The Filipino director Catalino (Lino) Brocka was a powerful force in his country's cinema and theater, noted for stage productions of A Streetcar Named Desire and Waiting for Godot. On film Brocka specialized in socially conscious stories about disadvantaged Filipinos struggling to subsist in harsh conditions, an image that the government of dictator Ferdinand Marcos didn't want publicized overseas. Brocka's Weighed but Found Wanting (Tinimbang ka ngunit kulang, 1974) is a touching story of the slums, about the friendship of a leper and a mentally ill woman. His Macho Dancer (1988) is about a gay man who can only survive by hustling on the street. Bayan ko: Kapit sa patalim (1984), the story of a worker caught in a web of labor politics, was targeted for suppression by the Marcos regime, yet was nominated for a major prize at the Cannes film festival.
Brocka's earlier slum melodrama Insiang (1976) was filmed in just three weeks, under the curfew imposed by Marcos-imposed martial law. A videotape of an earlier TV production was said to have been destroyed. Insiang became the first Filipino production to screen at Cannes. A scathing indictment of living conditions in a Manila slum called Tonda, it has come to be known as the director's masterpiece. It frames its social message within an audience-pleasing tale of personal revenge.
Slum life for pretty young Insiang (Hilda Koronel) is an ugly trap. She and her mother Tonya (Mona Lisa) do laundry for a living; their home is a shack constructed from scraps of metal and cardboard. It's a harsh world, where a woman alone has almost no control over her life. Tonya's husband deserted them quite a while before, yet the two women continue to support his freeloading family. Insiang isn't distressed when her mother simply kicks the relatives into the street. Tonya even keeps the clothing she had bought for the small children, leaving them as literal naked beggars.
But Tonya has evicted her relatives for amorous reasons, to make room for her much younger lover, the local thug Dado (Ruel Vernal). The predatory, arrogant Dado moves in and is soon claiming Insiang as his sexual property. Mother turns a deaf ear to Insiang's pleas, insisting that her daughter must be at fault for enticing her boyfriend. Furious, Insiang turns to her own boyfriend Bebot (Rez Cortez) for protection but for her trouble receives only more injustice. Pushed over the edge, she takes brutal action to settle the score with her oppressors. The conclusion makes perfect sense: this is what brutal living conditions do to people.
Insiang impresses with its fluid cinematography in the claustrophobic, unsanitary Tondo neighborhood. Lino Brocka's camera captures Insiang's awful predicament. Life for her was impossible even before the arrival of the oppressive Dado.
Incensed by its unflattering view of the poverty and squalor of Manila's slums, the Philippine censors tried to stop the film's export to the Cannes Film Festival. Insiang earned special attention from the critics at Cannes and also garnered attention for Lino Brocka at the Toronto film festival. At Los Angeles' Filmex, it was compared to Luis Bunuel's celebrated slum melodrama Los olvidados (1950). Brocka's film then returned to a successful commercial release in Manila. Hilda Koronel's put-upon heroine doesn't say much but has a powerful presence. She gives a tormented human face to the misery in the city's slums.
Speaking at Cannes, Brocka said that he had structured Insiang as a tragedy, and that his intention was "to show the annihilation of a human being, the loss of human dignity caused by the physical and social environment and to point out the need to change these life conditions."
In her New York Times review, critic Manhola Dargis was impressed by young Insiang's determination against impossible odds: She "works, endures and finally fights" to escape her hellish situation. Dargis emphasized the intensity of Lino Brocka's imagery, making special mention of scenes of work in a slaughterhouse. Shots of the women hanging their laundry on barbed wire underscore the prison-like aspect of the neighborhood and of the lives being wasted there.
Lino Brocka lost his life in a traffic accident at age 52. Remembered as an activist for the arts, he was posthumously awarded several honors by the new government headed by President Corazon Aquino. Insiang was chosen to be part of the World Cinema Project curated by Martin Scorsese and was released on Blu-ray in 2017.
By Glenn Erickson
