Manila: In the Claws of Light

Lino Brocke was Filipino film-maker.  Like Rainer Werner Fassbinder, whom he resembles in certain respects, Brocke was openly gay and fantastically productive -- he is said to have made nearly 60 films between 1970 and his untimely death in a car crash in 1986.  Brocke was a tormented figure before he discovered his vocation.  Raised as a Mormon, he traveled to Hawaii from the Phillipines and worked among the lepers on the island of Molokai.  His homosexuality and religious doubt plagued him and he abandoned his mission after a couple of years, traveling then to San Francisco.  In San Francisco, he worked menial jobs, at times caring for the elderly in nursing homes.  He returned to Manilla during the military dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos.  Working in TV first, Brocke established himself as a hyper-efficient and economical director.  He was recruited into the film industry and, essentially, established a Golden Age of Filipino Cinema.  Of course, his Leftist political leanings made his films suspect with Marcos.  He was jailed on occasion and managed also to offend Corazon Aquino, Marco's Leftist successor.  She also threatened him.  Many of Brocke's films are acclaimed as masterpieces.  But, until the restoration of his signature work, Manila:  In the Claws of Light, an adaptation of a novel by Edgardo Reyes, most of his movies were either lost or on the verge of being lost.  Efforts are now underway to restore his most important works, Manila:  In the Claws of Light was painstakingly restored from various fragments in the collection of film archives in the Phillipines, the U.K. and Italy.  The restoration, financed in part by Martin Scorsese's International Film Foundation, was done in conjunction with the Bologna Ritrovatta foundation.

Manila (ITCL) is Dickensian.  It's like Oliver Twist in which Bill Sykes triumphs.  The movie is harrowing and, although I'm glad that I watched it (and would recommend the picture), I don't think I would willingly endure the ordeal a second time.  Shot on the streets of Manila during a period of ferocious repression, the movie has a documentary look, although it is composed and edited intelligently in the manner of well-made movies and TV shows produced in the Seventies -- the film was released in 1975.  The picture contains a surprising amount of overtly homosexual subject matter -- in this way, the picture seems to presage the nonchalantly gay sequences in films made by the Thai filmmaker, Apichatpong Weerasethul. There is a hoax or false premise in the film that considerably debilitates its persuasiveness, although the picture is intensely gripping, often, disturbing, and will rouse violent passions in its viewers.

The story concerns a young man from the boondocks who has traveled to Manila to find his childhood sweetheart.  It is immediately clear that she has been lured to the big city and trafficked into the sex-work industry.  Prostitution is central to the film and depicted as pervasive and ubiquitous.  The young woman bears the tendentious name "Hilda Paraiso" ("Joyful Paradise") and she has been coerced into becoming the sex-slave of a Chinese oligarch named Ah Tek.  The film is about 125 minutes long and the hero doesn't find his long-lost girlfriend until the last half hour of the picture.  The first part of the film shows the protagonist, the 21year old naïf Julio, played by Rafael Roca, Jr., struggling to survive on the mean streets in Manila City, mostly at the intersection of Misericordia and Ongpin, a crossroads over which Ah Tek's importing firm looms, the place where Julio thinks Hilda is held captive.  Julio works on a construction site.  On his first day of work, he's so hungry that he passes out on the job although his fellow-workers are kind, give him some food, and, ultimately, show him how to sleep in a construction hut on the premises.  The work is dangerous and, when people get horribly injured, there doesn't seem to be any workers compensation in evidence. Filipino society is portrayed as uniformly corrupt on all levels:  A Chinese woman harangues her customers while she bargains with them, the boss on the construction site defrauds his workers, the contractor employs a system call "Taiwan" to make the laborers pay 10% for the release of their paychecks, prostitutes of both sexes roam the streets, and people pretending to be cops shake-down pedestrians and steal their money.  Purse-snatchers abound and people who complain about the corruption are shot down or tortured to death by death squads in jail-house cellars.  Rapacious land-owners oust peasants and steal their land -- it's a dog-eat-dog world with horrific slums in which children swim gaily in sewage.  All of this is pretty much displayed as a full-frontal assault on the audience and, after about a half hour, the audience is hankering for some sort of payback.  The film is conventionally shot and plotted so that we are encouraged to wish that the poor will rise up and violently revenge themselves upon their tormentors.  But this doesn't occur, except problematically in the last ten minutes of the picture.  Julio has various adventures while he searches for Hilda, including a stint as a male prostitute servicing wealthy homosexuals -- these scenes are shot in a totally matter-of-fact way:  the young prostitutes proclaim to one another that they are heterosexual while performing tricks with the businessmen who pick them up on the streets.  (Brocke is expert as shooting in darkness on location -- a scene at park where men cruise for sex is expressionistically lit by huge neon advertising signs.  His scenes in the terrifying slums and the male brothels are all shot with natural light in locations that must have been very difficult to manage, particularly with harassment by Marcos' goons.)  Finally, Julio finds Hilda -- her captor has allowed her to attend Church for Christmas.  She goes with Julio to a movie theater where they talk while watching King of Kings re-released for Christmas and, then, take a room at a cheap hotel.  There follows a long and emotionally devastating scene in which Hilda explains how she was trafficked, forced into prostitution, and, then, sold to the Chinese businessman.  He abuses her and threatens her baby -- she has had a child in captivity.  The sequence is shot like some of the more harrowing sequences in Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage -- Brocke uses long takes with his camera close to the two nude protagonists:  he shoots them talking into the camera from the shoulders up against the bare wall of the poverty hotel where they are hiding.  Julio encourages her to meet him that night so that they can flee to the village where they were childhood sweethearts.  Of course, the villainous Ah Tek (like Bill Sykes) gets wind of the plot, beats Hilda to death and, even, kills her baby.  The rest of the film is a variant on Scorsese's Taxi Driver -- Julio goes to Ah Tek's place, located above a long squalid set of stairs, stabs the villain repeatedly while he squeals like a pig, then, pitches him down the steps.  The Filipinos, who show a strong propensity (then as well as now) for vigilante justice, chase down Julio and, presumably, beat him to death.  The films ends with slow-motion and, then, a freeze-frame of Julio shrieking at his tormentors.  The slaughter of Ah Tek, stabbed about thirty times with an ice-pick, is pleasingly cathartic -- although, I regret, that the audience is supposed to applaud this murder.  Brocke is didactic -- before murdering Ah Tek, we see a Communist parade on Main Street, lots of red banners and people singing the Internationale.  Julio and his buddy turn away from this parade, representing, I suppose, a positive political approach to the country's injustice, and, then, uses "self-help", as they say, to avenge Hilda. 

The film contains frequent annoying interpolations showing the idyllic village and Julio's sweet love affair with Hilda by the sea-side.  These shots are golden with panoramic sunsets and blue frothy sea -- the interpolated imagery looks like an ad for a Sandals resort in the Dominican Republic.  This imagery is a lie:  if village life were so idyllic, why does Mrs. Cruz, the evil sex-trafficker, have no difficulty recruiting village maidens for a life of horrific abuse?  Why are the squalid slums full of folks from the country?  The fact is that the city is awful and full of predators but it is still better than the impoverished life that these people are fleeing in the country.  (Brocke is honest enough to show this -- one of the laborers at the medieval construction site gets a night school degree and ends up making an excellent wage in advertising.  No sooner a member of the middle class, the man begins oppressing his fellow workers.)  The film's other deficit is the performance by Rafael Roca as Julio -- he is prettier than Hilda, pouting and batting his sad doe-eyes for the camera.  I would have preferred a more robust leading man, but, maybe, this criticism is a bit unfair.