps and tortures Rina in order to coerce him to assassinate a target from behind—who turns out to be his father. Addon’s rampage goes beyond Rex to include the town’s political leadership.

Mario O’Hara’s first definitive masterpiece nearly fell victim to the vagaries of celluloid-era distribution and preservation. After being refused entry in the Christmas season’s film festival because of censorship issues, it was screened to near-empty theaters during the historical period when audiences were caught up in the snap election that eventually resulted in the end of the martial-law regime that it allegorically addressed. After no print could be found during the current millennium, critic-archivist Jojo Devera managed to track down an imperfectly transferred video copy, which is all that remains of the original. A measure of the achievement of Bagong Hari is that much of its engaging suspense and excitement can still be gleaned even in its debased condition, as befits the literally last major action-film release of the Second Golden Age: the people-power uprising occurred a month after its screening, paralleling its narrative’s fairly hopeful ending. Despite the fact that action films constituted the most successful censorship-era genre of the period, too few samples were preserved and even fewer have been able to sustain their original impact over time. The availability of Bagong Hari is the kind of small mercy that more-than-adequately serves the purpose of representing and celebrating a now-mostly-lost filmmaking tradition.

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Pangarap ng Puso

English Translation: The Heart’s Longing
English Title: Demons
Additional Languages: Cebuano & Hiligaynon
Year of Release: 2000 / Color, B&W
Director: Mario O’Hara
Screenwriters: Rey de Castro & Mario O’Hara
From a short story by Rosario Cruz Lucero, with poetry by Amado V. Hernandez, Florentino Collantes, and Denise O’Hara
Producer: Good Harvest Productions

Cast: Hilda Koronel, Anita Linda, Matet de Leon, Leo Rabago, Lucita Soriano, Alex Alano, Mike Magat, Arman de Guzman, Judy Teodoro, Eugene Domingo, Dido de la Paz, Robynne von Hagel, Christian Alvear, Ruben Gatmaitan, Lilia Cuntapay, Lalaine de Gola, Sammuel Ebaristo, Judy Lou de Pio, Ruben O’Hara, John Portugal, Edwin O’Hara

Nena grows up in her parents’ hacienda on Negros Island, nourished by nationalist poetry and her nanny’s tales of the mythological kapre, a dark-skinned tree-dwelling giant who stalks any maiden he finds attractive. Although her parents are sufficiently enlightened to assist their workers whenever they can, the escalation of the antidictatorship movement in response to the assassination of Senator Benigno S. Aquino Jr., coupled with the government’s corrupt mismanagement of the sugar industry, leads to severe poverty and grassroots malcontent. Nena extends what help she can to Jose, who comes from the family of their most impoverished tenant, although she keeps her charity a secret so as not to hurt his pride. Matters worsen when the grownup Jose is suspected of aiding rebel forces and his household is raided by militia troops, with bloody (though historically verifiable) results for him and his family. When Nena seeks him out to extend her sympathy, his anger over the abuses of the ruling class extends to her and he attempts to avenge on her what his enemies did to him.

Pangarap ng Puso is saturated with anomalies, from its emergence in a filmography marked by its director’s dodgy social and religious approaches, through its attempt at negotiating progressive politics from the perspective of a class-privileged character, to its possibly oblivious harnessing of third-cinema principles[2] that led to severe and undeserved marginalization by Philippine evaluators. Fortunately for its filmmaker and any prospective appreciator, the film is accomplished enough to reveal any objections to it as originating from careless misinformation. Its departure from its credited literary source indicates how much more willing Mario O’Hara was in prospecting for a resolution that steps way beyond karmic justice, toward a visualization of the horrific consequences of class conciliation as well as a critique of the romanticization of autochthonous cultural signifiers. The fact that the project was implemented as part of its producer’s B-movie program (called pito-pito, or seven location days plus seven post-production days under severe budgetary constraints) aligns it appositely with Ishmael Bernal’s early documentary-style explorations of his multicharacter narrative options. Even his signature performer, Nora Aunor, lends her presence via the startlingly perceptive performance of her adoptive daughter. The Philippine cultural establishment’s oversight notwithstanding, the film secures a sui generis claim as a radical masterpiece in global cinema, the only question being how long before its achievement attains the appreciation it merits.

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Babae sa Breakwater

English Title: Woman of the Breakwater
Additional Language: Cebuano
Year of Release: 2003
Director & Screenwriter: Mario O’Hara
Producer: Entertainment Warehouse

Cast: Kristofer King, Katherine Luna, Gardo Versoza, Yoyoy Villame, Alcris Galura, Lou Veloso, Lucita Soriano, Amy Austria, Daniel Fernando, Dick Israel, Rez Cortez, Odette Khan

Brothers Basilio and Buboy leave their home in Leyte and end up in the slums by Manila Bay, where they form a mystical connection with its waters. City life takes its toll on Buboy and he goes missing. Basilio finds loving comfort in Paquita, a prostitute. But Dave, a disabled ex-cop who has subjugated the slum dwellers, turns jealous and makes life difficult for the two lovers.

Given the opportunity and resources to fashion a film epic, most Filipino filmmakers, like their foreign counterparts, wind up with results that range from middling to disastrous. Mario O’Hara’s an exceptional case: an artist with certain problematic quirks: upbeat endings since the trauma of the box-office flop of Tatlong Taóng Walang Diyos (1976), for example, or an uncritical acceptance of religious authority. In common with front-rank masters, he nevertheless possessed an increasingly prodigious philosophy that enabled him to rise above the industry’s limitations. Babae sa Breakwater is ultimate proof of this, where an adequate budget and a proliferation of talent serve a Rabelaisian vision—grotesque, bawdy, and fantastic, often in wondrous combinations—of the city’s dispossessed populace. The degree of inventiveness is vibrant enough to almost offset the use of a physically handicapped, psychologically imbalanced, and sexually impotent villain, standing in for the big bad city, as an ultimately defeatable figure.

Notes

[1] An unusual development in the archival predicament of Tatlong Taóng Walang Diyos is that, because of the existing print’s deterioration, critic-archivist Jojo Devera so successfully experimented with processing the material in black-and-white that ABS-CBN Film Restoration decided to perform the same treatment, although it neglected to officially acknowledge Devera’s innovation. The resulting copy made the film closer to the solid Cold War sensibility that it exemplified, although several 1950s works by Gregorio Fernandez were able to match or even break free of such strictures.

[2] The movement known as Third Cinema is ascribed to the 1969 manifesto written by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, partly based on their experience with their 1968 agitprop documentary La hora de los hornos or The Hour of the Furnaces (see “Towards a Third Cinema: Notes and Experiments toward the Development of a Cinema of Liberation in the Third World,” translated by Julianne Burton and Michael Chanan, in Twenty-Five Years of the New Latin American Cinema, edited by Michael Chanan, Channel Four Television & BFI Books, 1983, pp. 17-27). Its distinction from Third World cinema lies in its rejection of conventions associated with First World film practice, with Hollywood as apex, even if these might appear in Third World contexts. Written without caps, third cinema upholds the movement’s principles without direct organizational links. The concept necessitates some problematization, which I have implicitly attempted in certain selections and citations elsewhere in this canon listing.

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Itim

English Translation: Black
English Title: The Rites of May
Year of Release: 1976
Director: Mike De Leon
Screenwriters: Clodualdo del Mundo Jr. & Gil Quito
Producer: Cinema Artists Philippines

Cast: Tommy Abuel, Mario Montenegro, Charo Santos, Mona Lisa, Sarah Joaquin, Susan Valdez, Moody Diaz

Photographer Jun meets Teresa, a woman who sporadically yet involuntarily slips into bizarre moods. It is later revealed that Teresa is actually being possessed by her sister, Rosa, who died years earlier though the cause is shrouded in mystery. As Teresa divulges the story behind her sister’s death, Jun discovers that he may have found a connection to Rosa.

It would take a few more years before Filipino students of cinema could attempt their own low-end exercises, and a couple of decades before the technology could allow them to present their own full-length projects as a matter of course. As the scion of studio owners, Mike De Leon mustered his family resources and elite-school training and proved himself worthy of the privilege. Several other debuting directors during this period also opted for horror-mystery challenges, but none of them turned out to be as accomplished as Itim. Part of the project’s continuing relevance derives from its critical inspection of the relationship between the materialistic function of media technology and the anxiety provoked by supernatural phenomena. De Leon’s casual, almost documentarian surrender to the “reality” of the gothic upholds several concerns that he would be focusing on afterward, including class and gender critiques, the rejection of authoritarian figures, and an abiding confidence in the power of cinema.

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Kakabakaba Ka Ba?

English Translation: Are You Nervous?
English Title: Will Your Heart Beat Faster?
Alternate English Title: Thrilled
Additional Languages: Japanese & Chinese
Year of Release: 1980 / Color with B&W
Director: Mike De Leon
Screenwriters: Clodualdo del Mundo Jr., Raquel N. Villavicencio, & Mike De Leon
Music: Lorrie Ilustre & Jim Paredes
Producer: Lvn Pictures

Cast: Christopher de Leon, Charo Santos, Jay Ilagan, Sandy Andolong, Boboy Garrovillo, Johnny Delgado, Armida Siguion-Reyna, Leo Martinez, Moody Diaz, Joe Jardy, Danny Javier, George Javier, Nanette Inventor, Jim Paredes

Japanese Yakuza and Chinese gangsters chase two young couples, after one of the four accidentally obtains a cassette tape that contains high-grade opium concentrate. The quartet ends up seeking refuge in a church in Baguio, but they later realize that this will occasion a zany adventure, complete with musical numbers, that will reveal just how significant the tape really is.

Among the variety of genres that Mike De Leon decided to tinker with, his second stab at the musical—after Kung Mangarap Ka’t Magising (If You Should Sleep and Then Awaken, a.k.a. Moments in a Stolen Dream, 1977), strictly speaking a realist film with music—proved to be distinctive not just for his record, but for Philippine cinema as well. This time around, he opted to begin with realistic elements including diegetic, or plausible and plot-specific, singing; then, via the intensification of absurd humor, he progressed to fantastic and geopolitically allusive developments, along with the traditional musical feature of non-diegetic performances, where characters burst into song and dance without any onscreen evidence of musical instruments and motivation for design changes. One may complain that the in-jokes in Kakabakaba Ka Ba? fail to steer clear of racial and gender stereotyping, the music is too pop-Western, the protagonists are distinctly privileged, and so on; yet the level of technical invention and performing-arts discipline on display here would be worthy of Manuel Conde, the country’s one certifiable film-musical genius, who had also once worked at the De Leon family outfit. Kakabakaba can in fact make one momentarily forget that the many equivalent accomplishments of Conde can no longer be found, since De Leon virtually stamps himself here as a true master’s disciple. Hip and high, polished and elaborate, with a disco number guaranteed to bring the house (of worship) down.

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1—Kisapmata

English Translation: Blink
English Title: In the Wink of an Eye
Additional Language: Ilocano
Year of Release: 1981 / Color with B&W
Director: Mike De Leon
Screenwriters: Clodualdo del Mundo Jr., Raquel N. Villavicencio, & Mike De Leon
(Based on “The House on Zapote Street,” from the 1977 book Reportage on Crime: Thirteen Horror Happenings That Hit the Headlines by Quijano de Manila)
Producer: Bancom Audiovision Corporation

Cast: Vic Silayan, Charo Santos, Jay Ilagan, Charito Solis, Ruben Rustia, Aida Carmona, Juan Rodrigo

Dadong, a retired police officer, has such inordinate control over his daughter Mila that, when she gets pregnant and marries her boyfriend Noel, the couple stays under his roof. Unable to bear his father-in-law’s excessive domination, Noel tries to convince his wife to move with him to his house instead. He unfortunately fails and ends up leaving her behind. But when Mila escapes to join her husband, Dadong is driven to desperation and violence in a way that reveals a well-kept family secret.

2—Batch ’81

Year of Release: 1982
Director: Mike De Leon
Screenwriters: Clodualdo del Mundo Jr., Raquel N. Villavicencio, & Mike De Leon
Producer: MVP Pictures

Cast: Mark Gil, Sandy Andolong, Ward Luarca, Noel Trinidad, Ricky Sandico, Jimmy Javier, Rod Leido, Mike Arvisu, Dodo Cabasal, Edwin Reyes

College student Sid and seven others make it as the latest potential members of the Alpha Kappa Omega (AKO) fraternity. While various hazing rituals force other neophytes to quit, these only strengthen Sid’s desire to be a full-fledged member. But AKO’s intensifying conflict with a rival frat will soon prove to be the neophytes’ biggest hurdle yet.

If only the Pinoy critical community had been ready: the series of protest films that Mike De Leon made during the late Marcos period should have occasioned debates on the progressive usefulness of two devices, metaphor as opposed to metonymy. Kisapmata and its successor (actually delayed predecessor), Batch ’81, both functioned metaphorically, specifically as referents to unidentified authoritarian systems. Metonymy, where one or more textual signifiers directly implicate the system being described, is considered more useful for critical purposes because of the grounding it provides. That having been said, one would still be hard-put to find better anti-martial law metaphors than these two titles. De Leon facilitates this analogy by making clear who the victimizers as well as the victims are, and whose side he supports. He also pays extra attention to the alpha-male characters’ performers (Vic Silayan and Mark Gil, both now-deceased), draws from his extensive knowledge of global cinema to evoke dread and decadence through locally unmatched audiovisual virtuosity, and dares to end with downbeat, in-your-face catastrophes.

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Sister Stella L.

Year of Release: 1984
Director: Mike De Leon
Screenwriters: Jose F. Lacaba, Jose Almojuela, & Mike De Leon
(Additional dialogue by Ellen Ongkeko-Marfil)
Producer: Regal Films

Cast: Vilma Santos, Jay Ilagan, Gina Alajar, Laurice Guillen, Tony Santos, Anita Linda, Liza Lorena, Eddie Infante, Ruben Rustia, Adul de Leon, Rody Vera, Malu De Guzman, Fernando Modesto

Moved by the stories of a namesake nun about the plight of laborers in her area, Sister Stella Legaspi leaves her job as counselor to unwed mothers to support workers’ protests. When her safety gets threatened, the young nun is ordered back to her convent. She finds a way to return to the workers but soon discovers that her commitment to activism has arrived at a crossroad.

The first overtly political effort by Mike De Leon had all the fervor and indignation of someone who had been holding back (forced to resort to metaphors?) for too long. Yet he’d wound up disavowing all the appreciative responses to the film, denigrating it as propaganda, after it made a near-clean sweep of the critics’ awards. One could retort that any text with a message propagandizes by default. In the case of Sister Stella L., certain problematic elements, starting with the notion that religion and progressive politics can be compatible, become worrisome in retrospect, after the recent history of Catholic-church meddling in state affairs. The movie also rises above the run of attempts at persuasive communication via the use of so-called third-cinema devices—mostly drawn, as the term suggests, from Third-World film practice. Notable among these are direct-to-camera address, discursive dialogue, and documentary-footage insertions—all of which materialize right at the point when the narrative wraps up. The unstable fusion of transitory issues and innovative technique has resulted in a fascinating spectacle, a work that evokes its historical moment as much as it remains defined by it. The best way then to be fully rewarded by the viewing experience, which may also explain the movie’s then-disappointing box-office performance, is to immerse in the historical experience of resisting a fascist system via united-front organizing.

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Bilanggo sa Dilim

English Title: Prisoner of the Dark
Additional Language: English
Year of Release: 1986
Director: Mike De Leon
Screenwriters: Mike De Leon, Jose Almojuela, & Bobby Lavides
(From the 1963 novel The Collector by John Fowles)
Producer: Solid Video

Cast: Joel Torre, Cherie Gil, Rio Locsin, Edu Manzano

After obsessing over Marissa from her fashion-model photographs, Eddie successfully executes his plan to kidnap her and imprison her in his home away from the city. He tells her that his goal is to keep her until she gets to know him, confident that when she does, she will fall in love with him. He’s beset by his memory of how he had lured Margie, an attractive woman who engaged in prostitution to support her college studies and who ultimately disappointed him because of her lower social status. When Marissa finds the letter that Margie hid before she died, she realizes the full extent of the nature of the man who introduced himself to Margie as Lito.

Filmmaker Mel Chionglo, who had once worked on Mike De Leon’s early films, once described Bilanggo sa Dilim as the quintessential MDL text. As usual with such statements, as much error as truth resides in that kind of declaration. No other De Leon narrative presents as intensive an inward turn as Bilanggo, except perhaps for the dream sequence of the main character in his first film, Itim; this was in fact drawn from his 1975 short film “Monologo [Monologue],” which however was too abstract to be productively interpreted. More a sequel than a strict adaptation of The Collector, Bilanggo enables us to understand more fully the abductee’s condition by articulating the hopes and suffering of her predecessor. The performers’ intertextual significations in recently concluded martial law-era cinema mediates their characters’ mutual entrapment—Marissa and Margie in their captor’s fiendishly located and constructed prison, and Eddie/Lito in the necessity of constantly exercising unrelenting and unrelieved tyranny, with violent killing becoming a welcome form of release. Though planned and executed in a format vastly superseded by today’s state-of-the-art digital technology, Bilanggo puts to shame many contemporary attempts at advancing “personal” film statements, proof positive that any medium can only be as valuable as the vision that an artist invests in it.

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Bayaning 3rd World

English Title: 3rd World Hero
Additional Language: Spanish
Year of Release: 1999 / B&W
Director: Mike De Leon
Screenwriters: Clodualdo del Mundo Jr. & Mike De Leon
Producer: Cinema Artists Philippines

Cast: Ricky Davao, Joel Torre, Cris Villanueva, Joonee Gamboa, E.A. Rocha, Daria Ramirez, Rio Locsin, Cherry Pie Picache, Lara Fabregas

As two (unnamed) filmmakers research for a movie they plan to make about national hero José Rizal, the main issue they face is whether, the night before his execution, he actually retracted his criticisms of the Catholic Church. As they conduct interviews with Rizal and several people related to him, the filmmakers realize that they may have bitten off more than they can chew.

The so-far final but soon-to-be-penultimate Mike De Leon feature was supposed to have been a mainstream entry, by then-active GMA Films (previously known as Cinemax), on the life and death of José Rizal. De Leon’s resistance to standardized treatment resulted in the original movie being produced anyway (as José Rizal, 1998, directed by Marilou Diaz-Abaya), plus a number of other tributes to the national hero—and then this: a project that acknowledges postmodernism by being reflective, ironic, multiplanar, and open-ended. As focalized by the issue of whether he had retracted his rejection of his Catholic principles, Rizal remains the same elusive figure at the end that he was at the start. Yet, contrary to the movie’s naysayers, that should be an essential component of the text’s triumph, not its shortcoming. Rizal may require further understanding, but as Bayaning 3rd World suggests, this may not necessarily lead to any definite revision of his historical worth. The movie characters actually being subjected to critique are in fact the contemporary artists—and, by association, the members of the audience—who seek an advantage to gain in separating Rizal’s myth from his person.

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Asedillo

Year of Release: 1971
Director & Screenwriter: Celso Ad. Castillo
Producer: FPJ Productions

Cast: Fernando Poe Jr., Barbara Perez, Jose Romulo, Carlos Padilla Jr., Rebecca, Imelda Ilanan, Paquito Diaz, Lito Anzures

Schoolteacher Teodoro loses his job as a police chief after being falsely accused of stealing by corrupt local officials. He founds a rebel labor group that aims to help the poor but is denounced as a troublemaker by the authorities. Though Teodoro clears his name and gains his hometown’s support, his enemies stop at nothing to take him down.

A genealogical line can be drawn from Gerardo de Leon through Celso Ad. Castillo to Ronwaldo Reyes, although conventional wisdom might argue that the returns tend to diminish the farther we get from the maestro. In fact it’s Reyes, better known as Fernando Poe, Jr., who links up directly with the other two: his father had worked on a few de Leon projects (including the controversial Dawn of Freedom, 1944), while Poe himself had Kamay ni Cain (Hand of Cain, 1957), Apollo Robles (1961), Ako ang Katarungan (I Am Justice, 1962), The Walls of Hell (1964, co-directed with Eddie Romero), and Juan de la Cruz (1976, unfinished) as his filmographic associations. With Castillo, Poe had done Ang Alamat (The Legend, 1972); he can also boast of at least one de Leon-worthy achievement in his own Ang Maestro (The Teacher, 1981). Asedillo is where Castillo’s and FPJ’s now-dated masculine heroics found full expression as populist entertainment. The visual style predictably overwhelms FPJ’s commercially determined persona. But the material abides, drawn from a real-life account during the period of intermittent anti-colonial resistance during the American occupation. Such distant global-political issues have rarely been given popular attention and continue to fascinate as samples of lost history. Nick Joaquin narrated the possibly apocryphal account of how FPJ’s Muslim fans rioted when his character was killed in the film, but this can be read today as a demonstration of the love for country and preference for populist narratives by the star who would have been Philippine President.

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Daluyong at Habagat

English Translation: Surge and Tempest
Year of Release: 1976
Director: Celso Ad. Castillo
Screenwriter: Mauro Gia Samonte
Producers: Associates and Celso Ad. Castillo Company, Sampaguita Pictures

Cast: Vic Vargas, Ricky Belmonte, Pinky de Leon, Lito Anzures, Alma Moreno, Rez Cortez, Joonee Gamboa, Angel Confiado, Mario Escudero, Pedro Faustino, Subas Herrero, Odette Khan, Nello Nayo, Ruel Vernal

Igus’s father dies when the bombshell he’s defusing for Don Anselmo Araneta explodes. Igus asks Don Anselmo for hazard-pay funds for his father’s burial but gets given an inadequate token amount. His wife, Cielo, resorts to nightclub hostessing to raise the money they need but Igus flies into a rage at her workplace when he finds out. Cielo falls seriously ill but Don Anselmo dismisses Igus this time since his son, Jake, is about to get married. Igus takes Jake’s bride hostage but Jake is able to track his hideout. Igus manages to shoot Jake and paralyze him, but he is caught by police and thrown in jail. He gets paroled for good behavior but the Aranetas are bent on meting their own kind of punishment on him, while Cielo returns to the only kind of job available to poor abandoned women like her.

Set right after the devastation of World War II and the frenzy of recovery induced by a newly independent republic, Daluyong at Habagat might sound like a compendium of the worst possible circumstances that could befall an urban proletariat family of its time and place; even more incredibly, the story is based on actual events. Celso Ad. Castillo mounted a steep uphill climb for legitimacy, after a lengthy period as a commercially successful specialist in action and sex films. Critics seemingly could not be persuaded that anything of import could come of D&H, although they also acknowledged its director’s impressive visual acuity. Their negligence resulted in shabby treatment for what has turned out to be a far more daring critique of Philippine society and governance than any film produced in over a decade. The parallels drawn between a gang lord and a wealthy industrial capitalist, as well as the mounting confrontations among organized crime, unionized workers, and state-supported bourgeoisie raise the issue of just how well an earlier critical generation was paying attention. A framing account, where a reporter draws out Igus’s narrative from the recollection of his widow, results in the usual stating of the obvious, but it also enables viewers from the present to witness how an entire set of toxic class and gender values is capable of destroying lives as a matter of course, most tragically those of the most vulnerable members of society.

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Burlesk Queen

English Translation: Burlesque Queen
Year of Release: 1977
Director: Celso Ad. Castillo
Screenwriters: Mauro Gia Samonte & Celso Ad. Castillo
Producer: Ian Film Productions

Cast: Vilma Santos, Rosemarie Gil, Rolly Quizon, Leopoldo Salcedo, Roldan Aquino, Joonee Gamboa, Chito Ponce-Enrile, Dexter Doria, Yolanda Luna, Rio Locsin

Chato assists striptease star Virgie Nite for a living. Eventually, she aspires to be just like Virgie and is able to do so when a window of opportunity arrives. Chato’s disabled father urges her to stop but she ignores him. She even falls in love and elopes with a mayoral candidate’s son. But when a series of personal setbacks occur, Chato takes some drastic measures as a means of defying the abuses that fate has dealt her.

Celso Ad. Castillo was perhaps the most ardent disciple of Gerardo de Leon’s visual innovations. But in appropriating GDL’s predilection for the perverse, Castillo tended to miss out on de Leon’s sympathy for women characters. That is, until a well-loved child star and wholesome teen idol decided to level up by going the so-called bold route. Brimming with raw talent and soulful innocence, Vilma Santos rendered the character of a woman awakening to both economic hardship and sexual desire as if these had been actually happening to her, which they well might have been. Her performance, capped by a rarely equaled climactic monologue, pulls together the film’s uneven production elements; the pathos her character experiences serves to justify the movie’s condemnation of cultural hypocrisy—a then-daring critique mainly because of the martial-law situation—while ostensibly championing striptease as a performing art. Even in Burlesk Queen’s fast-deteriorating video format, with all celluloid copies destroyed by unimaginable negligence,[1] Santos makes the movie worth revisiting, as a precursor of the strong-woman roles that she would also be dominating thereafter.

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Celso Ad. Castillo’s Totoy Boogie

Alternate Title: Totoy Boogie
Year of Release: 1980
Director & Screenwriter: Celso Ad. Castillo
Producer: Lea Productions

Cast: Eddie Garcia, Marissa Delgado, Rossana Ortiz, Pia Moran, Dennis Roldan, Lloyd Samartino, Roderick Paulate, Anita Linda, Celso Ad. Castillo, Irish Buendia, Martin Marfil, Luis Benedicto, Alma Bonavie, Erwin Garcia, SOS Daredevils, Joe Quirino, Alfred Yuson, Samuel Almariego, Rosemarie de Vera, Maribeth Biscara, Alfred Yuson, Discor Dancers

Totoy and his parents live in a dilapidated building in a seedy section of Quiapo district, where their Estacio’s Academy of Modern Dance subsists beside the Buddhist Yaw-Yan Temple. Working-class customers along with the occasional slumming rich matron attend for lessons on ballroom skills from boozehound Peping (Joe Estacio’s nickname), famed for his skills during his younger days, with Totoy sometimes helping to demonstrate some difficult steps. While hanging out at one of the discos where he shows off his abilities, he notices the zippy, frisky moves of Susan and realizes he’s fallen for her after he gets to know her. Although she readily makes out with him, Susan maintains a steady relationship with a rich bully and introduces to Totoy an icy lady who hires him as her personal dance instructor. Realizing how his parents have kept him from a more exciting future in showbiz, Totoy quarrels with his father and moves out on his own. Talent agents start noticing him and he gets a tempting proposition from a famous film director.

Totoy Boogie’s a difficult film to take to heart. It has the same end-of-an-era treatment that Celso Ad. Castillo expended on Burlesk Queen, but it’s too carefully done, and consequently too languidly paced, to make a strong first impression. Not surprisingly, after its box-office failure, he never attempted anything like it again. Yet Castillo firmly belongs to that Pantheon of Filipino filmmakers who’ve fully earned the right to pursue material as seemingly personally indulgent as the crises in and transformations of mass-patronized art forms induced by shifting global trends. The unexpected revelation, for those who allow TB to function the way its creator must have preferred, is that it delivers his usual concerns with class differences and affinity for working-class culture, but undergirds the presentation with utter compassion for the protagonists contending with the trauma of inevitable change. The benevolence will be undeniable in the characterization of the title character’s parents, with Eddie Garcia and Marissa Delgado delivering exquisite performances that will be (and have been) easy to overlook; but Castillo was also careful enough to realize where he could falter, which is where TB attains a measure of integrity that, say, the preceding attempts of Lino Brocka could not match. This is where he introduces queer supporting characters of both genders, who’re saddled with the defeatist resolutions then expected by an authoritarian system where women still had to stake their claim on historical development. He cast Rosanna Ortiz in the role of lesbian ballbuster (even using her nickname, Osang, as the character’s own), succeeding in turning Totoy’s flighty and promiscuous girlfriend into a more responsible individual. More sensationally and subversively, the director who successfully hits on Totoy first appears on TV crowing over his achievement with Asedillo (1971) and remains unnamed. His real-world identity as well as his features are of course Castillo’s, treating his followers to the closest he’d ever gotten to his dream project, Ang Lalakeng Nangarap Maging Nora Aunor (The Man Who Dreamed of Becoming Nora Aunor). As cishet as it’s possible to get, he nevertheless intended to direct and star in it, thus leaving the rest of us to wonder what other flights of imagination he could have left behind, if he’d been accorded the proper recognition due his uniquely off-kilter genius. [Warning for audiences: the original print of TB might be imperilled by copyright issues, regardless if the original soundtrack adds to the film’s distinctive quality; watch out for any remastering that remixes the musical numbers, or better yet, try securing any older, though possibly deteriorated, video transfer.]

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Uhaw na Dagat

English Translation: Thirsty Sea
English Title: Burning Seas
Year of Release: 1981
Director & Screenwriter: Celso Ad. Castillo
Producer: Bancom Audiovision

Cast: Gloria Diaz, Elizabeth Oropesa, Isabel Rivas, Dennis Roldan, Roland Dantes, Lito Anzures, Eddie Garcia, Yehlen Catral, Irish Buendia, Marilou Dytioco, Max Laurel, Gil Guerrero, Paeng Giant, Miniong Goliath, Eddie Killer, Popeye, Angel Face, Mar Gutierrez, Buli-Buli, Ipe Crisostomo, Oca Barako, Domingo Gaciong, Rey Big Boy, Egoy, Arsenio Palomar, Jun Turko, Joe de Cazale, Mar Razon, Jimmy Durante, Eddie Alberto, Johnny, Albia, Rene Miranda, Orlando Miguel, Ric Esguerra

Magda lives with her two younger sisters, whose conduct she oversees, on an island where they are the only inhabitants. Before leaving to fight in World War II, their father had instructed them to raise goats but not for food. So when a boatload of famished sideshow performers sends their speech-impaired muscleman Golem to capture a kid for a meal, Adelfa, the middle sister, threatens him with the only gun they possess. Golem falls for and pursues Adelfa, who in turn eventually accepts him. Crisanto, a straggler from the war, arrives on the island to seduce Magda so he can claim the treasure that the women’s father told him about. Only the youngest, Teresa, is shielded from worldly temptations. Eventually, Satur, who has also learned of treasure on the island, arrives with enough firepower to overcome all resistance.

Whatever egotism Celso Ad. Castillo might have displayed was always tempered by (or even understood in the context of) his eccentricity. His carnivalesque sensibility enjoyed free rein in his sex-themed projects, which provided him with opportunities for humor, playfulness, and occasional idiosyncratic insight—major advantages for an artist confronted by moralistic censorship. With the then-forthcoming Manila International Film Festival offering the prospect of major profits, Bancom Audiovision gave Da Kid unprecedented access to a blockbuster budget, large cast, and enough fireworks for a month of New Year’s Eves, all of which he lavished on his otherworldly scenic resort in Siniloan Municipality in Laguna Province. Uhaw na Dagat may just as well stand in for all the Castillo-as-perverse-visionary films, from Nympha (1971) through Ang Pinakamagandang Hayop sa Balat ng Lupa (The Most Beautiful Animal in the World, 1974) to Virgin People (1984), although these also deserve at least a single going-over, with Nympha requiring every possible recovery effort alongside Castillo’s astounding horror entry Kung Bakit Dugo ang Kulay ng Gabi (Night of the Zombies, 1973). Even Uhaw na Dagat has wasted away over the decades in a slipshod video transfer, proof that its period of emergence boasted of a cornucopia of film delights but with certain titles privileged over the rest by virtue of their favorable standing with local and global tastemakers.

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Paradise Inn

Year of Release: 1985
Director: Celso Ad. Castillo
Screenwriters: Celso Ad. Castillo & Oscar Miranda
Producer: Amazaldy Film Production

Cast: Lolita Rodriguez, Vivian Velez, Michael de Mesa, Dennis Roldan, Jinggoy Estrada, Robert Arevalo, Armida Siguion-Reyna, Lito Anzures, Rodolfo “Boy” Garcia, Lucita Soriano, Odette Khan, Bomber Moran, Joseph de Cordova, Bing Davao, Mary Walter, Virginia Montes, Renato del Prado, Jaime Fabregas, Jestoni Alarcon, Vic Varrion, Jean Carlos, Vicky Suba, Lucy Quinto, Luis Benedicto, Cris Daluz, Nick Alladin

Ester runs Paradise Inn, a nightclub on a hilltop, but wants to shield her daughter Daria from the dissolute lifestyle that led her to this fate. Daria elopes with Al, whose family is prepared to accept her despite her family background. Ester, however, scandalizes Al’s family, forcing Al to break up with Daria. When Al decides to run for mayor against the incumbent Anton, Ester convinces the latter to get rid of the competition. Meanwhile Anton’s wife, Sonia, wishes to get rid of Paradise Inn in order to reclaim her husband. The carnal and political dynamics of the situation lead to a confrontation where no one can claim to have a satisfactory resolution.

Celso Ad. Castillo was more forward-thinking than people realized at the time. Moralists, including left-leaning ones, may have been relieved that Paradise Inn was a departure from his turgid though consistently amusing hard-core melodramas, if not exactly a return to the progressive treatments of historical figures. In fact, the symbolic elements, as well as the retention of prostitution as discursive material, indicate an intent to provide a summation of his filmmaking concerns at this stage, a sort of updating of Burlesk Queen. Yet the closest to a political reading, circa the mid-1980s, suggested a few crucial disruptions with the conflict between two strong-women figures. If the long-suffering proprietress was Corazon Aquino, why did she continue to practice her work as a sex professional? If the self-righteous privileged challenger was Imelda Marcos, why did she have (unlike the real-life former First Lady) the entire Catholic support group behind her? The benefit of hindsight allows us to see that Castillo was talking about the future, rather than the present, in terms that Lino Brocka would eventually adopt after his falling out with the post-Marcos dispensation. Undoubtedly Paradise Inn was far from an empty exercise in high cinematic style then, although those surface values—inclusive of peak achievements by, among others, cinematographer Romy Vitug and actor Lolita Rodriguez—continue to guarantee as much spectatorial pleasure today as they did then.

Note

[1] One of the final clarifications made by Teddy O. Co concerned the rediscovery of a print in a private Western collection. Negotiations for the recovery of an item that is part of the country’s patrimony will have to be conducted; unfortunately the Philippine government at that point still had to carry out its duty.

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Pagdating sa Dulo

English Title: Reaching the Top
Year of Release: 1971 / B&W
Director & Screenwriter: Ishmael Bernal
Producers: Mever Films & Frankesa Films

Cast: Rita Gomez, Vic Vargas, Eddie Garcia, Rosemarie Gil, Ronaldo Valdez, Elvira Manahan, Zeneida Amador, Rosemarie Gil, Subas Herrero, Joonee Gamboa, Ernie Zarate, Ellen Esguerra

Driven by great financial need, Ruben, a filmmaker, reluctantly agrees to helm a bomba or soft-core sex movie and launches nightclub dancer Ching as leading lady. To ensure that no one discovers her background, Ching creates a fake backstory and assumes a new name. She then convinces her former lover Pinggoy to enter showbiz too. But the dangerous allure of celebrity life soon triggers Ching and Pinggoy’s downward spiral.

Having returned from higher studies in film and literature in India and France respectively, Ishmael Bernal may have picked up a cosmopolitan sensibility that accommodated both European and native values. Flaunting this same sensibility before media practitioners were convinced that it could work in “low” cultural exercises, he risked getting fired from his first film project—Luis Enriquez’s Ah Ewan! Basta sa Maynila Pa rin Ako! (I Don’t Care! I Still Prefer Manila!, 1970)—and needed to get together a team of investors just to be able to finance his own low-budget debut. Pagdating sa Dulo proceeds from the English-language pun of a taxi driver falling in with a taxi dancer, then ventures into the tragicomic world of showbiz sexploitation. Bernal’s subject, for the most part of his career, had been the fallen Pinay; though one could sense the tension between his highly schooled training and his enthusiastic acceptance of mass culture, his sense of literary proportion and critical perspective on social issues provide heft to potentially lightweight material, and his propensity for satire spices it up.

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Lumapit … Lumayo ang Umaga

English Translation: The Morning Arrived … and Left
English Title: Near, Far the Morning
Year of Release: 1975
Director & Screenwriter: Ishmael Bernal
(Based on the story by Liwayway Arceo)
Producer: Lea Productions

Cast: Dante Rivero, Elizabeth Oropesa, George Estregan, Anita Linda, Caridad Sanchez, Renato Robles, Estrella Kuenzler

Innocent about the ways of men because of having grown up fatherless, Amy falls for a handsome stranger who keeps showing up at the market stall where she works as a fish vendor. She and Vic start a family after her mother dies, but Vic’s criminal past catches up with him and he has to take leave of his family on the pretext that he has to work in Mindanao. After an absence of over seven years where neither Amy nor her friends can track him, William, the Chinoy owner of the shop where Amy works, offers her marriage even after finding out that she has a son by another man. The new family have a prosperous and contented existence, until Vic returns to reclaim the family he left.

Ishmael Bernal continued working for Lea Productions long after Lino Brocka cut off ties with the studio. Evaluators unthinkingly downgraded Bernal’s 1975 studio entry in favor of Brocka’s independently produced Maynila: Sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag. As it turned out, Lumapit … Lumayo ang Umaga outshines all the other available Lea films (except possibly for a now-lost 1967 title, Armando de Guzman’s Maruja). Understandably, Brocka’s abhorrence of compromise garnered better notices—and more trophies—than the delicate balance between popular appeal and the sober dissection of social relations in Ishma’s attempt. Elizabeth Oropesa’s performance, a first in Filipino film naturalism, exemplifies the manner in which a typical everyday provincial-accented Pinay strives to acquire wisdom and sophistication in accordance with her rise in social status. In final contrast with Maynila, the film acknowledges how a Chinoy may fall for a native lass but without necessarily turning monstrous out of lust. The film may have definitely benefited from a period in Bernal’s career before he turned too arch and satirical for his own good, but Brocka may have also been taking notes, as his own personal aesthetic development eventually circled back to this very same set of filmmaking values.

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Ligaw na Bulaklak

English Title: Wildflower
Year of Release: 1976
Director: Ishmael Bernal
Screenwriter: Edgardo Reyes
(From his novel titled Bulaklak ng Apoy [Flower of Fire]
Producer: Crown Seven Film Productions

Cast: Vic Silayan, Marissa Delgado, Yvonne, Charina Alonzo, Anita Linda, Jun Mariano, Alma Moreno, Elvie Escarro, Edgar Garcia, Ria

Abandoned as a child, Evelyn is raised in a working-class kabaret (taxi-dance hall) by its proprietor and manager; like everyone else, Evelyn calls her Mommy, although she happens to be Evelyn’s godmother. Although delayed in her studies, Evelyn finishes her elementary education in their town’s public school, where the principal insists on civic propriety for her entire constituency. Mang Juan, the school gardener, lives on the premises and takes a fatherly interest in the young woman. When Mommy drives her away for using her jewelry for her graduation ceremony, Evelyn winds up sharing Mang Juan’s on-campus living quarters. And when the principal’s promiscuous son visits his mother during vacation, he too is drawn to Evelyn’s pubescent charms.

One of the mysteries in a close tracking of Ishmael Bernal’s career trajectory is how he could come up with such an impressively edgy depiction of Philippine rural existence—then abandon the approach in his future major film projects; for all their merits, Nunal sa Tubig (1976) and Himala (1982) both assumed the perspectives of outsiders looking in. Bernal was such a creature, after all, but Ligaw na Bulaklak possessed sufficient urban resonances with, say, an earlier period when Manila residents were more naïve and easy-going. His familiarity with that type of milieu can be perceived in how he managed to sneak in a critique of authoritarian developmentalist policies in what is essentially a psychosexual study of desire and how, unbridled, it easily transmutes into a destructive force. Most observers focused on the interaction among randy stud, willing nymphet, and repressed senior disabled worker, but the truly powerful figures in their narrative situations are the ones who drive the increasingly malevolent succession of events: the whorehouse madame whose unflinching honesty enables her to assess the readiness of her hapless ward for sex work, and the upstanding school principal whose hypocrisy dictates that she police her students’ and employees’ moral behavior even while she maintains a paramour on the downlow. The bleakly lurid future that the town faces will hold no glad tidings for the triangle at the story’s center, but these two opposing forces will likely be able to move on from what will be for them just one of many possible setbacks.

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Nunal sa Tubig

English Translation: Mole on the Water
English Title: A Speck in the Water
Year of Release: 1976
Director: Ishmael Bernal
Screenwriter: Jorge Arago
Producer: Crown Seven Film Productions

Cast: Elizabeth Oropesa, Daria Ramirez, George Estregan, Ruben Rustia, Pedro Faustino, Nenita Jana, Ven Medina, Leticia de Guzman, Tita de Villa, Ella Luansing, Rustica Carpio, Paquito Salcedo, Lem Garcellano, Carlos Padilla Jr., Tony Carreon

Benjamin shares his affection between island natives Chedeng, who is a midwife, and Chedeng’s friend Maria. Chedeng decides to practice her profession in a nearby town and leaves the island. Benjamin also leaves so he can join the navy, but only after he gets Maria pregnant. Upon Chedeng’s return, her relationships with her lover and her friend require some drastic adjustments.

Ishmael Bernal’s friendly rivalry with Lino Brocka resulted in a productive series of projects for both of them, although Brocka’s flashier attempts tended to outshine Bernal’s. Nevertheless, after his debut in 1971, Bernal managed a more consistent level of quality from one project to the next, in contrast with Brocka’s uneven output. Nunal sa Tubig typifies Bernal’s predicament: a writerly obsession with abstract issues pertaining to material and medium, so that the result yields insights over time rather than make a strong first impact. This also explains why Bernal tended to utilize exploitative strategies, specifically raunchy language and scenes of sexual coupling, in addition to his offbeat humor. In this specific outing, which was set in a fishing village too far away from his deep-urban comfort zone, he appears to have had no other choice except to fall back on his extensive documentarian training. So startlingly well-observed it could trump most real-life footage from the same period, Nunal was nevertheless genuinely “bold” (the then-current term for sexually frank cinema) in depicting its trio of characters’ awakening to erotic desire. It was also forward-looking in terms of the ecological effects of development and empathetic regarding the plight of rural labor. If the viewing experience, as affirmed by agitated mass audiences during the movie’s initial release, turned out to be occasionally tedious, the long-term rewards will be worth every effort.

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Nonoy Marcelo’s Tisoy!

Alternate Title: Tisoy!
Year of Release: 1977
Director: Ishmael Bernal
Screenwriter: Nonoy Marcelo
(From the comics strip originally featured in Manila Times)
Producer: NV Productions

Cast: Christopher de Leon, Jay Ilagan, Lorli Villanueva, Bert “Tawa” Marcelo, Ruffy Mendoza, Dexter Doria, Soxy Topacio, Pongay, Jun Morales, Moody Diaz, Nora Aunor, Dranreb Belleza, Feling Cudia, Marianne de la Riva, Johnny Delgado, Angie Ferro, Ernie Garcia, Sandy Garcia, Trixia Gomez, Hilda Koronel, Edgar Mortiz, Orestes Ojeda, Elizabeth Oropesa, Rolly Quizon, Bembol Roco

Preceded by Tikyo, who loads his companion in an ambulance, Tisoy arrives with Clip from the US and is met by his rich friend Boy. He seeks out Maribubut, the girlfriend he left behind, who resents him for not keeping in touch. Tisoy explains that he left to find his American father, but returned because he heard that his father traveled to Pinas. They round up their old friends Pomposa, a compulsive eater, and Gemmo, an artist who’s not beneath swiping someone else’s commission so he can earn extra. Clip meanwhile visits his mother Aling Otik, who still lives atop the Intramuros wall but also joined Imelda Marcos’s crew of street sweepers, the Metro Manila Aides. They see Tikyo at his campaign sortie for barangay captain, but he knows nothing about Tisoy’s father. The wander around Manila’s scenic areas and nightspots to help Tisoy’s mission, while Tikyo amuses his American friend by trading puns in various global languages.

Tisoy! is an illustrious undertaking involving the best film talents working at peak capacity, from Ishma Bernal to a more-than-game cast, plus Nora Aunor in her less-appreciated function as film producer. Its source material was from the country’s top comics artist, Nonoy Marcelo, although ultimately its weakness will have to be tracked to the team deciding (unusual for Bernal) to take his script at face value. The director and performers deliver a procession of puns, witticisms, in-jokes, foreshadowings, and reflexive references with a zippy energy that might prove too fast even for contemporary viewers, and manage to slip in a few satirical barbs that the martial-law censors decided were unacceptable enough to cause the film to be unavailable for the rest of the fascist dispensation (typical example: before cast members danced to Festival’s “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” in a disco in Manila by Night, “Pamulinawen” gets played here on the way to Pangasinan, whence the friends stage a beauty contest where Pomposa mouths the First Lady’s tourism bromides).[1] Most of these elements were of course ascribable to Marcelo, although the overriding quest of a son seeking to reunite with his father, plus the revelation of who said father might be, would be obvious to any Disney-raised preteen. The measure of how impressively the film prevailed can be seen in how, a few years later, most of the same cast was reassembled for Mike de Leon’s Kakabakaba Ka Ba? (Are You Nervous? 1980), but could barely recapture the spirit of loony inspiration that marked their presence in Tisoy!

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Ikaw Ay Akin

English Translation: You Are Mine
Year of Release: 1978
Director: Ishmael Bernal
Screenwriters: Ishmael Bernal & Jose N. Carreon
Producer: Tagalog Ilang-Ilang Productions

Cast: Nora Aunor, Vilma Santos, Christopher de Leon, Nick Romano, Ellen Esguerra, Zandro Zamora, Odette Khan, Ven Medina, Ernie Zarate, Anton Juan

Jeepney manufacturing company executive Rex and orchid cultivator Teresita have been lovers for five years. But when Rex meets artist-designer Sandra, sparks fly and an affair ensues. When Teresita discovers this, Rex has to decide which woman he truly wants to be with in his life.

With the qualified success of Nunal sa Tubig (1976) and the impressive mark made by Ikaw Ay Akin, Bernal started being called a “poet of the middle class”—a description that never caught on, fortunately. In fact, a careful inspection of the present film would demonstrate that his insider status becomes evident only once, in a highly proscribed milieu, one that used to be called “bohemian.” His decision to aestheticize the middle-class situation leads to similar-yet-different results as with the rural village in Nunal; for one thing, the man caught between two equally desirable women, played by long-time friends and rivals Nora Aunor and Vilma Santos, this time endeavors to articulate his dilemma to each one of them, instead of running away. And while it may be true that Filipinos, Pinays included, rarely engage in moments of silence, Bernal’s approach—highlighted in the dialogue-less confrontation that serves as the film’s closure—provides a certain weight that any native who has experienced any kind of tongue-tying befuddlement will recognize.

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Salawahan

English Translation: Fickle-Hearted
Year of Release: 1979
Director: Ishmael Bernal
Screenwriter: Jose N. Carreon
Producer: Regal Films

Cast: Jay Ilagan, Mat Ranillo III, Sandy Andolong, Rio Locsin, Rita Gomez, Mark Gil, Ruthie Roces, Rene Requiestas, Bongchi Miraflor

Cousins Manny and Gerry always seem to strike out when it comes to love. Manny is a playboy and easily gets into trouble with his many girlfriends. Gerry values monogamy but takes too long before he makes his move. When they agree to switch dating styles to see where it takes them, a myriad of comic misadventures ensues, involving their respective girlfriends as well as Marianne, an elderly sex researcher.

Ishmael Bernal had been interrogating middle-class lifestyles for so long—from early in his career with Daluyong! (Storm Surge!) (1971) up to as recently as 1978’s Ikaw Ay Akin—that when he provided the equivalent of a mid-career summation, only his mass audience took note. Yet Salawahan stands as tall as anything since 1976 to the end of the decade, and has aged better than any title in, say, its year of release, which saw Lino Brocka’s Jaguar being the toast of local awards groups and the Cannes Film Festival. To be sure, Salawahan’s comic façade, which enabled it as well as several other Bernal films around this time to sneak past the militarized board of censors, undoubtedly resulted in mainstream critics downgrading its worth. Perversely, the same body would occasionally ban harmless entries for no perceivable reason except to keep practitioners on the alert—so in retrospect, Salawahan was more daring than people had presumed. Also, a minor to-do among critical observers over who delivered the year’s best male performance—i.e., Dindo Fernando in Danny L. Zialcita’s Ikaw at ang Gabi (You and the Night) vs. Phillip Salvador in Jaguar—would have been easily averted if everyone had paid closer attention then to Jay Ilagan.

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Aliw

English Title: Pleasure
Additional Languages: Japanese, Spanish
Year of Release: 1979
Director: Ishmael Bernal
Screenwriter: Cecille Lardizabal[2]
Producer: Seven Star Productions

Cast: Lorna Tolentino, Amy Austria, Suzette Ranillo, Butz Aquino, George Estregan, Jojo Santiago, Rustica Carpio, Manny Castañeda, Laura Danao, Menggie Cobarrubias, Dick Israel, Ruby Regala, Ruthie Roces, Juan Rodrigo, Cesar Topacio, Junix Inocian, Edmund Farolan, Antonette Bass

Ayet, Lingling, and Esper are nightclub hostesses dealing with a bevy of problems. Ayet is torn between easy money and true love. Lingling keeps ending up with men who stifle her independence. Esper struggles to support a family (her own and her mother’s) while maintaining a relationship with a married man, with whom she raises their love child. As they deal with issues of money, addiction, professional rivalry, abusive lovers, and social prejudice, they find that their pursuit of personal happiness will constantly have to be deferred.

One would expect that critics would have given Ishmael Bernal, with all his extensive academic and practical training in film, the benefit of the doubt when he turned to low-end aesthetic strategies. Unfortunately the type of US film-studies influence that first arrived here must have come from directly across the Pacific, with Hollywood the locus of application. Otherwise, with Aliw on hand, observers should not have been too surprised when its expanded version, Manila by Night (1980), emerged right afterward. The conceptual and creative intelligence that went into the seemingly casual outing that was Aliw, distinguishes it as the first successful instance of a multicharacter film narrative—i.e., one where the number of lead performers exceeds the standard singular or dual (hero/antihero) arrangement. After the box-office trauma of Nunal sa Tubig (1976, financed by the same producer as Aliw), Bernal’s sharpened sense of commercial contingency enabled the movie to market itself as part of an unnamed subgenre of local melodrama. In retrospect, and with a nod to Korean film scholars, we may now refer to these types of movies as the “tragic-hostess” films, where the socio-economic conditions underlying women’s sex work are exposed, as a way of implicating patriarchy and martial rule. Apart from its innovative storyline, Aliw endows its material with a mix of pathos, humor, insight, and accuracy, automatically rendering less consequential all other films in its league.

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Manila by Night

Censors-Approved Title: City after Dark
Additional Languages: Hiligaynon, Chinese, Japanese
Year of Release: 1980
Director & Screenwriter: Ishmael Bernal
Script consultants: Jorge Arago, Toto Belano, Jose Carreon, Ricky Lee, Peque Gallaga, George Sison
Producer: Regal Films

Cast: Charito Solis, Alma Moreno, Lorna Tolentino, Rio Locsin, Cherie Gil, Gina Alajar, Orestes Ojeda, William Martinez, Bernardo Bernardo, Maya Valdes, Johnny Wilson, Jojo Santiago, Aida Carmona, Sharon Manabat, Lucy Quinto, Abbo de la Cruz, Dante Castro, Dennis Marasigan, Tony Angeles

Drug-addicted nightclub singer Alex employs the services of blind masseuse Bea. She, in turn, is the object of affection of lesbian drug pusher Kano. Meanwhile, playboy taxi driver Febrero juggles affairs with naïve waitress Baby, night nurse Adelina, and gay couturier Manay Sharon, who also eventually manages to pick up Alex. Manay is persuaded by Alex to help Bea by soliciting the help of Adelina. As these interactions among them and with their families and friends grow more complex, each person is led to a path where the line between salvation and doom becomes harder to perceive.

The Filipino entry that towers over everything else made by Ishmael Bernal and, by extension, the rest of Philippine cinema. The storytelling element alone (over a dozen lead characters) already invites comparison to few other examples in global film, and Bernal’s refusal to provide closure raises the possibility of its singularity among existing multicharacter film texts. Too easily taken for granted is a further accomplishment, one that eluded even Bernal himself in most of his future attempts at implementing the format: the successful depiction of dramatic themes drawn not from any (anti-)hero in the narrative, but from the equal-emphasis interaction of all the major characters. As a consequence, the city of Manila emerges as an ultimate abstract super-character, ensnaring everyone in its seductive web of deceit and desperation. Once more, critics were (and still are?) misled by Bernal’s reliance on Third-World aesthetics, where the proliferation of misery onscreen ironically heralds a richness of conception and unconditional sympathy for a wide range of social misfits and rejects.

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Pabling

English Translation: Playboy
Year of Release: 1981
Director & Screenwriter: Ishmael Bernal
(Unofficially adapted from Ah Ewan! Basta sa Maynila Pa rin Ako!, dir. Luis Enriquez, 1970)
Producer: Regal Films

Cast: William Martinez, Maricel Soriano, Gina Alajar, Joel Alano, Alfie Anido, Michael de Mesa, Subas Herrero, Jay Ilagan, Alma Moreno, Balot, Jimi Melendez, Al Tantay, Chanda Romero, Bernardo Bernardo

Suave playboy Berto and sassy charmer Maya leave their rural town in search of greener pastures in Manila. Once there, some shared misfortunes help them to strike a friendship that slowly leads to love. As they take up several odd jobs, Berto gets into all sorts of high jinks with various women and eventually loses contact with Maya. Eventually, however, their paths cross again as their fortunes change.

Even when Ishmael Bernal took a much-deserved breather from his visionary contributions to Philippine cinema, he could not help his newfound innovative bent. Hitting upon an update of Luis Enriquez’s Ah Ewan! Basta sa Maynila Pa rin Ako! (1970), his first script project and would-have-been directorial debut, he imbued the picaresque narrative with situations from and references to his own and his colleagues’ popular films. In addition, he opted to surrealize as well as satirize the absurdity of the triteness of the situation. And just as 1980’s Manila by Night was his ethnographic answer to the excessive romanticism and unexamined stereotyping of Lino Brocka’s Maynila: Sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag (1975), so was Pabling a playful reversal of many of Maynila’s narratory obsessions. It commences with a rural couple’s migration to the big city and realizes a central twist in the girlfriend managing to survive—and exploiting her lover in the process. In the end, social and emotional developments generically conspire to restore a semblance of the normative, a criticism that attended all of the major Bernal movies up to this point. However, as in the aforementioned films, it’s the journey, not the destination, that matters.

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1—Relasyon

English Translation: Relationship
English Title: Affair
Year of Release: 1982
Director: Ishmael Bernal
Screenwriters: Ricky Lee, Raquel N. Villavicencio, & Ishmael Bernal
Producer: Regal Films

Cast: Vilma Santos, Christopher de Leon, Jimi Melendez, Lucy Quinto, Ernie Zarate, Manny Castañeda, Bing Fabregas, Beth Mondragon, Thaemar Achacoso, Dante Castro, Tony Angeles

After temporarily parting ways with his wife, Emil moves to an inherited house with his mistress, Marilou. Things start well but later on, Emil’s chauvinistic attitude causes Marilou to leave him. She eventually misses their relationship and returns to her lover. But Emil and Marilou’s supposedly happy reunion hits a snag when Emil’s wife suddenly returns, and Marilou discovers that Emil has a potentially fatal illness.

2—Broken Marriage

Additional Language: English
Year of Release: 1983
Director: Ishmael Bernal
Screenwriters: Jose N. Carreon & Bing Caballero
Producer: Regal Films

Cast: Vilma Santos, Christopher de Leon, Harlene Bautista, Richard Arellano, Len Santos, Lito Pimentel, Rey Ventura, Orestes Ojeda, Tessie Tomas, Spanky Manikan, Cesar Montano, Rey Ventura

Over the years, Rene and Ellen’s marriage has been gradually crumbling. They decide to temporarily split up, with Rene living with his friends and Ellen taking care of their two children. But soon, their separation makes matters worse as their marital problems start to affect their jobs and their family. Eventually, they are forced to reevaluate the terms of their relationship.

The plight of the other woman has been a recurrent theme in Philippine film and literature, and will persist for as long as the country remains the only secular nation where divorce is unavailable. Relasyon is as close to an archetypal film sample as we can get, and the fact that Ishmael Bernal and Ricky Lee had previously succeeded in painted-women narratives might have had a bearing on the degree of empathy and quality of insight that the film manifested. Vilma Santos, whose consummate performances lay elsewhere, nevertheless gives the role her best shot—meaning a load of charm and feminine flourishes alongside an occasional misfire. At his peak, Bernal could be pressured to repeat himself, but he would always manage to wind up with something new. After the success of Relasyon, its producer Regal Films brought together the movie’s lead performers and had the director tackle once more the theme of disorder and early sorrow in modern relationships. Both actors emerged with better performances than in the earlier film, and the feminist slant is developed with more subtlety, mainly by contrasting the central relationship with those of several others—from a giggly engaged couple to an elderly single-male parent, plus a ground-breaking depiction of a fairly viable same-sex arrangement. Although Relasyon is more distinctive as a study of the other woman, in contrast with Broken Marriage’s overworked wife, any imperfect film by Bernal can still trump the best efforts of most other filmmakers anywhere.

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Himala

English Title: Miracle
Year of Release: 1982
Director: Ishmael Bernal
Screenwriter: Ricky Lee
Producer: Experimental Cinema of the Philippines

Cast: Nora Aunor, Veronica Palileo, Spanky Manikan, Gigi Dueñas, Vangie Labalan, Laura Centeno, Ama Quiambao, Ben Almeda, Pen Medina, Aura Mijares, Cris Daluz, Rey Ventura, Tony Angeles, Joe Gruta, Lem Garcellano, Vicky Castillo

Crowds gather at Cupang, a drought-stricken town, in search of Elsa, a girl who claims that she saw the Virgin Mary and could now heal the sick. Inundated by the sick and the fortune-seekers, Cupang begins to prosper but material values take hold of everyone. Eventually, Elsa and her friend Chayong are raped, causing Chayong to hang herself and Elsa to lose her confidence in healing. When some unusual natural events occur, people believe that miracles are possible once more and clamor for Elsa again. But this time, she has come to her own moral awakening.

The challenge for Manila-based artists when they explore areas beyond the metropolis is how to depict what may essentially be a foreign world while being true to the place as well as to their roots. The Experimental Cinema of the Philippines, which produced Himala, was already guaranteed an authentic “rural” narrative, period-historical at that, with Peque Gallaga’s Oro, Plata, Mata (1982). Himala, which in contrast was set in the north, also decided on a different tack by exploring how “Manila” becomes an imagined ideal, distant yet somehow attainable, in the lives of people in the rest of the country. Even the least secular personality, a faith healer, aspires to the politicized stature of a media celebrity and realizes her ethical predicament too late, via her own process of enlightenment. The fact that the project had managed to cast Nora Aunor in the central role gave the film institutional value beyond the issue of the separate worth of her performance—which, if it ever still needed pointing out, was as unassailable then as it remains today. Himala was initially welcomed with qualified enthusiasm, since commentators may have been put off by its makers’ refusal to create clear-cut moral identities as well as by the movie project’s authoritarian sponsorship. Since then, though, it has grown in stature and represents Bernal’s ability in responding to classical-humanist filmmaking challenges with his critical intelligence intact.

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Working Girls

Additional Languages: English, Spanish
Year of Release: 1984
Director: Ishmael Bernal
Screenwriter: Amado Lacuesta
Producer: Viva Films

Cast: Hilda Koronel, Rio Locsin, Gina Pareño, Tommy Abuel, Carmi Martin, Chanda Romero, Maria Isabel Lopez, Baby Delgado, Robert Arevalo, Edu Manzano, Joel Lamangan, Raoul Aragonn, Chris Michelena

Seven women show the ups and downs of working in a corporate world ruled by men. Carla has to compete with a womanizing coworker for a promotion. Isabel suddenly gets pregnant but is too meek to stand up for herself. Suzanne and Rose use womanly wiles to reach their goals. And while Nimfa and Amanda compete to marry the same man, Anne tries to keep her crumbling marriage from affecting her job.

Ishmael Bernal’s tribute to, and documentation of, the then-raging anti-dictatorship protest movement might appear to be asking to be differentiated from the typical entries, notably Mike de Leon’s Sister Stella L. (1984) and Lino Brocka’s Bayan Ko: Kapit sa Patalim (1985). Yet Working Girls partakes of certain elements of these related texts, specifically the women-centeredness of Sister Stella L. and the labor-rights issues of Bayan Ko; otherwise Working Girls stands apart, in terms of its middle-class milieu, its multicharacter structure, and its comedic strategies. Another way of understanding it is to regard it as another version of Aliw (1979), updated and expanded but also gentrified, becoming more conventional in its equal-rights feminist argument but also more distinctive as the rare protest (and multicharacter) film with a happy ending—and just as vital at present, if not more so, than its contemporaries.

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Hinugot sa Langit

English Title: Wrenched from Heaven
Year of Release: 1985
Director: Ishmael Bernal
Screenwriter: Amado Lacuesta
Producer: Regal Films

Cast: Maricel Soriano, Charito Solis, Dante Rivero, Al Tantay, Amy Austria, Rowell Santiago, Rey Ventura, Ronald Bregendahl, Gamaliel Viray, Tony Mabesa, Mario Taguiwalo

Carmen gets into an affair with a married man despite having a persistent suitor. When she becomes pregnant, her cousin Stella tells her to get an abortion. Carmen’s overly religious landlady Juling discourages her. As Carmen mulls her unborn baby’s fate, a series of events and personal issues cause her to evaluate her role in society as a woman.

Stung by ill-considered criticism of his technical abilities, Ishmael Bernal spent the most part of his late career polishing his films’ surfaces, prior to committing to orthodox-left ideals and succumbing to substance dependency—all arguably unnecessary for someone of his stature and capabilities. An occasional project, such as Hinugot sa Langit, would engage him with its impossible-to-resolve ethical and sociological questions, specifically on the usefulness of abortion as a legally unavailable option in a national culture that aspires toward liberal ideals yet makes impossible demands on its female citizens. Confronted with a clutch of thorny questions, Bernal could focus once more on his discursive strengths and provide entertainment that could endure extended evaluations. Significantly, and sadly, he had to step back afterward—to the vicinities of television and advertising, theater performance, and café proprietorship—to allow his peers, notably Lino Brocka, an opportunity to assimilate the lessons he had accumulated in film form, structure, characterization, and thematic development. But with Brocka’s sudden demise, Bernal’s spirit (as he himself averred) also seemed to give out. Yet no one since has been able to consistently transform complex material into accessible, even occasionally fun-to-watch, film presentations. A woefully early end to an extremely productive career.

Notes

[1] “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” was a song from Evita (1976), initially a concept album and later a musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice; despite the multimedia success of the pair’s previous musical Jesus Christ Superstar (1971), Imelda Marcos disallowed the staging of Evita because of her denial of any similarities between herself and Eva Perón, although its hit song could not be targeted because of its ubiquity, especially in discos. “Pamulinawen” (literally “alabaster”) is an Ilocano folk song allegedly sung by Ferdinand E. Marcos to his mistress Dovie Beams, whose voice she recorded along with their bouts of fornication; the audiotape managed to be copied and circulated among media practitioners, including rebel broadcasters at DZUP during the Diliman Commune of February 1971, and was transcribed for Chapter 16 of Hermie Rotea’s Marcos’ Lovey Dovie (Liberty Publishing, 1983). Apart from the parody of the Kabataang Barangay, the updating of Aling Otik as a Metro Manila Aide, while far from satirical per se, harbored some political baggage: the workers, mostly elderly working-class women, were initially charged with resisting street demonstrators—a harebrained and mercifully short-lived decision.

[2] The screenwriter repudiated her credit in a letter to the editor when the film was nominated for the Urian awards; her name was replaced by those of Franklin Cabaluna & Ishmael Bernal.

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Tubog sa Ginto

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

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

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

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

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Stardoom

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

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

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

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

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Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kulang

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

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

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

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

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Maynila: Sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag

English Title: Manila in the Claws of Light
Alternate Title: The Nail of Brightness
Year of Release: 1975 / Color with B&W
Director: Lino Brocka
Screenwriter: Clodualdo del Mundo Jr.
(Adapted from the 1968 novel Sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag by Edgardo M. Reyes)
Producer: Cinema Artists

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

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

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

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Insiang

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

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

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

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

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Jaguar

Additional Language: English
Year of Release: 1979
Director: Lino Brocka
Screenwriters: Jose F. Lacaba & Ricky Lee
(Based on “The Boy Who Wanted To Become ‘Society,’” from the 1977 book Reportage on Crime: Thirteen Horror Happenings That Hit the Headlines by Quijano de Manila)
Producer: Bancom Audiovision Corporation

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

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

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

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Bona

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

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

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

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

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Cain at Abel

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

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

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

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

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1—Bayan Ko: Kapit sa Patalim

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

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

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

2—Orapronobis

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

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

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

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

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Miguelito: Batang Rebelde

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

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

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

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

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Babangon Ako’t Dudurugin Kita

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

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

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

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

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Hahamakin Lahat

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

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

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

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

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Gumapang Ka sa Lusak

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

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

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

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

Note

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

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Badlis sa Kinabuhi

English Translation: Line of Life
English Title: Hand of Fate
Alternative English Title: Destined
Language: Cebuano
Year of Release: 1968 / B&W
Director: Leroy Salvador
Screenwriters: Junipher (Leroy Salvador & Gloria Sevilla)
Producer: MG Productions

Cast: Gloria Sevilla, Mat Ranillo Jr., Frankie Navaja Jr., Felix de Catalina, Danilo Nuñez, Martha Dee, Aurora Villa, Siux Cabase

Celia lives a peaceful life with her husband Domeng and their son Lito. The only thorn in her side is her foster father Simon, who disapproves of her marriage because of his lust for her. When Simon’s incestuous behavior goes too far, Celia kills him. But this traumatizes Lito and leads Domeng to abandon her. As Celia’s trial unfolds, her fate hangs in the balance.

Philippine cinema must have been granted a much-needed stroke of luck in that even in a degraded pre-restored state,[1] the fullest available single sample from early regional production has turned out to be one of our best commercial films ever. This will be news mainly for Manila-centrified observers, since Badlis sa Kinabuhi is not only fondly remembered among elderly Cebuano audiences, it was also the first Filipino feature to screen at the Berlin International Film Festival. Director Leroy Salvador must have picked up insight and inspiration from the several genres he appeared in as an LVN Pictures performer; surrounded by practitioners who were out to prove themselves equal to Manila’s output, he and they managed the tricky balance between heavy melodrama and judicious humor, with a genuinely involving race-against-time finale. Gloria Sevilla, a rare instance of a popular figure who also encompasses folk-artist significance, combines strong presence with skilled delivery—enough to make her plight sympathetic even to those who barely understand the language.

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Beloved

Year of Release: 1985
Director: Leroy Salvador
Screenwriter: Orlando Nadres
(Based on the komiks by Nerissa Cabral)
Producer: Viva Films

Cast: Nora Aunor, Hilda Koronel, Christopher de Leon, Dindo Fernando, Deborah Sun, Fred Montilla, Virginia Montes, Metring David

After a friendly encounter on a flight to Manila, Adora and Renée meet again when Adora’s boyfriend Dindo lands a job at the company owned by Renée’s father. Renée also succeeds in hiring Adora as her secretary. Due to her attraction to Dindo, Renée quickly promotes him, which angers sly sales manager Ver. What follows is a chain of events fueled by lust, betrayal, revenge, and greed for power.

Those who regard Nora Aunor’s populist persona as necessarily opposed to the original Viva Films’ house image (mainly represented by glossy melodramas) will find their logic challenged by this offbeat entry. Rather than bring up the expected gender issues, the movie superimposes the characters’ class dynamics and observes how gender differences play out within this framework. The central quartet of mature performers ensures that the sudden shifts in character behavior turn out to be revelations rather than inconsistencies, and intensify the tugs-of-war with just the right balance of charm and deviousness, so that it becomes impossible to pinpoint a definitive winner among all four of them once the dust has settled.

Note

[1] The 2015 Cinema Rehiyon festival featured as opening film a basic digital remastering of the available print, the closest we might ever be able to get at present to the original screening.

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The Passionate Strangers

Language: English
Additional Language: Filipino
Year of Release: 1966 / B&W
Director & Screenwriter: Eddie Romero
Producer: MJP Productions

Cast: Michael Parsons, Valora Noland, Mario Montenegro, Celia Rodriguez, Vic Diaz, Butz Aquino, Claude Wilson, Jose Dagumboy, Bong Calumpang, Cesar Aguilar

In trying to uncover his wife’s affair with another man, Adam accidentally kills a labor union leader. An initial investigation insinuates the involvement of the American company Adam works for, inasmuch as its previous negotiations with the slain union leader did not push through. Soon, Adam’s crime of passion escalates into a murder dealing with issues of racial difference.

As a protégé of Gerardo de Leon, Eddie Romero’s curse also became his advantage: as long as he could work with de Leon, he never needed to worry about focusing on directorial expertise, just as de Leon could always count on a pool of outstanding writers for his scripts. The best Romero films would therefore tend to be so well-written that their technical shortcomings can be overlooked. An outstanding sample would be the now-lost Sa Atin ang Daigdig (The World Is Ours, 1963, credited to Cesar J. Amigo but claimed in interviews by Romero, who’s credited as scriptwriter). The Passionate Strangers is even more ambitious in tackling neocolonial US presence, labor unrest, and interracial romance, unfolding the tinderbox situation via the opportunistic investigations conducted by a cynical, perceptive, yet paradoxically humane local-government official—wonderfully essayed by the usually taken-for-granted Vic Diaz. Despite its US B-film pedigree, this entry, rather than Romero’s well-received apology for US military presence, The Day of the Trumpet (a.k.a. Cavalry Command, 1958), earns its designation as “Filipino” more than most other projects by him, if not by other Filipinos. Adults who mess up their lives despite their best intentions: that appears to have been Romero’s recurrent theme, and it has never been encapsulated any better than in this overlooked gem.

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Savage Sisters

Language: English
Additional Language: Filipino
Year of Release: 1974
Director: Eddie Romero
Screenwriters: H. Franco Moon & Harry Corner
Producer: Cinema Projects International & Hemisphere Pictures

Cast: Gloria Hendry, Cheri Caffaro, Rosanna Ortiz, Sid Haig, Eddie Garcia, Rita Gomez, Leopoldo Salcedo, Vic Diaz, Dindo Fernando, Angelo Ventura, Romeo Rivera, Alfonso Carvajal, Robert Rivera, Subas Herrero, John Platter, Bruno Punzalan, Joonee Gamboa, Max Rojo, Johnny Long, John Ashley

Jo Turner, a white American fighting for the same cause as her revolutionary lover Ernesto, has been arrested along with her Asian comrade Mei Ling. The two are brought along with other women to a correctional, where a black warden, Lynn Jackson, recognizes Mei Ling as a former sex-work colleague. Jo and Mei Ling are aware that Ernesto’s team plans to swipe a million dollars from a government delivery vehicle so they can be rescued and overthrow the corrupt military regime running the island territory. Ernesto and his friends, however, are double-crossed by the mercenaries who promised to help them for a share of the money. Jo and Mei Ling plot to escape so they can recover the funds but when Lynn learns about their plan, she volunteers to help them for an equal portion. Working as a threesome, the women encounter Billingsley, whom the mercenaries contacted to provide them with a ship to get off the island. When he tells them that he wants to be of help, they have to determine first whether he can be trusted.

Although dismissive of his coproduction projects, Eddie Romero was able to claim some bragging rights when an American colleague, Jonathan Demme, managed to parlay his B-filmmaking training (spent partly in the Philippines) into critical acclaim, culminating in an Oscar for The Silence of the Lambs (1991).[1] His Demme collaboration was the project prior to Savage Sisters, Black Mama White Mama (1973), which provided Pam Grier with her blaxploitation breakout role. Savage Sisters proceeded from BMWM’s pointed critiques of race and power, but evades the latter’s heavy-handedness by adding not just an extra racial subject (via an Oriental character) but also an expanded number of satirical targets, mostly patriarchal but including an oversexed prison matron. The proliferation of players dilutes the film’s ideological purpose just enough to enable it to provide the diversions required of genre entertainment, inasmuch as the locales of these projects, extending back to the Blood Island films of the 1960s, were never meant to be identifiable in the first place. Ironically, Romero’s immersion in exploitation-film practice may have been key to his further (though not complete) distancing from Cold War ideals. Filmic expertise had never been a previous component of his store of capabilities, since he could always rely on Gerardo de Leon to accomplish his vision; but with the latter’s semi-retired status, Romero had no choice except to overcome his hesitation about creating films for American drive-in audiences and reached a point, with Savage Sisters, from which he was able to embark on his most successfully realized material in his next film, Ganito Kami Noon … Paano Kayo Ngayon? (As We Were, 1976).

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Ganito Kami Noon … Paano Kayo Ngayon?

English Translation: This Was How We Were Then … What Happens to You Now?
English Title: As We Were
Additional Languages: Spanish, Chinese
Year of Release: 1976
Director: Eddie Romero
Screenwriters: Eddie Romero & Roy Iglesias
Producer: Hemisphere Pictures

Cast: Christopher de Leon, Gloria Diaz, Eddie Garcia, Dranreb, Leopoldo Salcedo, Rosemarie Gil, E.A. Rocha, Johnny Vicar, Tsing Tong Tsai, Jaime Fabregas, Peque Gallaga, Odette Khan, Laida Lim-Perez, Teresita Non

After his hut burns down, Kulas meets a priest who asks the young man to bring his illegitimate son to Manila. Kulas and the priest’s son soon meet a traveling theater group. Though Kulas falls for the actress Diding, he prioritizes his assignment. Upon arriving in Manila, he becomes a sophisticate with the help of the priest’s lawyer. But he will face a bigger change just as Diding re-enters his life and the country, confronted by US imperialism right after expelling its Spanish colonizers, marks a pivotal point in its history.

Rarely has a Filipino film project had better timing than Ganito Kami Noon. Eddie Romero had just ended a fairly successful run of Fil-Am co-productions; his mentor Gerardo de Leon had just completed his last movie even as Lino Brocka was leading the charge in effectively announcing a renewed film consciousness; an uncertain stability had been forcibly imposed by the military takeover of film-censorship functions barely three years after the declaration of martial rule; and someone had to be able to demonstrate that people from the previous Golden Age could still productively contribute to the then-dawning new cinema. Like the earlier volumes of the martial-law government’s official Tadhana (Fate) book series on Philippine “history,” Ganito Kami Noon also benefited—where Romero’s subsequent Aguila (1980) did not—from maintaining a focus on the past. The project could by then successfully formulate a progressive perspective regarding the influx of foreign invaders and the emergence of a native bourgeois class. Despite a whiff of sexism in the movie’s moral downgrading of a strong woman character, Romero’s cosmopolitanism served him well against the usual accusation of xenophobia that accompanies nationalist texts: Ganito Kami Noon was one of the first films on Philippine history that acknowledged the revolutionary contribution of Chinese-Filipino citizens.[2] On the whole, its humanism turned out to be just right for a narrative that sought to present multiple conflicting points of view. And though such an equal-opportunity approach could not permit intensive discursive analysis, Romero’s wit and humor allow the viewer to digest the proceedings with less of the bitterness that tends to lace grand-scale historical conflicts.

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Banta ng Kahapon

English Translation: Yesterday’s Warning
English Title: Doublecross
Year of Release: 1977 / Sepia (faded coloration)
Director & Screenwriter: Eddie Romero
Producers: Hemisphere Pictures & Shelter Films

Cast: Bembol Roco, Vic Vargas, Chanda Romero, Roland Dantes, Lito Legaspi, Roderick Paulate, Ruben Rustia, Celita de Castro, Romeo Rivera, Karim Kiram, Olvia O’Hara, Henri Salcedo, Johnny Vicar, Jose Garcia, Roma Roces, Rose Gacula, Gil Arceo, Herman Magsipok, Roger Robles, Zahn Garduce, Joe Watts, Ramon “Palaka,” PMP Stuntmen

In the present time, Greg pauses from working as a janitor in a colonial government building to take a look at the political headlines on a broadsheet. He recalls an earlier period, the turbulent election year of 1969, when a mute convict, addressed as Mangubat by the prison warden, is released after serving his time. He’s followed by shady characters in a car to his home in the slums, where he arrives just as his father dies from an illness and his sister berates him for failing to assist their situation. When he steps out, the men following him address him as Kuwago [Owl] and offer him a well-paying one-shot job to assassinate an elected official. After he turns over his earnings to his sister, his contacts double-cross him but he’s able to escape them. Police bring him to a hospital where more men arrive to finish him off. He flees the hospital and encounters a street urchin, Berto, who offers to help him by asking his sister, who lives on a small island community, to help in his recovery. Greg, who’s helping Bobby, the son of the assassinated politician, to track down the people who want his father killed, follows Kuwago to the island and offers him help in arresting the men who double-crossed him.

Eddie Romero tended to have better results when he worked on small-scale undertakings, with the singular exception of Ganito Kami Noon … Paano Kayo Ngayon? (As We Were, 1976). Aside from the titles selected in the current canon listing, his unfortunately lost peak achievement would include the screenplay of Cesar J. Amigo’s Sa Atin ang Daigdig (The World Is Ours, 1963). Intended as part of a loose series on Philippine history, Banta ng Kahapon covers the more-or-less contemporary era, after Ganito Kami Noon tackled colonial transition and Kamakalawa (The Day Before Yesterday, 1981), too directorially slapdash to be given more than passing attention, depicted the magical world of the country’s precolonial era yielding to social governance and material productivity; a special case would be Aguila (1980), an epic tale appropriately headlined by Fernando Poe Jr., which was so much a celebration of Philippine history that it was willing to accept the lies and excesses of the fascist dictatorship in arriving at its present period. Like The Passionate Strangers (1966) and unlike his epic works, the characters in BnK do not seek to influence or disrupt Philippine history, doing instead the best they can to claim what they regard as their rightful share while adhering to their idea of principled behavior. They eventually get overpowered by forces beyond their control, but like the great film-noir heroes, their best efforts provide us with illumination, if not much inspiration. We can count ourselves fortunate that the most dismissible narrative element in BnK, the framing story, is set in the historical present, knowing how enthusiastically Romero welcomed the avowals of Ferdinand Marcos Sr.’s New Society. His depiction of the violence-ridden recent past managed to bring out the light-handed cynicism that constantly elevated his outstanding output—of which, in this particular instance, apparently and alarmingly what remains is the telecine transfer of a faded copy of the print created for the 1983 Manila International Film Festival’s Focus on Filipino Film module.

Note

[1] Eddie Romero’s unbecoming and problematically classist assertion appears in Bliss Cua Lim’s article “‘American Pictures Made by Filipinos’: Eddie Romero’s Jungle-Horror Exploitation Films,” Spectator 22.1 (April 2002), pp. 23–45. The Blood Island film cycle (drawn from the reissue title of Gerardo de Leon’s Terror Is a Man, 1959) was in fact appropriated from an earlier Hammer Films release, Val Guest’s The Camp on Blood Island (1958), which was all about Japanese atrocities during World War II set on a Malayan island—see the capsule review of Terror Is a Man in the relevant de Leon entry. The Blood Island film cycle, all reworkings of or variations on H.G. Wells’s 1896 novel The Island of Doctor Moreau, covers about a dozen titles made throughout the 1960s to the early 1970s, by either de Leon and/or Romero, plus Al Adamson’s Brain of Blood (1971); Hammer Films, for its part, returned to the Oriental setting with a prequel, The Secret of Blood Island (Quentin Lawrence, 1965) and coproduced with Shaw Brothers a hybrid East-meets-West entry, The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (Roy Ward Baker, 1974). A new Pinas-grown cycle, in which Savage Sisters may be counted, emerged in the early 1970s, comprising far more pliable narratives of women in island prisons breaking out in pursuit of various personal or political agendas. The new imprisoned-women genre is actually subsumable under a longer exploitation-film tradition directed at the male gaze.

[2] Worth mentioning is the fact that accounts of uprisings by the Chinese community in the Philippines during the Spanish period had appeared in historical records: the Parián de Arroceros transformed from a marketplace into a Sangley ghetto adjacent to Intramuros, which effectively excluded its residents from the Walled City and made them vulnerable to abuses by colonial forces. Some of these narratives found their way into literature and even film samples prior to Ganito Kami Noon. In the previous year, Xing long fu hu (Sleeping Dragon), a film codirected by Ishmael Bernal and Jimmy L. Pascual and cowritten by Wilfrido D. Nolledo and Ophelia San Juan, was set during the Parián rebellion of 1603. It was screened in the country as well as overseas, but the full print is apparently lost and only a trailer is available. See Andrew Leavold, “Sleeping Dragon (1975),” The Bamboo Gods Project, November 4, 2023.

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