IMPROVISATORY BRILLIANCE

Posted by Jojo Devera ,


     Working Girls (Viva Films, 1984) represents Ishmael Bernal at an all-time personal peak and it came at just the right time in his career. For anyone who believed that what Filipino movies needed most, during the often-moribund cinematic eighties, was more of the old Bernal independent spirit and maverick brilliance, and more of a sense of what the country really is, rather than what it should be. The director’s sudden cinematic reemergence with Working Girls was an occasion for bravos. Like many of the other key innovative moviemakers of the seventies, notably Lino Brocka, Celso Ad Castillo and Mike de Leon, Bernal suffered through the eighties, though he managed to survive it. He came blazing back to center stage with Working Girls. It was a larger, riskier effort but it was a daring, omniscient technique and scathing take on the lives of modern women. Working Girls opened the way to Bernal’s remarkable achievements, including Hinugot sa Langit (1985) and The Graduates (1986). And in Working Girls returning to the style and strategy of his earlier seventies movies with their interweaving story lines, huge cast and open-ended narratives, Bernal actually topped his official masterpiece, Manila by Night (1980). The ensemble is large and various. Bernal, screenwriter Amado L. Lacuesta, Jr. and editor Ike Jarlego, Jr. concentrate on transitions, leaping from one track to another, making connections between clusters of characters. How? Sometimes, as in Manila by Night, one character simply shows up as back-ground in a story where he or she doesn’t belong. Sometimes, a few illicit sexual liaisons cross the borderlines, too. 

     Bernal's greatness as a director rested principally in that improvisatory brilliance, in his uncanny knack with actors. In a cast so large and uniformly superb, it seems unfair to pick any of them out even though Gina Pareño is the one who is handed a big, virtuoso, movie-stealing dialogue. It also lies in Bernal’s ability to free up an entire company to do their best work, his unique obsession with the whole process of making movies, the fact that he wouldn’t quit, no matter what. Appropriately, he won back the spotlight in the most impudent way possible, by laying bare the excesses and hypocrisies of Makati itself. Working Girls is one of those marriages of seeming opposites that works. What Bernal does by placing these people in another of his rich, boisterously populated collage films, is to show how every city (especially Makati) is, in a way, a community of the isolated. Bernal may even give us more of a sense of truth than the stories alone, because they recognize more of the absurd and terrible interconnections of life, the consequences that most of us choose to ignore. Part of the films' greatness, which is one of the triumphs of contemporary moviemaking, lies in the inclusiveness of its portrait, the way it gives such an omniscient sense of character, of milieu. And part also lies in Working Girls’ recognition that nothing in life is ever resolved, that there are no happy endings, but virtually no endings at all. Bernal likes the messiness and coincidence of real life, where you can do your best and some days it's just not good enough. Working Girls understands and knows because it is filmed from an all-seeing point of view. Its characters sometimes cross paths, but for the most part they don't know how their lives are changed by people they meet only glancingly. Some of these characters, would find the answers to their needs, yet these people have a certain nobility to them. They keep on trying and hope for better times. 


Sound Supervision: Vic Macamay

Musical Director: Willie Cruz

Production Designer: Benjie de Guzman

Film Editor: Ike Jarlego, Jr.

Director of Photography: Manolo R. Abaya, FSC

Screenplay: Amado L. Lacuesta, Jr.

Directed By: Ishmael Bernal