The Spy in the Sandwich

Tuesday, July 28, 2020

10:00 AM | The Film Meme No. 94

[94th of 100]. It was my sophomore year at Silliman University High School, and we were just required to watch a film in Town Theater, which was Ðumaguete's seediest movie house. We groaned. What was to like? We looked at all required activities, both co- and extra-curricular, with suspicion, time away from our youthful preoccupations. But we got used to this, being herded around by the school to watch concerts and plays and exhibits, designed "to mold" us into better, culture-appreciating former philistines. "What's the movie?" one of us asked. We were told it was going to be a Tagalog film, an old one from the 1970s. We groaned some more. [Dumaguetnons used to be famous for being virulently anti-Tagalog, preferring our native Binisaya or the English of the American missionaries who used to be fixtures in the town.] But this was in 1990, and we were celebrating the centennial of our province of Negros Oriental. One of the cultural highlights was the festival showcase of the films of an acclaimed Filipino filmmaker whose name did not register to me or to anyone of my classmates at all. "Lino Brocka something." My class settled in the balcony section of the movie theater, which had indeed seen better days, and we were all predictably noisy like all restless high schoolers. We didn't really pay any attention when the program started and the host introduced some guy in glasses, who began to talk to the audience about the film we were about to see, that it was made years and years ago, in 1974, and that some of the imagery may be disturbing. Most of us barely heard anything he said, and barely noticed the lights going down. We only settled down to some sort of quiet when the film began. We were greeted with the flickering purplish close-up shots of a woman in some kind of distress -- and then it dawned on me: the woman on screen was getting ... an abortion? I shot up straight in my chair, perplexed -- were we even allowed to watch this? The shock rushed through me, and now I was paying attention, ignoring the whispered gossip of my friends, shushing even the classmate seated next to me when he attempted small talk. I was hooked, I wanted to watch more of this film -- and the surprise that sprang to my mind was this: I had no idea there were Filipino films like this. The movie unfolded like an invitation, and I was treated to a very compelling story of small town mores: a young man in the cusp of compromised adulthood, his philandering amoral father who used to be the town mayor, his hard-to-get girlfriend who gets sucked into the town's games of privilege, the town's resident mad woman whose plight is the epitome of the town's guilty secrets, a lonely man with leprosy who takes her in, among an assortment of characters who amply demonstrated the title's moral reckoning -- than in the final judgment, everyone is guilty of the worst persuasions of humanity. It is Lino Brocka's startling answer to Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game, and is even more amazing for how it towers over that classic of French cinema by embracing the melodrama of it all. I gather this was Brocka's revenge of sorts, having returned to his Nueva Ecija hometown -- a place he ran away from in the first place to escape its suffocating hypocrisies -- to film this production, movie stars in tow. The revenge must have been so sweet, and it was a double-edged sword: [1] to give the ultimate clapback as the returning success story, and [2] to immortalize his hometown's hypocrisy on film, capturing the faces of the guilty playing themselves. Most of us have the same misgivings about the small places we are from, thus striking a nerve, as it did me. It was an electrifying experience watching this movie at age 15 -- and it proved to be so personally impactful because this became my portal to the best of Philippine cinema. I came away from that theatre transformed: I knew with some inchoate realization that great art makes possible incisive social critique; that I don't mind very much anymore "required" things, because it impells me to see things I might not even be conscious about; that there was so much of Philippine art and culture I knew nothing about because of a tendency to be dismissive with only ignorance as ammunition; and that Lino Brocka -- later on a National Artist for Cinema -- is one of our film geniuses, bold in his social commentary, unflinching from his depictions of our frailties as a people. I would find out later on he would die the next year in a freak accident, in May 1991. A much later realization was this: that bespectacled man during my screening who gave the introduction to the film was Brocka himself. I was in the presence of a legend, and because I was a noisy, know-nothing high schooler, I wasn't even aware life had gifted me with an encounter for a lifetime. What's the film?

For the introduction to this meme, read here.

Labels: film, philippine cinema