"Maynila" at the edge of greatness

Noel Vera

(Please note: plot discussed in close detail)

Lino Brocka is the best Filipino filmmaker ever; his
masterpiece, "Maynila sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag" (Manila in the Claws of
Neon, 1975) the greatest Filipino film ever made.

That was the consensus arrived at sometime after "Maynila" first came
out, and the idea has persisted ever since. Has, in fact, been given
greater legitimacy with a top spot in the Urian's list of the ten
best Filipino films in the past thirty years, and by inclusion in the
book "Film: the Critic's Choices"--a list of what some critics
consider the 150 greatest films ever made.

That's what they say. What about us--you, me, the mere mortals?
What do we think?

Strangely enough, it's a proposition we can easily test out
ourselves, unlike with the works of other masters of Philippine
cinema. Many of, say, Gerardo de Leon's best--"Daigdig ng Mga Api"
(World of the Oppressed, 1965); El Filibusterismo (The Filibuster,
1962); "Sawa sa Lumang Simboryo" (The Python in the Bell-tower, 1952)
have no available prints, and are deemed lost. As recent a filmmaker
as Celso Ad. Castillo has had the negatives of his
masterwork, "Burlesk Queen" (Burlesque Queen, 1977) turn to vinegary
rot, while his epic "Ang Alamat ni Julian Makabayan" (The Legend of
Julian Makabayan, 1979) is represented by a single faded 16 mm
print. Not so with Brocka's "Maynila"-- a beautifully preserved
subtitled print is available for screening (thanks to the picture's
cinematographer, Mike de Leon), and the film is shown regularly on
cable TV.

So how does the film fare, nearly thirty years later?

"Maynila" is the story of a young provincial named Julio Madiaga
(Bembol Roco) who goes to the city to look for his lost love, Ligaya
Paraiso (Hilda Koronel). He has one adventure after another before
he finds Ligaya, who is kept hostage by a Chinese named Ah Tek (Tommy
Yap). Julio and Ligaya plan to run away together, but Ah Tek stops
Ligaya by killing her. Julio stabs Ah Tek to death, then runs; he's
ultimately hunted down and killed himself.

The film in outline has a simple story--too simple, you might say;
not much structure to it. Julio simply wanders around, passive, and
allows everything to happen to him. After a while, he joins a
construction company, and learns of unfair labor practices. A fellow
worker dies; Julio is ultimately fired. After which he is introduced
to the world of gay sex and turns male prostitute. After which he
finally meets Ligaya inside a church...

The episodic quality may have come from the source, "Sa mga Kuko ng
Liwanag," by Edgardo Reyes, serialized in "Liwayway" Magazine from
1966 to 1967. For each episode or installment, the writer provides
enough incidents--bringing the end of the installment to enough of a
conclusion--to satisfy the reader, at the same time keeping enough
elements unresolved to entice him back for more. After twenty or
more installments full of subplots and side characters exiting or
dying or having climactic fits, you notice several advantages and
disadvantages. One is the near-unpredictability--you can almost
never guess what's going to happen to whom, or why. Another is the
near-formlessness--having to retain the interest of a fickle
audience, the writer usually keeps a constantly changing sideshow of
clowns and grotesques and whatever going on, while the real story
develops almost in the background.

It was once a popular way of publishing--Charles Dickens among others
presented his novels to the public this way; as Dickens himself might
put it, it's as popular an artform as you can imagine, entertaining
and easy to digest (no matter how unwieldy the final hardcover may
be). And Reyes, despite his considerable literary talents and (or
perhaps because of) deeply felt social concerns, clearly wants to be
seen as a popular artist, a people's artist.

And it's a legitimate way of telling a story. You don't always get
the pleasures of a well-made plot--the twists, the reversals, the
sudden revelations--but you do get something less conventional,
harder to define: something much more similar in feel to real life.

There is a crucial difference between novel and film, however, and it
isn't just the gay sequences that Brocka, in a fit of
autobiographical exhibitionism, decided to insert into the picture.
Brocka's Julio is driven into a corner, taunted, and tortured before
he thinks of killing; in Reyes' novel, Julio was already a killer.
It's a relatively short passage, where Reyes suggests that Julio
follows a man into an alley to murder him--its very casualness,
incidentally, making the passage all the more horrifying.

It's not just a matter of a small scene or episode being deleted for
reasons of length; it's also not a matter of crying "foul!" just
because a hair on the original's head was touched. Julio's crime
colors our perception of him, makes him less passive, less of a
victim or innocent; it makes our feelings for him more ambivalent and
complex. By deleting the murder, Brocka ensures that our
identification with and love of Julio is absolute. The advantage is
that Julio's destruction is made all the more dramatic--the
destruction of innocents is always more dramatic. The disadvantage
is that the film is more simplistic in its treatment of Julio. Brocka
has streamlined and intensified Reyes' novel, but at the cost of
emotional complexity. Maybe not much...then again, maybe enough to
cross the line between art and melodrama.

And this I think is a key weakness in the film. Yes, "Maynila" has
an open, rather amorphous story structure--a perfectly acceptable
style used repeatedly with some success (think Robert
Altman's "Nashville" (1976) or its Filipino descendant, Ishmael
Bernal's "Manila By Night" (1980)). But Altman's "Nashville" and
Bernal's "Manila" gave us a constellation of characters with complex
relationships, all interacting, in place of a classically structured
story; Brocka's "Maynila" has just one main protagonist--Julio--
interacting with himself. There's really nothing more beyond him
than his surface loneliness and suffering. We know little of his
past, other than his coming from the provinces and once having a
girlfriend; we know he has homosexual tendencies, and that he's
capable of murder when pushed--but that's all. Critics have
commented on this allegorical quality of Julio--that he's the
prototype Filipino, the symbol of the suffering everyman. I think
it's a polite way of saying that Bembol Roco--an excellent, natural
actor--doesn't have a character to work with here, that playing a
nationalist symbol has never made dramatic sense, and that the
character's passivity is really the passivity of an actor with no
idea what's going on.

The rest of the cast--Tommy Abuel as Julio's close friend Pol; Yap as
Ah Tek; Pio de Castro as Julio's up-and-coming friend Imo--are
vividly drawn, but again interact with Julio in terms of whether or
not they are allies or enemies; there are no shadings, no levels of
ambiguity. Hilda Koronel's Ligaya Paraiso, which one critic once
described as representing "Ynang Bayan" (Mother Country--!), is
possibly the worse offender; her name translated literally
means "Joyful Paradise," the kind of obvious dirty-joke name you'd
give a porn star, not your daughter. Koronel is given a chance to
prove herself late in the picture, with a long monologue delivered to
Julio inside a motel room, a sad and sordid tale of rape and forced
imprisonment. By monologue's end, with Koronel crying hysterically
and Roco giving reassuring caresses, two things pop into your mind:
1) Koronel is a very beautiful and fairly talented young woman, and
2) she's too young and raw to carry off the complex, heavily-loaded
monologue she just delivered. Pity, but there you are.

I'm not trying to make a case for "Maynila" not being a great--I
think it is, but not for the reasons people have traditionally given
for the film. In terms of its "meat" and "bones"--its
characterization and story structure--"Maynila" isn't much more than
an excellently-made melodrama; what makes the film great, finally, is
its "skin." "Maynila sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag" has marvelous visual
texture, thanks to its cinematographer, Mike de Leon (who would go on
to become a great filmmaker himself). From its opening shot of
littered sidewalks and choked-up "esteros" (canals) to its final one
of Julio, cowering at the bottom of a dead-end alley, it is a series
of voluptuous images captured raw and honest. More, the images are
charged with an urgency, an immediacy uniquely Brocka's--as if Brocka
had shot the picture right outside the theater where it's screening,
developed the rushes, and raced inside to spool the print into the
projector, fresh and smoking hot.

Giving life to the realism, of course, is Brocka's melodramatic
energy. If the characters in "Maynila" don't benefit from the three-
dimensionality of the best screenwriting, they--the leads down to the
teeming extras--are blessed with that intense, Brocka-mandated
quality of people struggling furiously to live, to hold on to every
miserable erg of life. Roco in particular may be playing a symbol
more than a fully realized character, but he does so with every nerve
in his body alive, aware, straining to be unleashed. Catching sight
of him for the first time onscreen (standing in the corner of Ongpin
and Misericordia) you draw back, troubled by the animal fear in his
eyes, the same time you're drawn in by their liquid sensitivity. A
connection is made...

...a missing circuit closes, and the film comes to blazing life. You
realize that the figures, the silhouettes you glimpse onscreen that
stubbornly refuse to resolve into recognizable human beings are
actually merely that--silhouettes, figurines. You stop looking for
the psychological depth that isn't there and instead lean back to
drink in the broad strokes, the panoramic view. The protagonist of
the film, as it turns out, isn't Julio, or Ligaya, or the various
other supporting characters; it's the city itself...

As a portrait of one man's corruption and downfall, "Maynila sa mga
Kuko ng Liwanag" leaves much to be desired. As a portrait of a city
caught between the edges of heaven and hell the picture is unmatched--
no other Filipino film looks or feels quite like it, ever or since.

(The film can be seen on the Cinema One Channel, in Sky or Home Cable)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)