Tinimbang judged today
Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kulang (You Were Weighed and Found Wanting, 1974) was a seminal work in contemporary Philippine cinema: one of the rare quality films of the '70s to enjoy commercial success, and Lino Brocka's declaration to the industry that a skilled commercial director has become a major Filipino artist.
Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kulang (You Were Weighed and Found Wanting, 1974) was a seminal work in contemporary Philippine cinema: one of the rare quality films of the '70s to enjoy commercial success, and Lino Brocka's declaration to the industry that a skilled commercial director has become a major Filipino artist.
Tinimbang tells the story of Junior (Christopher de Leon) son of Cesar (Eddie Garcia) the richest man in town. Junior starts out happy; he lives in a mansion, is popular and good-looking, and his sweetheart Evangeline (Hilda Koronel) is the prettiest girl in school. Then things happen: his father is revealed to be an incurable lecher, his girlfriend is caught with another boy then married off, and Junior himself is seduced by Milagros (Laurice Guillen) the bastard child of the town mayor. Junior seeks comfort among the town's outcasts-- with Kuala, a crazed homeless woman, and her companion Berto the leper. He eventually realizes that everyone around him-- from the loutish youths he calls his friends to the wizened old women he calls his aunts-- are ignoramuses, hypocrites, spiritual grotesques. The film ends with Junior acting out the eponymous action-- he looks everyone in the eye, judging them one by one.
A dramatic moment that Brocka invests with near-Biblical significance, as if Junior were a teenage Christ delivering verdicts on a premature Judgment Day (hardly a coincidence the title is taken from the Old Testament's Book of Daniel). Helps enormously that Brocka worked on a large canvas, one of the rare moments in his career he would be allowed to do so. Brocka was essentially telling his life's story, drawing from memories of San Jose, Nueva Ecija and of the people there. Junior is Brocka-- the sensitive young man, disillusioned with the status quo and yearning for something different; he was also Milagros, the illegitimate child (Brocka himself was born out of wedlock from a political figure). You might say that the secret behind Brocka's close identification with the marginalized was his own status as an outcast-- painful knowledge that made him aware of the plight of others.
This intense identification is both his foremost virtue and his biggest vice. If he had a tendency to like certain characters-- to get under their skin and see through their eyes-- he also had an equally intense tendency to shut others out-- deny them their full measure of understanding.
You see this to a certain extent in Brocka's treatment of Milagros. Guillen in an interview talked about how she would often chafe under Brocka's detailed direction (Brocka in response would call her his "Jeanne Moreau"--mysterious and neurotic). Milagros was clearly conceived to be a worldly sensual woman who would initiate Junior into the mysteries of sex; Guillen (perhaps rebelling against Brocka's rigid direction) adds a hint of empathy, a sense that she's a hurt soul reaching out to a fellow hurt soul. It might have been more complexity than Brocka bargained for, because after the seduction scene Milagros essentially drops out of the picture and you miss her; you want to know what happens next, how her one-night stand might have affected her.
An even graver sin is committed against Cesar, Junior's father. As it turns out, Kuala had once been one of Cesar's many girlfriends; when she found herself pregnant Cesar had her baby aborted, and the trauma drove her crazy-- she's been seeking her child ever since. Cesar interestingly enough is not unaffected by the affair; certain gestures of Kuala remind him of the beautiful girl he once knew. Eddie Garcia plays Cesar beautifully; his could have been a defining role in the film, the contrasting viewpoint to De Leon's Junior-- where Junior is an innocent waking up to the possibility of compassion, Cesar could have been the aged hedonist haunted by it, a mirror images lit from a different angle.
But no; these flashes of remembrance and regret don't redeem Cesar in Brocka's eyes, perhaps because the character is too far from Brocka's own to understand, perhaps because the man too closely resembled his father (reportedly a kind man, but Brocka may not have forgiven him for dying early). When the time comes, Junior judges Cesar as harshly as the rest-- even harsher, perhaps, because Cesar keeps warning Junior away from Kuala and Berto. Milagros and to a greater extent Cesar represent wasted potential in Brocka's scheme I think; they are either swept to one side or forgotten, and the film's complexity suffers.
But then Junior's story isn't to my mind the film's true focus. Junior is hardly original-- he's an amalgam of ideas borrowed from Federico Fellini's I Vitelloni and Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show, a gallery of small-town youths educated on disillusion and heartbreak. Junior is something of a self-righteous prig-- de Leon plays him as if he's too good for his father and those hypocritical grannies, a superior stance too easily assumed; you feel he hasn't quite earned the right to do so.
The film's true power comes not from its foreground story but from its marginalia, its deadpan observations of small-town life, its depiction of Kuala and Berto and their intense yet simply told story of love at the bottom of the world. Cesar feels unfinished and Junior feels thin; Kuala and Berto are fully felt fully realized people (does it help that O'Hara who played Berto wrote the screenplay from Brocka's outline?). The film is Brocka's version of Jose Rizal's Noli Me Tangere (Touch Me Not) with Kuala as Sisa (remember that Noli was about yet another dull youth who wakes up to reality, that in the novel's margins danced a madwoman in search of her child)...
Lolita Rodriguez as Kuala captures the smallest, wince-inducing detail about homeless lunatics, from scabied scalp to urine-stained thighs. O'Hara plays Berto as a man isolated by his leprosy, perhaps not a little mad-- when he first notices Kuala, he looks her over with predatory eyes. Rodriguez and O'Hara make the relationship between them feel effortless yet real-- Rodriguez as Kuala responds to Berto's attentions hungrily (as a child would); O'Hara as Berto suddenly finds himself functioning as guardian and father as well as lover. Is it any wonder that Junior would be drawn to them, that he would reach hungrily (as a child) to them, and that we the audience would respond as he would, to the warmth they radiate?
Menzone, September 2002
Picture above thanks to Video48
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