Ishmael Bernal, a partial retrospective

Call Him Ishmael

THERE IS A SCENE IN MANILA BY NIGHT, where Charito Solis' Virgie confronts William Martinez's Alex about his drugtaking. What follows is a storm of maternal fury, unmatched by any other in an already turbulent film. She slaps him mauls him rains blows on his back and head; she throws things--knickknacks, heavy objects, anything and everything detachable and ready at hand. In glorious slow motion, she smashes a drawer on his skull, wood splinters flying like exploded shrapnel. The scene feels like it has gone too long; you're reminded of a Buster Keaton film where everything is flying around in a tornado and Keaton is the still, rooted center in the storm. Manila has pushed past the point of drama to absurdity, is well on its way past absurdity into a kind of comic horror.

The scene is disturbing for another reason: Bernal was known for being terrified of his mother, a strong, attractive woman even in her old age, even confined to a wheelchair, (as she was when I saw her at her son's wake). He was also known to do drugs recreationally. Could this moment in the film startling in its sudden ferocity have been an early trauma from his own life? Or, if it had already been written into the script, could it have hit Bernal so close to his heart he chose to direct the scene with this much intensity?

It's a question I would have loved to put to the man, and now never will. Bernal's films are full of such moments: sharp, intense, superbly directed, unforgettably acted, rarely clear-cut or easy to decipher.

Significant to note that Bernal's first film, Pagdating Sa Dulo (At The Top) was also his first flop--never mind that it was a humorous, brutally honest look at the local film industry. Bernal never really cared about money, not deep down inside; he wanted to make films that mattered (might as well note that Bernal survived this disastrous debut to enjoy a long career in movies).

Bernal mentioned his long-time rivalry with Lino Brocka (as far back as the shooting of Maynila Sa Mga Kuko Ng Liwanag, (Manila In The Claws Of Neon) he was eager to talk to the production crew, pumping them for details about what Brocka was up to). This was a necessary rivalry inasmuch as it spurred him to excel, but the truth of the matter was he needn't have felt inferior. The pleasures Bernal provide are less obvious to the eye--they need a step backwards, a specifically ironic attitude. Bernal's films aim at the heart but detour through the mind along the way, making interesting twists and turns.

Take Hinugot Sa Langit, (Snatched From Heaven) ostensibly an anti-abortion film. The script, by Amado Lacuesta, takes a tabloid subject--abortion--and presents the issues and dilemmas with admirable subtlety. Maricel Soriano's pregnant office girl Carmen has no feminist agenda, no militant point of view; she's just someone trying to eke out a living and a child would be an insupportable burden. But even better than Bernal's complete lack of didactism is his beautifully understated sense of drama: Carmen listens to her mother on the phone; a chance remark makes Soriano think of the consequences of her act. No music, no sound effects, most of all no hysterical acting: just the camera moving gently into her face as the tears well up. One of the loveliest and saddest single shot in all of Philippine cinema.

Working Girls is another script by Lacuesta (the business class milieu was a specialty). Here he draws a satiric sketch of Philippine business (or more accurately Philippine monkey business), from highest executive to lowliest secretary--Bernal directs with admirable fizziness, the slapstick portions light and graceful comic ballets.

Nunal Sa Tubig (Speck In The Water) is known as Bernal's "art" film. The picture sank in the box-office; otherwise Bernal might have continued along these lines. Strange saying this of anyone but good thing he didn't--this is Bernal at his most gaseous. Bernal always resisted stooping down to level of the lowest common denominator, but here his storytelling is so elliptical it's nonexistent, a series of scenic picture postcards featuring Elizabeth Oropesa as Maria, brooding darkly over the mysteries of life and nature. There's no tension, no drama, no life in this gorgeous-looking "art" film.

Bernal films have an amazing range--he  proved to be an even more versatile director than Brocka. Aside from the usually mentioned works (Himala, or Miracle; Manila By Night; Relasyon or An Affair), he did film noir (Wating), light-hearted comedy (Pabling or Playboy), a dance musical (Good Morning Sunshine), sex farce (Huwag Tularan: Pito Ang Asawa or Don't Imitate: I Have Seven Husbands), historical period (El Vibora), martial arts (Sleeping Dragon), even a superhero movie (Zoom Zoom, Superman, which to my  eternal embarrassment was the first Bernal I ever saw and, at seven years old, loved). He did the first comedy to pay tribute to Filipino cinema--Tisoy (Half Breed), where Nonoy Marcelo's comic strip character runs across Bembol Roco (from Maynila Sa Mga Kuko Ng Liwanag), Elizabeth Oropesa (Bernal's own Nunal Sa Tubig), Nora Aunor (Minsa'y Isang Gamu-Gamo, or Once A Moth), and the feral kids from Alkitrang Dugo (Thick Blood).

He did Boy Kodyak, the rare Bernal action flick (he didn't like to do action)--Detective Teo Rosa (Bembol Roco) on the run, hiding amongst religious cultists in Mount Banahaw. Peter Weir may have seen the film while making The Year Of Living Dangerously; is it possible Weir was so impressed that years later he would send Harrison Ford to hide among the Amish in Witness?

Bernal worked in areas Brocka didn't go. Unlike Brocka, he had a sneaking sympathy for the middle and upper class, or at least a more complex understanding. It's a basic principle of comedy: you can't make fun of what you don't understand. He did satiric damage to the Makati business class in Working Girls; in Manila By Night he skewered the spoiled offspring of upper middle-class parents, borrowing one or two details from his own life.

Relasyon is his starkest, most direct work, possibly his most heartfelt. Vilma Santos is Marilou, Christopher De Leon her married lover Emil: Marilou clings to the lower end of the middle class, economically independent and free of the chains of marriage. The challenge for her is to lose that independence, take up those chains; she doesn't--or Emil manages to evade her attempts. Ultimately, she pays--but for what? Was failure to marry or failure to stay aloof of the relationship her real crime? Bernal of course doesn't spell it out, but leaves it for us to pick over and ponder. 

Hinugot characterized another aspect of Bernal: where Brocka was passionately supportive of this or that issue, Bernal was passionately skeptical about this or that problem, and the solutions we keep coming up with. Hinugot sa Langit on abortion, Himala on faith, Pagdating Sa Dulo on the film business--Brocka the idealist, Bernal the cynic.

In Himala the skepticism was particularly corrosive. We saw an industry grow around Nora Aunor's faith healer Elsa, a marketplace that sold everything she kissed or touched or even breathed on; the moment Elsa declares to the crowd "There is no miracle!" is the moment Bernal looked up into the heavens and found them empty. This is when Bernal's cynicism matched Brocka's idealism, the stance of one no less potent or awe-inspiring than the other's.

Style was the best thing about Bernal's last work Wating. It was a flawed film, with two weak central performers and at best an erratic story. But it stood out: with its dark noir lighting, stylized production design, sense of an intelligence at play, it stood out. The film kept promising--threatening--to break out and turn into a great film, a feeling you get from practically no one else working in local cinema today.

Bernal's most effective fusion of all three--cynicism, comedy, style--was achieved in what many call his masterpiece, Manila By Night. People who saw it when it first came out found the film disturbing for its honest depiction of the ugliness, the sleaze and grime of Manila. Seeing it again I was struck by how reactions can change through the years. What's really disturbing about the film was an even deeper honesty, that it showed not the ugliness, but the seductiveness of Manila; the lurid neon glow, the dripping sheen of its phosphorescent underbelly. This was Manila's true danger, that it was a sexy fascinating whore--a Manila that lured youths to their doom, a Manila with serrated blades hidden in velvet gloves, a Manila that tantalized and teased and led you down one dark corridor after another. This Manila's rain-slicked streets have the heartstopping brilliance of Paris's night streets, seen by a child through a prison van window in Francois Truffaut's The 400 Blows. It has the brilliance of a dream city, of evanescent pleasures tasted and half-forgotten, leaving an unsatisfied bitterness in the mouth. You pursued that aftertaste at your own risk.

Manila in Manila actually looks cleaner: the streets have less garbage, the traffic isn't as bad, the neon lights are brighter for the relatively purer air. The men and women, far from being the last survivors of a dying community, have an animal energy about them, like the decadent performers in Bob Fosse's Cabaret. The killing of Adelina (Alma Moreno) doesn't have the same shock value as the recent Vizconde Massacre; the horror of performing sex live before paying customers, torero style--which had the blind Bea (Rio Locsin) screaming and struggling to keep from being dragged in--is shown in more explicit detail in films like Chito Rono's Private Show and Tikoy Aguiluz's Boatman (a film Bernal admired very much). The horrors of Manila in the 70's have faded in the light of the horrors of Manila today; Manila in Manila actually looks like a good place to live in.

But the film's power derives not from the period details which date the film but from the characters, their relationships, what they say and do to each other. We all know a heartless user like Orestes Ojeda's taxi driver Pebrero, or his equally heartless lover Adelina, who one-ups his dishonesty by making him believe she's a nurse. Love for them is a game, the loser the one with the most illusions. We all know someone with the irresistible charm, the infuriating helplessness of drug-addicted moocher Alex, always needing money for his next fix. "Seeing human nature as it is--that is ugly," Gustav Hasford writes in his novel The Short Timers. Coming at the tail end of a book filled with blood-drenched horrors from the Vietnam war (the basis of Stanley Kubrick's watered-down Full Metal Jacket), this was an extraordinary statement; it was also true. Manila is honest in  that sense.

Manila is Bernal's Nashville, a multicharactered, multistoried portrait of a country's soul. Unlike Robert Altman's political epic, Manila is set in a profound spiritual and physical darkness, in a city glimpsed between flashes of bright neon, its people reflected on the rain-slicked streets. If Brocka's great Manila film Maynila Sa Mga Kuko Ng Liwanag faded at the last moment to a gauzy vision of Hilda Koronel, Bernal's refuses to soften its attitude--it ends with a sunrise, traditional symbol of hope, but is otherwise silent. We come to no conclusions, the film says with a smile: we have only survived the night. From this and from his other films Bernal emerges as the great Doubting Thomas of our society, the clear-eyed critic of our flawed culture, the cynical, barbed-tongue prophet of our inevitable doom.

Written for the Hong Kong International Film Festival, April, 1997