A superficial reading might suggest that it was the fall of Marcos’s regime that enabled Brocka to reinvent himself as a queer filmmaker with the release of Macho Dancer (1988). The book’s final chapter provides a worthy reorientation of Brocka’s oeuvre through a queer criticism that Capino executes flawlessly. Marcos’s removal from office prompts a more overt political investment on Brocka’s part, reflected in the “political melodramas of redemocratization” assessed in Capino’s sixth chapter. The next chapters assess the domestic social costs of the country’s post-1980 financial meltdown as depicted in Brocka’s family and male melodramas, in which brave young men fight authoritarian figures. The first three chapters focus on Brocka’s social, maternal, and crime melodramas, respectively, exploring their links to realism and film noir. To manage Brocka’s large body of work, Capino organizes the films according to loose subgenres. His vivid accounts are not only staggering, but offer further evidence of the political significance of Brocka, a figure whose oeuvre directly and indirectly confronts Marcos’s regime. Through decoding the political and historical inscriptions in Brocka’s films, Capino introduces the reader to the political history of martial law in the Philippines. Aided by an abundance of archival materials-press kits, screenplays, censorship documents, promotional materials, and more-Capino restores Brocka’s films to their historical context. Rather than the expected auteur-focused account of Brocka’s career, Martial Law Melodrama traces a resistant cinema that rejects cooperation with an authoritarian regime and refuses to serve a nationalistic interest. For Capino, the wide net of the melodrama mode-from weepies to thrillers-provided Brocka with the ideal vehicle for such deceptions. Reined in by this pressure, Brocka imparted to his films a latent political meaning that could not be made explicit. Most of the films that concern Capino here were made during Marcos’s regime, under a constant threat of state censorship. Capino combines historiographic and interpretive methods, claiming these films as inescapably products of their own time while highlighting how their sociopolitical representation speaks to that history. Martial Law Melodrama reveals the political meanings in Brocka’s films that are hidden beneath the innocuous appearance of popular mainstream cinema. Is the film’s final scene an antiauthoritarian statement made in reference to Marcos’s dictatorship? Or does Bona’s subversive action signify a feminist awakening? More unexpectedly, is it possible to extract a gay subtext from the film’s narrative-a reading suggested by French screenwriter Jacques Fieschi-that casts Bona as an alter ego for Brocka himself? For Capino, such divergent decodings are the result of a wealth of signifiers in Brocka’s work that attest to a Filipino film culture “engaged with the politics of its day” (xiii). The film’s crude realism and troubling scenes of domestic violence offer a starting point for Capino’s investigation of “inscriptions of politics and history” in Brocka’s melodramas made during the martial-law era of Ferdinand Marcos’s regime (1972–86).
Capino begins his fascinating Martial Law Melodrama: Lino Brocka’s Cinema Politics by describing how images from Bona have remained imprinted in his memory since childhood.
Balancing highly emotional scenes with a quasi-documentary depiction of decaying Manila streets, Brocka reconfigures film melodrama into a defiant political act. Bona watches her lover scream in agony as she carries out her vengeance with the same serenity with which she had formerly carried out his bidding. At the end of the film, after being told by Gardo that she should leave his home, Bona gives him one more bath-this time with boiling water. Illustrating the imbalance of their relationship, Bona bathes her lover every night, ensuring the water is always warm enough for his liking, even after he brings other women home for his sexual adventures. She dedicates her life to serving Gardo full-time, in spite of the many abuses to which he subjects her. Bona gives up the comfort of her middle-class home, leaving behind her family and boyfriend, to live with Gardo in a Manila slum. In Lino Brocka’s Bona (1980), Filipina star Nora Aunor plays the titular character, who grows infatuated with Gardo (Phillip Salvador), a B-movie actor and stuntman. From Film Quarterly, Spring 2020, Volume 73, Number 3
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