the drag queen’s son
by
Douglas Messerli
Orlando Nadres (screenplay), Lino Brocka (director) Ang Tatay Kong Nanay (My Father, My Mother) / 1978
If one marvels at the buoyancy of the late 20th century Philippine film industry, there are two names that help to explain it: Kidlat Tahimik and Lino Brocka, the later of whom is partially responsible for the surfeit of LGBTQ films still being created in that country.
Certainly one of Brocka’s central films is his comedy-drama Ang Tatay Kong Nanay (My Father/ My Mother) amazingly shot in 1978, an incredibly prolific period for the director, who also filmed Mananayaw, Gumising Ka, Maruja, Hayop sa Hayop, and Rubia Servios among other works during the same year.
Father/Mother is a somewhat long, almost two hours, and rather discursive work ranging over so many different issues that it alone challenges, long before it was popular to do so, any singular identity of LGBTQ individuals.
The film begins by suggesting that its
central figure, hair stylist Dioscoro Derecho, better known as Coring (played by
one of the most popular comedians of Philippine cinema, Dolphy [Rodolfo Quizon])
is a rather haggard drag queen, watching in tears as his friends camp it up and
dance out the night. Coring, it seems, cannot get over the abandonment of his previous
boyfriend/son/lover Dennis (Phillip Salvador), who after Coring paid for his
education ran off to another city, a situation the has its echoes in the
character of Bernadette Bassenger (memorably played by Terence Stamp) in The
Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) who lost his young
lover Trumpet to the fumes of peroxide.
Coring’s friends not only mock his
inability to enjoy the evening, but gang up in a taxi on their way home to destroy
Coring’s one remaining treasure of that relationship, a letter from Dennis. The
cater-wauling group, like the rather self-hating and friend-baiting gang of The
Boys in the Band—yet another echo of this highly influential film—finally
escape in flight as first Coring bails after which the cab driver forces the
others to follow.
After that night on the town one can
hardly imagine the somewhat tired but yet talented parlorista he appears to be
the next day. Living in the comfortable, if not fashionable house his father
left him, he is a community regular despite his flamboyant behavior, celebrated
by neighborhood figures who live far more destitute lives than he does.
But
that new day also holds a remarkable new series of events beginning with the reappearance
of his beloved Dennis, who has now evidently joined the American navy in order
to help support the infant son he carries with him, but whom Coring—so
overwhelmed by the homecoming of his beloved protégé—barely notices.
Dennis, so we discover has unintentionally
impregnated a hooker, Mariana Jimenez (Marissa Delgado), who not only soon
after left Dennis, but moved on to financially greener grasses. Scheduled for almost
immediate duty on a departing ship. the young man abandons the boy, later called
Nonoy (Niño Muhlach), to the care of his longing elderly lover.
Coring can’t say that he hasn’t been
warned by his clients, many of whom are also cross-dressers, about the near-impossible
odds he will face in raising a young boy, given his lifestyle and the tatty
neighborhood in which lives and works. How will he possibly care for the child
and work at the same time? What kind of guidance can he offer to a child given
his flair for the dramatic and outrageous aspects of life? On his meager wages,
how will he pay for a son?
If the film appears now to reverberate
with the pop comedy of a commercial film such as the 1985/1987 film (Trois hommes et un
couffin / Three Men and a Baby), Brocka predictably approaches his
work with a far darker tone.
Coring clearly does not perceive his own
life’s trajectory as fitting with the future what that he imagines for the boy,
and his gradual toning down of his personality and his unexpected criticism of
those in his shop who, in front of the boy, uncontrollably project their queenly
personae, loses him customers as well as, we are certain, some of his own
self-respect.
Brocka, presumably, might almost be faulted
for his character’s tacit disapproval of high-camp behavior—which is, in itself
often a tactic with which to survive the normative, disapproving world in which
effeminate homosexuals live—but given the early date of a film confronting
audiences with such a wide-range of truly controversial LGBTQ issues, I think
it might be prudent to forgive both the director and his screenwriter, Orlando
Nadres.
In the very same year the French-Italian
film La Cage aux Folles got around these issues by simply ignoring them,
as it were not even an issue worth questioning for a young boy to grow up atop
a Saint-Tropez gay drag club with a male drag queen parent, Albin Mougeotte,
who with the boy’s blood-father helped raise the perfectly normative
heterosexual boy Laurent. Brocka and Nadres quite obviously approach a similar
situation more seriously.
As After Dark critic Noel Vera wrote,
in a biographical summary of Dolphy’s career at the time of the entertainer’s
death in 2012:
“If there's any comedy in the picture, unlike with most of Dolphy's movies, the humor arises from character rather than situation, and Dolphy here reveals himself as a superb character actor. Witness his discomfort at dealing with Dennis (the physical attraction he feels so intense he almost feels faint); witness too the growing sense of maternal love he feels for Nonoy, Dennis' child....
More, there's a handling of homosexuality that is startlingly deft, considering when this was made. Coring doesn't believe in gay empowerment—when Nonoy catches him in drag, he makes excuses; when the boy puts on lipstick (in an attempt to play an American Indian), Coring, misunderstanding, reprimands the boy. Brocka shows us a gay man who fails to transcend his times (Coring believes homosexuality is a flaw—or worse, a sin), who nevertheless does his level best to be a parent to the child; watching Coring bumble along in desperate befuddlement, often against the dictates of his own instincts, creates a complex knot of feelings in the viewer. You feel your heart quietly breaking in sympathy for the man, the same time you find yourself (despite the film's overall serious tone) chuckling in amusement.”
The “drag” episode is particularly
poignant, as Coring is convinced by his friends to drop his parental duties for
just one night and return to perform, as he had in the past, in the notorious “fashion”
shows held in local neighborhoods. This event, held in a school playground,
attracts
If there is any evidence that the actions with
which Coring has been involved for his entire life are societally verboten
we recognize it when the police, with clubs raised, suddenly appear in an
attempt to close down the event. Coring takes cover beneath a metal-supported
bleacher, suddenly discovering Nonoy standing beside him. The look on Coring’s
face is one of horror and regretful release, as if all that he has attempted to
keep out of the boy’s consciousness has been for naught.
Angrily, he pulls the boy out of the
rubble of his dream-night and walks him home, his make-up dripping from what
are surely his tears of fear and embarrassment. Yet the boy seemingly takes it
all with amazing innocent, as if he has just witnessed a special treat, a
playful costume party in which men are permitted to dress up as women. It’s a
touching scene that reveals, especially by film’s end, the absurdity of Coring’s
attempts to hide his own natural proclivities.
Despite these corrective incidents,
however, one cannot imagine a move loving and supportive father than Coring,
who clearly dotes on the boy as if he were truly his own child germinated by his
long-ago lover.
All of that changes, however, when Dennis
suddenly returns on leave and without warning visits his and Mariana’s son
while Coring is at work work. Dennis, as has previously been suggested, is not
someone who thinks carefully about his actions, and now basically kidnaps the
kid for the day, portraying the boy’s “uncle” as he takes him to an amusement
part and buys him small trinkets.
This episode creates a major tonal shift
in the entire work, as we now discover another, more frightening aspect of
Coring’s identity after Dennis, also visiting Marianna, reveals to her their
son’s whereabouts.
Since leaving Dennis the ex-hooker has
married a wealthy man whose death soon after has made her wealthy, transforming
her into a kind a dictatorial head of household that Marianna might have conjured
up from reading about Imelda Marcos—who we might recall was ousted from role as
the First Lady along with her Filipino President husband Ferdinand only a year
previous to the making of this movie.
Most of the merry window’s days are now
apparently spent redecorating her palatial manor, inspecting it out of fear for
any trace of insect or other animal life (even a small turtle leads her into a
fury of revenge), and maltreating her numerous staff-members. Delusional, she
determines
While Coring quickly shows her the door after
she, too, briefly kidnaps the boy for a shopping spree, he realizes that he
will never be able to outwit her lawyers and can never offer Nonoy the
opportunities her money represents. Almost sheepishly, he bows to her demands,
requesting only that she leave the boy with him for just a little while longer
so that he may acclimate Nonoy to the change he is about to suffer.
If previously any anger that Coring
expressed to the boy as out of love, he now appears to scold and even taunt the
boy for no obvious reason, refusing to even give him a few coins to buy his
bird—a present from Marianna—a small pack of birdseed, and demanding the boy
return home when he attempts to display the bird to some of his friends in the
street. If at first one might imagine that he is taking out his own anger and
hurt upon the child he about to lose, we recognize, more importantly, that he
is still attempting to teach the boy to love him a little less. After each
angry outburst, the actor Dolphy hurriedly turns away from the camera as if
hiding his own bodily pains and subsequent tears for what he believes is his
necessary behavior.
When the transition comes, it does not
work well, at least from Nonoy’s point of view. In Marianna’s spotless house he
is simply another trinket she has collected who doesn’t fit into her orderly
plans of extravagant dinners and late-night parties. The child is refused entry
even into her own bedroom, while being given nothing which might truly
entertain him in the long empty days he seems confined to the house’s equally
empty rooms.
As I wrote about the gentle film above, You
Are Not Alone, 1978 was a particularly mean, if fascinating, year when it
came to the depiction of LGBTQ people. These two films were notable exceptions,
Brocka’s work becoming a touchstone for honest portraits of queer folk for a
long time to come.
Los
Angeles, December 4, 2020
Reprinted
from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (Decembeer
2020).
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