SARI-SARING SINENG PINOY

     The slums of Tondo crush the titular heroine of Lino Brocka's Insiang (Cinemanila Corporation, 1976), a young woman trapped in an environment of destitution and abuse which she can only struggle against violently and vainly. Brocka's portrait of familial treachery and societal abandonment channels its melodrama through the filter of neorealism, its story's heightened emotions kept at a simmer yet meticulously composed. Certainly, the root of her misery extends all the way home where her mother Tonya (Mona Lisa), bitter about her husband's departure, kicks her financially strapped in-laws to the curb so her young lover, Dado (Ruel Vernal) can move in before proceeding to badger her daughter into a Machiavellian rage. Beset by maternal resentment, her boyfriend Bebot's (Rez Cortez) callousness and Dado's rapist tendencies, Insiang (Hilda Koronel) plots her revenge with Brocka expertly dramatizing the understandable, if not prudent reasons for each character's behavior. What registers forcefully throughout isn't Insiang's literal plot twists and turns as much as the pervading mood of lonely powerlessness and the reactionary impulse to strike back against intractable forces and situations by any means necessary. It's an undercurrent conveyed by Koronel's guileless countenance and Brocka's unaffected depiction of the impoverished setting and its beleaguered inhabitants. Insiang's defiant actions cast the film as a lurid ode to feminist self-actualization. But with the misery-wrought finale and its tangled knot of obstinate, volatile, unfulfilled feelings and desires, Brocka ensures that any minor triumph enjoyed by his morally and emotionally warped protagonist is tempered by an overriding dose of bittersweet sorrow and despair.

     Frequent Brocka collaborator, cinematographer Conrado Baltazar shot the film in the open-matte 1.37:1 aspect ratio making sure to leave room at the top and bottom of the frame to facilitate a full image, though a boom mike can be seen in one scene which leads me to believe that the film was framed incorrectly. Ironically, Insiang was released on DVD by Cine Filipino in its preferred format, lopping off the top and bottom in order to decrease the width of the black bars when viewed on 16x9 screens. Baltazar's camerawork combines gritty naturalism with core noir elements to produce a stunning image that's always been difficult to reproduce in the home video realm. Martin Scorsese's World Cinema Project however, has done a spectacular job, creating a new digital transfer in 4K resolution from the original camera negative. Here, the realism is uncompromised, with medium grain enhancing the slum setting and rough exteriors. Some of the solid backgrounds appear a little noisy at times and a few scenes suffer from a nagging bit of softness, but on the whole, the image is clear and well modulated. Close-ups caress Mona Lisa's iconic face and Koronel's unspoiled loveliness. Without a doubt, Insiang has never looked better and this superior effort makes an unforgettable film even more powerful. Dialogue can be problematic at times, bass frequencies are strong, nuances are also a bit more pronounced, but they seamlessly blend into the film's fabric. Criterion’s high-def presentation features a top-notch video and audio transfer, and fascinating extras to make every viewer an authority on this classic film. Like the best movies, it satisfies on many levels, forcing us to think about and reflect on a variety of substantive themes. It also inspires unabashed admiration for the sheer talent on display in front of and behind the camera. Insiang is one of the truly great Filipino films and an absolute must own.

Art Director: Fiel Zabat

Sound Supervision: Rudy Baldovino

Screenplay: Mario O'Hara, Lamberto E. Antonio

Director of Cinematography: Conrado Baltazar, F.S.C.

Film Editor: Augusto Salvador

Music: Minda D. Azarcon

Direction: Lino Brocka

     The heroine of Mario O'Hara's Tatlong Taong Walang Diyos (NV Productions, 1976) is a creature of contradictory attributes that isn't easy to imagine in the flesh. Rosario would seem too oversized to be embodied by any actress, even by an actress of extraordinary resourcefulness and versatility. Nora Aunor has already established herself as a performer of that caliber, but nothing in her earlier work fully anticipated Tatlong Taong Walang Diyos. Aunor accomplishes the near-impossible, presenting Rosario in believably human terms. In a role affording every opportunity for overstatement, she offers a performance of such measured intensity that the results are by turns exhilarating and heartbreaking. There is hardly an emotion that Aunor doesn't touch in this movie and yet we're never aware of her straining. This is one of the most astonishing and yet one of the most unaffected and natural performances I can imagine. Conrado Baltazar photographs Aunor excellently. To begin with, she looks more translucently beautiful than ever and what Aunor has wrought, with O'Hara's help, is a psychological verity for Rosario that she reveals through patterns of motion. She seems to be shunning the close scrutiny of others. Yes, she often faces people, often embraces, converses with them, but the overall impression of her movement is sidling, gently attempting to hide herself in open space. Through this kinetic concept, Aunor gives Rosario an aura of concealment. Sometimes O'Hara hands the picture over to Aunor. The camera fixes on her in medium close-up and virtually without any change of shot, she tells a story. It’s what Ingmar Bergman has done a number of times with Liv Ullmann and it’s been done before with Aunor.

     Presented in an aspect ratio of 1.33:1 and granted a 1080p transfer, Mario O'Hara's Tatlong Taong Walang Diyos was restored in 2016 by L'Immagine Ritrovata in Italy and the digital transfer was created from the surviving 35mm print deposited at the Cultural Center of the Philippines. I find the new appearance of the film unconvincing. There is an entire range of color values that effectively destabilizes the film's native dynamic range and in many cases even collapses existing detail. Plenty of the darker/indoor footage convey very specific digital flatness that gives the film a distracting artificial quality. Grain exposure is unrealistic although I have to make it clear that without the anomalies described above the visuals would have been quite wonderful. Image stability is very good. Debris, cuts, damage marks, stains and other standard age-related imperfections have been carefully removed. There is only one standard audio track on this release, Tagalog LPCM 2.0 with optional English subtitles for the main feature. Excluding one short segment where a light echo effect appears during the exchanges, clarity and stability are otherwise excellent. The music is nicely balanced as well. Dynamic intensity is limited, but given the organic nature of the original sound design this should not be surprising. Tatlong Taong Walang Diyos is so perfectly cast. A fine, absorbing and wonderfully acted movie about three people who flounder in the bewilderment of being human in an age of madness. Watching it is quite an experience.

Art Director: Vicente Bonus

Film Editors: Ike Jarlego, Jr., Efren Jarlego

Director of Photography: Conrado Baltazar, F.S.C.

Music By: Minda D. Azarcon

Written and Directed By; Mario O'Hara

     Maria (Blackops Studios Asia, Viva Films, 2019) paints its setting in broad strokes. The film’s action takes place in a generic space occupied by stilted characters. Two assassins, Kaleb (Ivan Padilla) and Victor (KC Montero) trade wince-inducing banter while waiting for new assignments from their father, Ricardo de la Vega (Freddie Webb), head of the BlackRose cartel. Interacting with them all is Lily/Maria (Christine Reyes), a woman who’s introduced via a series of images that reduce her to flashing brown eyes and pursing lips. In fact, Erik Matti’s Buy Bust (2018) stands out as the closest analog to this film, yet the comparison to Matti’s freewheeling, deconstructionist take does this lugubrious thriller no favors, as director Pedring A. Lopez doesn’t so much as dust off the cobwebs from the tropes he recycles throughout. Maria’s actors are awkward and stiff in trying to project hard-boiled cool and all while delivering lines that sound as if they had been passed multiple times through an online translation tool. Even Reyes, a master of the cat-who-ate-the-canary grin is unable to fill the gaps left by the film’s unambitious screenplay. With the exception of her initial interactions with Kaleb, Lily/Maria offers nothing deeper than perfunctory poses. Chasing after a quick and painless death, Kaleb picks up on her true nature and discusses the possibility of expediting her demise. As Kaleb mull the pros and cons of his plan, the film suddenly feels uniquely sardonic and almost poignant. But then another hollow twist kills the mood, reducing even this exchange to more grist for the mill of Lopez’s lifeless genre gamesmanship.

     Maria was shot digitally by cinematographer Pao Orendain. The frame is routinely awash in brightly fluorescent blues, reds, greens, oranges and yellows with different hues often competing for attention. Alternating shadows and streaks of bright light scream while there's barely a natural flesh tone in sight. Fine detail is superior where it's intended to be visible (mostly in closeups) but routinely fades into darkness or is blown out by intense brightness. However, the image is not without flaws. Occasional banding appears, but it's minor and brief. More serious is the subtle but frequent background noise in the riotous clashes of colors and these recur in irregular background streaks throughout the film. They will be more or less obvious depending on the size of your display and its settings,and they are fleeting enough to pass without major distraction. Maria's 5.1 soundtrack is loud and you may find it necessary to turn down your customary volume setting by a few db. It's not the sound effects which are effective though relatively modest, but the score by Jessie Lasaten has been mixed to fill the entire speaker array, pulsing and throbbing as it does its best to rise to the level of the overcooked visuals. To the sound mixers' credit, the dialogue never gets buried, remaining intelligible and firmly anchored to the front but, like the bright colors and odd angles onscreen, the soundtrack is working overtime to knock you sideways with suspense and foreboding in a film where nothing much happens and the ultimate reveals aren't worth the wait. Lopez shows promise as a visual stylist, but he needs a gifted screenwriter. Maria is a potentially interesting experiment betrayed by the weaknesses of a derivative script. If you're curious, stream it, given the unfortunate overcompression.

Directed By: Pedring Lopez

Written By: YC Carbonell, Rex Lopez

Music By: Jessie Lasaten

Director of Photography: Pao Orendain

Edited By: Jason Cahapay

Production Design: Raymund 'Diong' Fernandez

Sound: Albert Michael M. Idioma

     Conditioned by a wealth of less imaginative and empathetic movies, one awaits the histrionics as a tension breaker. But the actors and director Cholo Laurel understand grief as a great, often outwardly inexpressible ache that resembles an unending subliminal slideshow of what will never be. The moments that would naturally invite heartbroken fireworks. Nasaan Ka Man (ABS-CBN Film Productions, Inc., Star Cinema, 2005) is about love and grief as rifting confirmations which logically informs life with an unmooring sense of fragility and what the justly celebrated editing, a feat of prismatic expressionism, is conveying. The symbols that Laurel and his editor juggle are often surprisingly hokey given the film's formal sophistication. The harbingers of doom are the stuff of old wives' tales, but they're layered and scrambled in a puzzle-box manner that renews them of their urgency. The editing (not only of image, but intricately of sound) is pointedly showy to the extent that even casual viewers will notice its contradictorily fluid yet jagged dexterity. It's meant to be violating, because we're supposed to feel as if we're slightly apart from the story. Nasaan Ka Man is an intangibly melancholic film that feels as if the bottom is always about to drop out of it. Not only brilliantly edited, it's also one of the great illustrations of the relationship between editing and performance. The former provides a slightly rotted, debauched, intellectualized framework that the latter invests with heartbreakingly understated moments of tender, searching humanity.

     There are no visible traces of electronic sharpening that affected detail and depth in this newly restored high definition transfer. Various density fluctuations remain in areas of the film where light is captured in specific ways. Minor contrast variations are present, but they are also part of the original cinematography. Colors are stable and natural, and I would specifically like to mention that here, they are slightly better saturated as well. The general flatness present on the DVD release is also a byproduct of compromising digital corrections. Overall image stability is excellent, and there are no large debris, cuts, damage marks, or stains. The encoding is very good, but I did notice some extremely light shimmer trying to sneak in during a short sequence early into the film. The stereo track is excellent. I did some direct comparisons with the Dolby 2-channel audio from the DVD and clarity and depth are identical. There is good range of nuanced dynamics that allow the score to shine in all the right places. The dialog is stable and easy to follow. All in all, this is a strong organic presentation of Nasaan Ka Man as the improvements in quality are quite dramatic. Laurel is careful in the way he approaches the material. There is an underlying current of suspense and even though the story's trajectory makes sense in hindsight, it is unpredictable.

Directed By: Cholo H. Laurel

Screenplay: Ricky Lee, Rafael Hidalgo

Cinematographer: Charlie Peralta

Production Designer: Jon Cuyson

Film Editor: Marya Ignacio

Musical Director: Jessie Lasaten

Sound Engineer: Addiss Tabong

     Empathy comes naturally to Lino Brocka, director of the overpoweringly intimate Cain at Abel (Cine Suerte, Inc., 1982). Working with screenwriter Ricardo Lee, he skips among his two protagonists without losing the story’s pulse. Every narrative beat is also a heartbeat. Christopher de Leon's tautness radiates strength, single-mindedness is Ellis' goal. As much as I like Phillip Salvador, I’ve often found him fuzzy, as if he’s wary of losing control. Is that why he’s so affecting here? The dissolute Lorenz turns out to be as tightly wound as his younger brother, only too scared to focus, he looks pitifully vulnerable. Baby Delgado has the kind of role that turns actresses into dullards, the wife who stands and looks stricken at her man in paroxysms of rage and grief. But she’s so grounded that as the others carry on, your eyes keep drifting to her, it’s her immediacy that keeps you glued to her face. In the role of Rina, Cecille Castillo is not as dazzling, but she doesn’t have to exaggerate her naïveté. Brocka’s actors work with their intellects fully engaged and they engage us on levels we barely knew we had. Cain at Abel pulls you so deep, so fast. You never catch Brocka or Lee grandstanding, only observing. Cinematographer Conrado Baltazar uses color to convey inner states without calling attention to itself and Efren Jarlego’s editing in two fraught dinner-table scenes is so exquisitely calibrated it’s as if the cuts were generated by the characters’ psyches. The crosscurrents keep you scanning the frame for Brocka's subtly vibrating features, each with their own distinct reaction.

     Now, as to the 1080p transfer, it's good, but not quite elite. Black levels fluctuate between appearing a little too heavy-handed in spots, revealing a fair bit of evident crush, but looking inky and sturdy in other scenes. The beginning of the movie looks particularly overwhelmed by crush. The transfer is marred by excessive film grain, but the image is nevertheless a hair soft throughout and detailing generally ranges between adequate and good, favoring the latter. Facial textures are nicely intricate, but a somewhat flat overall image doesn't allow the smaller nuanced details to spring to life. It features an inconsequential amount of banding and no perceptible blocking. The restoration could stand to be a little less soft and show a little more detail, but for the most part it's a solid, if unspectacular, hi-def image.The audio is presented in 2-channel PCM, but the original stems are the weakness of this soundtrack. Overall, the sound is band limited, but none the less quite pleasing for an 80's mix. Gunshots sound just a bit anemic, lacking body and weight. The score by Max Jocson wraps pleasantly creating an enveloping quality. Overall the score fares better than the dialog and sound effects. Cain at Abel is far from flawless. The scenes leading up to the key moment are a little lackluster and Lorenz may appear to be the perfect family man, but in drama, as in life, appearances can be deceiving.

Screenplay: Ricardo Lee

Cinematography: Conrado Baltazar, F.S.C.

Music; Max Jocson

Film Editor: Efren Jarlego

Production Design: Joey Luna P.D.G.P.

Sound Supervision: Rudy Baldovino, Willy Islao

Directed By: Lino Brocka