by Carlo Cielo
And so we return to the scene of the crime.
Turing is down to his last set of chips. He’s taken all his bets as far as these could go. There is only just his gun, his bellicose pal, the bloated hostage, and a barrage of law enforcement agents waiting to lunge straight at them, while the media gadflies buzz around. Only the most futile of pedestals keep them from heading straight into judgment. The fort they’ve made of the factory has long been infiltrated now; his troops have all been taken out. Numbers are running thin, and there is a shot yet to be fired. Then, a plea. Few minutes ago, his former activist wife called upon him, through police blow horn, to desist. Beckoning him to pry open the last defenses his meager income has left him with: the wobbling doors and fortifications which maintain the protest in his head. Seems none of this was good enough, wasn’t enough seizure of a future that’s been long denied them. The rest cannot see that, or look past incident. They can only be intimidated by the action.
So, Turing relents, and lets her arrive. Some, however, ain’t so giving.
Quickly, his felon buddy grabs the well-stuffed Mrs. Tan, and sticks his gun into her temple. Within the few seconds the heathens land in their uniforms, it’s a free for all. He chucks his bullets onto that stout piece of crap, while Turing and his wife ducks for cover. Several blasts raze through tight air, as the multiple hits tear up every fiber of the brigand’s body. In a few seconds, he is dead. Turing is immediately held down the ground, his wrists tied together in cuff links. His wife walks beside him, smug and content that he’s gonna be kept safe by the type of ‘justice’ with which they mock the uninitiated, knowing full well he hasn’t seen the last of oblivion....
***
It is in this final sequence where the film really shows how it’s firmly held together, not just in terms of culminating narrative threads, but in the utter completeness of cinematic visions merging with sentiment – from the props, the focused sense of geography, right down to Turing’s uniform, as he marches into battle, and makes that climactic assault in the printing press. His dress evokes NPA, with the bandana and the ragged guerilla clothing and strut. The laborer attacking capitalist machinery's a shocking proposition enough as it is; his address to the Filipino people more so. While registering more as cheap satire 25 years on, that scene of him prior talking at length about worker’s rights and oppression while holding an AK-47 at his lap ( far as I remember ) is a sublime act of cinematic provocation buried underneath the proceedings, and could have been among the reasons why this film got banned by the Marcos regime in the first place. All these events occur in a tight room, with the principals up front and human collateral behind.
Yet this is where Lino Brocka breaks with posers exploiting terrorist chic mileage. Said scene is as much informed by revolutionary insight. It owes more than to mere petty theater, or bourgeoisie cynicism, that he had the goon guy take the mic from Turing as he berates him. Both he and Pete Lacaba know their politics enough to not entrust the uprising to these lumpen scalawags.
Even if it’s only on film. In fact, this unified sentiment informs the rest of the creative choices made all throughout. The people who make up the ragtag crew, for example, don’t act like they abide by any principle, and are anything but heroic, or even protagonist. They’re every bit the villainous henchmen in random Filipino action flicks, and to see these bumbling felons walk alongside the lead, and the lead, played by an action star, mind you, being so helplessly dependent on them, lends a filmic sense of tension to the whole ordeal, highlighting the utter recklessness of Turing’s actions, and giving it a palpable sense of believability. As if his mission is bound to crumble at any minute, with his buddies being creeping antagonists that run beside him, instead of charging straight at him, guiding him to his fall through a false sense of cathartic victory. Not just any sort of ‘achievement’. The punishing lighting brings this to bear; drenched in shadows, yet illuminated enough for us to see who exactly is messing with which – not sparing us from the total humanity of the guilty.
And you can find little that is as visceral a stand-in for capitalist machinery as the printing press. I am permanently reminded, for example, of a short story I read, where a worker gets so worn down by his condition, that he sleeps and falls into a printing machine, tearing him to bits. The film ‘The Machinist’ uses it in the same way as well, in the scene where a blue-collar fella gets his hand chewed up by it pretty bad. There’s just something inexplicable about the construction of these printing machines, their overall forms; a troubling oddness in these hostile shapes, where it’s not as comprehensible as say, the assembly line , where there is a conveyor belt, and a generally horizontal A to B trajectory where you know where the raw material goes to die, and where the product comes out to bury it into utility. Not so much in the printing machine’s case, which doesn't correspond as easily with the environment, with its twists and turns and convolutions, and some messed up parts of it suspended, while absent souls are forced to work its grind, even as it doesn’t know what its flowing into or where it's take them, and is as divorced from their conditions as it could get. The machines in this movie produce children’s books, happy shit that have zero relevance in their lives, this end-product being simply random and alienating. Among other things that make the usage of such, and the printing factory being setting, an accurate artistic choice relating to the purpose of the entire work.
The film also achieves wholeness through the rigorous significations of the character quirks and traits, both symbolic as well as functional : of suggestions which are brought in early and adequately pay off later ( you get to know why one of the goons is named after fecal matter ), or say, petty views which unexpectedly lead to, even hint at, grander progressive action, which then ironically drives its adherer to the sidelines. The latter would feel jarring at first, and risks turning such character into mere convenient mouthpiece for the both writer and director’s positions at a given time – in this case, the female worker and vice president of the union – but a closer inspection reveals that her actions indeed follow consistent logic. Albeit one that could potentially cloud any sense of nobility her actions exuded earlier; her proletarian affectations, while largely meant, largely serving as a means for her to reinforce her inexplicable fixation towards the lead character. Anything to drive Turing in a corner, and make him look like either an inordinate thug, or a wayward embarrassment that needs our ‘guidance’ and ‘understanding’. Which is to say that he can never do anything right on his own accord. And it’s ruthlessly exposed on live television, unhinged in all its ghastly pandering, dramatic sighs and all, even as the dullards behind the camera are tainted and compromised. Making that social point, and doing it right on celluloid, not only requires not only sharp sophistication, but also the effective integration of all collaborators’ efforts. That it is being noted at all points to the precision of the film’s mise-en-scene.
***
Saw this first in B&W VHS tape, and while a recent 33mm screening took some of the excellent rawness away, the film concludes beautifully all the same : with the Filipino teetering to the edge.
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