10 films for a senior high student: ‘Maynila sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag’ and ‘Himala’

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By John Anthony S. Estolloso

(Part 2 of 5)

August is for everything Filipino: language, history, and everything that is lost in between. On occasion, it becomes the task of our artworks to recover and reinstate what has been forgotten and perhaps, slap us to a rude awakening. Film, as an artform, shares in this chore and our National Artists understand this assignment: one needs but revisit Lino Brocka’s ‘Maynila sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag’ and Ishmael Bernal’s ‘Himala’ to grasp the idea.

Both films probe the Filipino psyche for artistic subjects – and the results are not exquisite portraits. In both films are the wretched, foul, corrupt, and credulous: a great irony that the best of Philippine cinema must showcase the worst about being Filipino. The colorful narrative and artful storytelling do not diminish the sordidness; on the contrary, they underline and highlight this.

Lino Brocka’s adaptation of Edgardo Reyes’ novel is tragedy set against a social commentary. While the film’s focus is the romance of Julio Madiaga – played by a young and svelte Bembol Roco – the narrative lets surface the squalor he encounters and experiences as he looks for some means of living from the streets of Manila. Plucked from the provinces, Julio must come to terms that his kidnapped beloved (played by Hilda Koronel) is a kept woman. He grasps at the fading light of hope only to end up being swallowed by the corruption of the streets. Caught between the jaws of hunger and anger, Julio succumbs to his desperate animal instincts of survival and eventually loses his life in the process.

With the film’s release during Martial Law and in a time when the First Lady was hellbent on beautifying the seedy streets of the capital by walling up slums, Brocka had the balls to film Manila in all its sordid, rancid glory. Through his lens, Manila in the 70’s – the lump of its suffering humanity – does not hang onto the talons of light; it claws back and rages in frustration and despair at its dying. Its anguished wails are the construction worker’s paltry wage, the streetwalker’s nightly peril, and the white-collar worker’s apathy separating him from the people at the sidewalk.

Ishmael Bernal’s ‘Himala’ takes the viewer from city to the provinces to face a different form of phenomenon. From the onset, Filipino folk religiosity has always been a force to be reckoned with – something that can lend itself to hysteria. The situation readily makes for good storytelling: a ‘Marian apparition’ to a naïve girl, a fallen woman surrounded by provincial male machismo, and a village thirsting for something more than rain. Scriptwriter Ricky Lee had a cinematic masterpiece at the tip of his pen.

Who can forget Nora Aunor as Elsa, the damsel who made everyone see her version of a vision of the Virgin? The character’s murder merely cemented this credulity, the act canonizing her in the townsfolk’s memories even after her iconic monologue dispelling any pretense of a miracle. But there lies the rub: illusions are more believable than the truth and in a country like ours, one that is fraught with patronage politics, political dynasties, and brazen incompetence, it actually works to our disadvantage.

‘Himala’ attempts to shake an integral foundation of Filipino society. Where religion and faith degenerate into cultism and fanaticism, they deteriorate into breeding grounds for moral rot where foul things are accomplished in the name of some divinity. Observably, when the Filipino’s capacity to question his beliefs is cauterized, he becomes easy prey to demagoguery – and the powers-that-be are quick to capitalize on that. In essence, that is how democracies are destroyed: a nation festers to the slow waltz of the lash of poverty paired with the blindness of cult-laced faith.

Lino Brocka, Ishmael Bernal, and Ricky Lee understood that one needed to shock the ordinary, apathetic Filipino to his sensibilities by offering the most unpalatable description of his everyday life. Watching their films, we are Caliban raging at our own reflection on the mirror of art – yet still we ask if perhaps we have become too benumbed to be moved by such wretched depictions of our own iniquities.

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Great films ought to provoke and inspire viewers. More than sheer entertainment, our films resonate (and they ought to!) Nick Joaquin’s question on what defines the Filipino. They provide a literary depth which reflects understandings of our culture and our contemporaneity through a more permanent medium of drama. Looking back at the works of our filmmakers, we catch bits of ourselves: our constant search for identity and struggle for nationhood – and onscreen, these are the stories that matter.

(The author is a language and literature teacher in one of the private schools in the city. Posters are from Festival de Cannes’ website and Wikimedia.)