Init Sa Magdamag (Midnight Passion)
Starring Lorna Tolentino, Joel Torre, Dindo Fernando
Written by Raquel Villavicencio
Directed by Laurice Guillen
Becky (Lorna Tolentino) is in love with Armand (Joel Torre). When Armand
leaves for the United States, Becky promises to wait for him, and she does,
until Armand's wife-to-be confronts Becky with her past: once upon a time, she
was named Irene, and she had conducted an affair with a married man. The man
died in a motel room, and Irene had left without reporting his death. Becky is
blackmailed into forgetting Armand; she vanishes, then recreates herself as
Leah, a fashion model. She attracts the attention of Jaime (Dindo Fernando), a
wealthy hedonist. With Jaime, she is locked in an ever-tightening sexual
embrace, spiraling from role-playing to voyeurism to sado-masochism.
Leah is dissatisfied: she wants more, but doesn't want to marry Jaime, who
proposes to her. Then she meets Armand again. Leah discovers she still feels
for Armand; this angers and arouses Jaime, and he assaults her, physically and
sexually. She seeks shelter with Armand, marries him, and bears his child. But
Jaime still won't let go--he stalks her; he calls her constantly on the phone.
Becky-Leah-Irene finds herself forced to choose, between a man she loves as a
husband and a man she loves as a matchless sexual partner.
When it opened in 1983 the film was a financial failure: most people couldn't
understand the woman protagonist's shifting identities, the apparent
plotlessness, the languid pacing, the moody cinematography. Those who could
have appreciated it rejected the politically incorrect image of a woman who
deliberately misbehaved, preferring their feminist messages represented by more
militant, less complex incarnations.
Which makes Init Sa Magdamag, coming at the time it did, all the more
remarkable. Feminism in early 1980's Manila envisioned woman as the all-around
superbeing: able to hold down a job, successfully raise children, express her
artistic longings, pray a decade of the rosary in fifteen minutes flat (sex
hardly, if ever, entered the discussion; sexuality was something men discussed
with other men, speculating endlessly). Anything that suggested a woman was
less (or, actually, more) than a bundle of virtues was frowned upon, even
attacked.
Init treats sex honestly; it doesn't shy away from the fact that women may
want sex and want variety in sex as much as if not in the same way as men do.
It shows this through attitude and sensibility, in so understated a style that
it's startling to realize Init, though a highly erotic film, doesn't have a
single frame of actual female nudity.
Init isn't completely free of the whiff of the exploitation film, and rightly
so; the exploitation aspects give it a pungency it otherwise wouldn't have.
It's also frankly erotic at a time when even American films were experiencing a
sort of Puritanism--this was 1983, years before 9 1/2 Weeks (which stopped short
of depicting sadomasochism), Basic Instinct (which is, to put it mildly,
misanthropic) and Fatal Attraction (basically an estrogen-drenched slasher
movie). In the Philippines there is a new puritanism, and if Init were to be
shown in theaters today, the local censors would have a time cutting away
footage.
As Becky-Leah-Irene, Lorna Tolentino gives a finely shaded, tightly held
performance that at moments simply blooms with sensuality. She can shift from
fresh-faced innocence to complete and utter abandonment from one scene to the
next, sometimes in mid-shot. Her sexiness is especially extraordinary when you
consider that she was four months pregnant at the time some of the scenes were
shot (Perhaps not that extraordinary; think of all those hormones flowing inside
her). Dindo Fernando, who's played a whole range of weak, humane, sophisticated
city types, is surprisingly effective as Jaime, the wealthy businessman with a
taste for cruelty. Joel Torre is effective, in a simple and moving way, as
Armand, Becky's husband.
Scriptwriter Raquel Villavicencio takes an exploitation film's conceit--woman
plays around with several men--and humanizes the story. It might make the more
enlightened feminists proud to realize that she has put a living, breathing
woman on the big screen, a woman with an essential core of mystery, who can't be
just be explained away by Freudian or social theories. An otherwise intelligent
woman with needs and desires and--yes, demons--driving her onwards. It might
not make the feminists prouder (but it should) that Villavicencio also does well
by the men, who are more than just cardboard figures in a pro-feminist diorama.
She gives them a vividness of their own, with their own needs and their own
points of view; they are by turns selfish and sympathetic, monstrous and meek,
according to circumstances and to the dictates of their character.
Laurice Guillen directs with a quiet intensity that serves the material well.
She puts in very little frills, and very little by way of changes; this may be
one of the most faithful adaptations of a Filipino screenplay ever put on film.
Laurice is better known for directing Salome, a retelling of the Japanese film
classic Rashomon; Init to my mind flows better; it's at the same time more
assured and less didactic. It may also be the last of its kind, at least for
her: she has recently been born again as Christian, and refuses to direct movies
of this kind, ever.
Init Sa Magdamag is unique in that it is a work written by a woman, directed by
a woman, starring a woman; it is infused with a woman's sense of values, with
her sexuality and needs. Yet it's a whole work of art--there's nothing
castrating about the film's view of men, nothing lopsided or simplified or
misogynistic about its attitude to the different sexes. Init is that rare work,
a feminist film that transcends its feminism: everyone is understood, with an
empathy that is almost frighteningly complete.
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