the innocent destroyed by their beauty
by
Douglas Messerli
Clodualdo
del Mundo, Jr (screenplay, based on the fiction by Edgardo M. Reyes), Lino
Brocka (director) Maynila sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag (Manila in the Claws
of Light) / 1975
Surely
one of the very saddest films ever made, Lino Brocka’s (1939-1991) 1975 masterwork,
Manila in the Claws of Light, takes us along for a long tradition of
wide-eyed country innocents coming to the big city only to discover how corrupt
and destructive that world is.
One need only think of Charles Dickens’ Oliver
Twist, Mário de Andrade famous Brazilian classic fiction Macunaíma, Thomas
Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, and more recently, John Schlesinger’s Midnight
Cowboy and even John Waters’ Pecker, where the young man, sullied by
New York scene, takes them all back to Baltimore to reveal their own corrupt
proclivities.
The young would-be hero of Brocka’s work
is the beautiful wide-eyed Julio Madiaga (Bembol Roco) come to Manila from
Marinduque to reclaim his youthful lover Ligaya (Hilda Koronel), who has been
lured away, with approval from her family, by the mysterious Mrs. Cruz (Juling
Bagabaldo) who promises the young beauty a job and educational opportunities in
the capitol city.
Just observing Mrs. Cruz’s obsessive
appetite for alcohol and other pleasures, we quickly perceive that her business
is actually involved with the sex-trade, and that poor Ligaya has been sold in
her trip to Manila into prostitution.
Attempting to reconnect with her, Julio travels to Manila, hanging out in places, such as the ever-present Ah-Tek store (the character played by Tommy Yap), a Chinese immigrant who has apparently taken the unfortunate Ligaya as his favorite “woman.” Julio tracks Mrs. Cruz to the Ah-Tek store, and attempts to enter, but is rebuffed.
Desperate to survive, Julio, who has been
a fisherman previously, takes on the hard tasks of working in construction,
forging friendships with several of his fellow workers such as Atong (Lou
Salvador, Jr.) who befriends Julio and introduces his to the shanty-town
conditions that allow he and his family to survive, while every payday being
cheated in their paycheck (given what is described as “Taiwan wages,” instead
of full pay). Atong, wrongfully arrested, is later murdered.
Another construction-worker friend, Pol
(Tommy Abuel) serves as Julio’s confidant, offering up important information of
how to survive in his friend’s new world, and even helping Julio when he has no
other place to sleep. Between them, there is an almost homoerotic relationship,
which is made more apparent when, after Julio is fired from his construction
job, he is brought, by a passing stranger, Bobby (Joio Abella) into the dark
world of Pilipino call-boys whom Bobby’s client’s find Julio very attractive.
He is, after all, a truly beautiful innocent, whom anyone with a heart might be
drawn to.
Yet, as we know from the very beginning
of this sad tale, Ligaya, once she meets up again with Julio—explaining to him
how she has been locked away as Ah-Tek’s lover and explains the full extent of
her involvement in Mrs. Cruz’s prostitution ring—that she will not survive. It
is left to his friend Pol to reveal the facts of her death.
Julio’s ineffective attempt at revenge
leads to his own death, from the hands of Ah-Tek’s minions.
This tragic story, so unfortunately, is
the story of so very many young people moving from one culture into another in
every country in this planet.
Innocence protected me in my voyage for a
year to New York City. But it doesn’t always work out that way.
One day, as I was walking the streets in
the upper 70s streets, just above Harlem, near to where I lived while working
at Columbia University—wearing, improbably, white pants and white shirt—a gang
of young males surrounded me, promising a violent encounter; but when they
looked at me, and saw the innocence of my eyes, they moved away without even
touching me. I was mugged once, and the nervous robber who stole my total
month’s salary, ran away without harming me, after demanding that I “drop my
pants.”
But clearly, in the long history of the
abused young people who naively come to major cities throughout the world, that
doesn’t always work. The beauty of innocence can often be overwhelming, but it
can also be an entry for extreme abuse. In the tale Brocka tells, based on Edgardo
M. Reyes’ novel, the beautiful are destroyed for no other reason than they are
so lovely to look at.
Los
Angeles, November 24, 2019
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (November 2019).
yes a touching work.
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