This is the last of my series of articles on Brocka's three best films:
"Insiang:" one unhappy family
Noel Vera
(Please note: story discussed in detail)
Lino Brocka opens "Insiang" (1976) with a close-up of a pig being stabbed in the throat, blood pouring out like a wide-open faucet. We see row upon row of headless carcasses, bellies split open from neck to crotch, their pink skin lending them an uncomfortable resemblance to human corpses. The film's cinematographer, the great Conrado Baltazar, captures the incandescent-lit stink and noise of a busy slaughterhouse like no one else has before, or since.
It's an amazing beginning, an opening image that foreshadows the slaughter to come. It also challenges you with the thought: "think violence to the flesh is bad? It's nothing compared to the violence possible to heart and mind." The slaughterhouse scene is an audacious note struck at the beginning of the film, the message loud and clear: "wait--there is worse to come."
Brocka then takes us to the slum in Tondo where Insiang lives, a cramped little community of cobbled-together shanties located near Smoky Mountain (literally a mountain of smoking garbage, the official dumping ground of Metro Manila at that time). Again, Baltazar's camera is crucial in capturing the stench of choked-up canals, the trembling of rickety, built-up shanties, the din of brown bodies yelling their way through narrow alleyways.
When we meet Insiang and Tonya, her mother, they are in the process of getting rid of their relatives--a whole passel including children camped out in the middle of the house. It's a clever scene that establishes Tonya (played by the imperious, still-handsome Mona Lisa) as a strong, sharp-tongued woman, relentless until she has her way; and Insiang (the beautiful Hilda Koronel) as a somewhat passive, gentle soul, embarrassed for her mother's behavior. Finally, it introduces a third character, when one of the relatives comes out and informs Tonya that they know her true reason for throwing them out: she has a new lover, and she wants privacy with him.
Insiang realizes the truth of this slander in the most embarrassing way possible--at night, listening to the moans of Tonya and Dado, one of the slaughterhouse butchers (stereotypically villainous Ruel Vernal, in possibly the role of his career). At dawn, Tonya has to face Insiang's accusing stare; Brocka makes the antagonism between the two women intensely palpable. Tonya loses this first round, as she is forced to endure the embarrassment of squatting before Insiang to urinate (they can't afford the luxury of a toilet stall); worse, however, is yet to come.
Insiang's rape--an act quick and brutal as the blow Dado delivers to Insiang's gut--is the initiating event that begins her turnaround. After Dado, everyone lines up to humiliate and betray her--her mother, by believing Dado and not her; her boyfriend Bebot (a young and pretty Rez Cortez), by taking up her offer to elope, then abandoning her in a motel room. With nowhere else to go, she returns to Tonya and Dado.
We see the first sign of change in Insiang when Dado comes to her one night and professes his love for her; Insiang realizes what is being offered, and asks a favor of Dado. Cut to the slopes of Smoky Mountain, where Dado and his boys are gathered around Bebot, pounding him into bloody pulp. It's a harrowingly violent scene, but you get the sense that it's somehow a preliminary scene--that someone's just flexing her muscles, trying out new things. Insiang is merely doling out punishment for humiliations suffered; next, she addresses the more serious issue of betrayal, the penalty accordingly more severe...
"Insiang" is arguably Brocka's masterpiece--it's his most intense work, the intensity sustained from beginning almost to end. It has the best-structured screenplay of all his pictures (by Lamberto Antonio, based on the original television script by Mario O'Hara); it's also one of his most atypical, and atypical of even most other Filipino films.
The intensity and structure go together hand-in-hand; you might say that structure is the source of the film's intensity. The story is admirably compact, with only three significant characters (Dado, Tonya, and Insiang) in essentially a single setting (Insiang's home--there are scenes elsewhere, but they could also as easily be set at home), the events taking place in the span of a few days to a few weeks. The relationships are remarkably symmetrical, with everyone manipulating everyone else--Tonya uses Insiang to revenge herself upon her absent husband, Dado uses Tonya to get close to Insiang, Insiang uses Dado to revenge herself on Tonya. Likewise, everyone betrays everyone else--Dado betrays Insiang's innocence, Tonya betrays Insiang's trust, Insiang betrays Dado and Tonya's belief in her innocence and trustfulness.
The film is comparable to Shakespeare's most elegantly plotted play, "Othello," except in "Insiang" the focus is less on Othello's downfall and more on Iago's creation. Insiang shares many characteristics with Iago--like Iago she is consumed by hatred; like Iago, she is the perfect murderer, able to kill through the indirect manipulation of others.
There are some differences (aside from the obvious one of sex): Iago makes the mistake, once in a while, of holding the knife himself (that's how he's caught); Iago is wholly evil from the start, while Insiang starts out as wholly innocent. Iago, ultimately is punished--Insiang is not, though she commits an even greater crime than Iago: she repents (more on this later).*
"Insiang" is atypical of Brocka's work, in that it's unusually tight and coherent (look at Brocka's other films--"Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kulang" (You Were Judged and Found Wanting, 1974), and "Maynila sa Kuko ng Liwanag" (Manila in the Claws of Neon, 1975)--for examples of meandering, scattershot scripts). It's also the rare Brocka film that displays true ambiguity--by the end of the film, it's almost impossible to establish for certain who was good and who evil, who the raped and who the rapist (again, look at Brocka's other films, particularly the later ones--"Bayan Ko" (My Country, 1985) and "Orapronobis" (Fight for Us, 1989) for simplified notions of good and evil). You blame and sympathize with all three alike, dancing helplessly in an interlocked chain of lust and loathing.
The film is unique in another sense--Philippine cinema is dominated by the twin themes of love of mother and survival of the family; almost all Filipino films revolve around some aspect of either two. "Insiang" takes these two great, overarching themes and, with an unmatched ruthlessness, dashes them to the ground, shatters them, reveals them to be the fallacies that they really are. The film is saying: "there are no guarantees, not from family, not even from mother; if anything, the most painful betrayals are inflicted by mother and family. You are ultimately alone."
("Insiang" can be seen at the Cinema One channel, at either Sky or Home Cable)
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* ("Insiang" suffers from two flaws, one of them self-inflicted. The first is the premise--that a girl looking like Koronel could ever live in the slums of Tondo (Koronel was, and is, a stunner--when the film screened in Cannes, France Soir ran a picture of her more than twice the size of a far more famous actress, Farrah Fawcett-Majors). To complaints that Koronel "is too beautiful for the slums," Brocka had the perfect reply: "but Koronel IS from the slums!" Good answer--the unaddressed point, however, is that she didn't stay there; she rose to become a star. The original screenplay by Mario O'Hara had set Insiang's story in a Pasay slum, which makes all the difference--the proximity of countless bars, nightclubs, and prostitution houses would guarantee that a woman, even one as beautiful as Koronel, can pass by relatively unnoticed. Brocka decided to set "Insiang" in Tondo, near Smoky Mountain, presumably because he wanted the greater visual impact--drama, in effect, over authenticity.
The second flaw is more serious. The censors refused to accept that Insiang could be so unforgiving, so Brocka shot a coda in Bilibid prison, where Insiang clumsily explains to Tonya her plan of revenge, then, unbelievably, flings herself upon her mother to ask for forgiveness. The scene, redundant and obvious, is the only one in the entire film that actually descends into melodrama; worse, it makes total hash of all that came before, and flies in the face of the film's otherwise unflinching sensibilities.
Given the external pressure, one could almost understand the latter flaw; given the magnificent squalor captured by Baltazar's lenses, one could almost forgive the former--if only O'Hara had not recently adapted his own screenplay for the theater stage. As staged by Tanghalang Pilipino, the play corrects these two flaws: the first by setting the story in Pasay, as originally intended; the second by having Insiang repeat her clumsy final monologue and, simply by altering the tone of her delivery, transforming it into a devastating expression of utter hatred and contempt for her mother)