Maging Akin Ka Lamang (Viva Films, 1987) is the recreation of a passion, but the passion entertained by this particular woman in love, played with frightening self-possession by Lorna Tolentino, is seen not as desire or ecstasy, or with even a glimpse of mutuality, but as a dark and one-sided obsession, a pursuit remorselessly undertaken with the female stalking the male. And thus does Lino Brocka, in rendering explicit the insight that has lain beneath the surface of many a “woman’s film” makes the “woman’s film” to end all “women’s films." In all of these, a woman in love defies social decorum and propriety, rejects the normal woman’s destiny in marriage and family, finally goes beyond even Andy Abrigo (Christopher de Leon), the beloved himself in embracing an emotion that is total, self-defining, based on denial rather than fulfillment can end only in martyrdom. What the world (and most feminists) see as a woman “throwing her love away” on an unworthy man is in fact a woman throwing away the world and all dependencies for a love radically created by her, preparing herself for immolation on its altar. This terrifying side of love, never quite acknowledged in most films, becomes the exclusive tonality in Maging Akin Ka Lamang. In thus intellectualizing the etiology of an obsession, Brocka has made palatable to critics a theme that would otherwise be regarded as soap opera, but has altered the premise in the process.
By opening the doom of an obsession analytically understood and predictable, Maging Akin Ka Lamang becomes a meditation on the “woman’s film” rather than a direct experience and skirts the depths and heights of the great tragedies of obsession. Rosita Monteverde embraces her martyrdom from the beginning. There is no dramatic conflict. Tolentino's Rosita begins as an outsider, intersecting with society only to seek a human form for her obsession. Brocka understands that such an obsession is not only magnificent but terrible, not only sublime, but selfish and cruel. He gave us, in the most deeply sympathetic “rejected lover” ever created, (Jay Ilagan's Ernie Azurin), the true measure of this cruelty. Their sense of the wholeness that is forfeited or lost by those who would defy society and live at its edge. They see, with ambivalence, the wholeness that is left behind, but they also see, with ambivalence, the obsession to which love and madness can lead. Loss and gain, the components of paradox, are simultaneously present in the vertiginous daring of style, whereas Brocka’s devotion to the truth has the effect of constantly justifying Rosita’s actions, redeeming them with gravity, without ever plunging her into the abyss of romantic folly and cruelty that might, paradoxically, have given her the dimension of greatness.
Sound Supervision: Vic Macamay
Production Designer: Edgar Martin Littaua
Musical Director: Willy Cruz
Screenplay: Jose Dalisay, Jr.
Film Editor: Ike Jarlego, Jr.
Director of Photography: Rody Lacap
Directed By: Lino Brocka
