Insiang (1976)

TV-14.  First of all, when would this have been Rated TV-14?  Is it shown more on TV and that's why?  But the bigger thing is that this movie is not only incredibly sexual, but also is fundamentally about rape.  While none of this is shown on screen, that's what the movie is about.  There's also naked children on screen, but never in a sexual context.  Also, just for your Criterion Collection Bingo card, we get unadulterated footage of a slaughterhouse with bonus points that it has nothing to do with the story.

DIRECTOR: Lino Brocka

Today is going to be a stressful day and I'm really hoping that I can write a lot before anyone really talks to me.  I've jumped back into the Martin Scorsese's World Cinema Project boxes because it hurts me that I've posted about Box 1 and Box 3, but not Box 2.  The experience in these boxes is interesting because it is an offering of what other, underrepresented countries have created cinematically, but it's also through the lens of Martin Scorsese and the World Cinema Project.  For a movie like Insiang, it's both a blessing and a curse.

These movies tend to be...depressing?  I mean, it's not absolute.  The Criterion Collection as a whole, as obsessed as I am with Criterion, has a mood to it.  Often, these movies don't tend to be fun.  It's not an absolute thing.  You could rattle off a whole bunch of really fun movies in the box set and you would be right.  But when I'm exploring and going blind into these movies, they tend to be somber looks at the world.  In most of these movies, we tend to show the worst of humanity through the filter of sheer misery and depression. Insiang really lines up with that for about 90% of the movie.  I tend to watch Scorsese's introductions to these movies because, as per the purpose of the World Cinema Project, these are directors that have been ignored by the first world.  I haven't heard of Lino Brocka before.  I don't know much about Filipino cinema.  I wanted to at least get a handle of what went into making these movies.  (For those not in the know, these introductions are two minutes.  Often, it's just Scorsese explaining why this film was packed coupled with a one-line about the movie and some of the director's contributions to cinema.)

With Scorsese's introduction, I knew that this movie was going to be about sexual assault.  I didn't know how far it would go.  But I colored the movie through that lens.  I knew it was a Criterion film.  I thought, for sure, that the assault would happen in the first act.  (Spoiler: It doesn't.  It almost doesn't happen to later in the second act.) But I was watching the world, per usual, show the dregs of civilization and how people treat each other terribly. I  wanted to write that men treat women terribly --which this movie is definitely about. But this is really also about how women treat each other terribly.  Again, all we have is Insiang.  Insiang, as the protagonist (who oddly isn't featured for a lot of the first act), is almost sacrificial in nature. The movie starts off with three strong characters.  This trio is typical in these kinds of stories.  Three have influence over Insiang.  Tonya, Insiang's mother, is greedy, especially in terms of her sexuality.  She flaunts her insecurities of being with a much younger and ruthless man, Dado.  Dado is a sadist.  He is the rapist of the story.  He's a more silent Stanley Kowalski.  Then there's the frustrating Bebot.  Bebot is the earliest example in cinema that I can think of that shows the myth of the nice guy archetype.  He acts nice, but is potentially one of the grossest characters in the story.

The development of both Tonya and Dado are slight shortcuts in terms of characterization.  Tonya has one of those scenes where she kicks out family members over small financial troubles, stealing back the clothing gifted to her nieces.  I mean, you know what you need to know about Tonya from moment one.  There's a moment of misdirect, where we might have questioned how static of a character Tonya really is, but that's almost immediately taken back. Dado is even more of a shortcut.  Hulking and nearly mute, Dado has a heart tattoo that says "Dado" over his chest.  We get who Dado is pretty quick.  Again, there are moments where I thought that they were going to try to redeem Dado and I nearly turned off the film.  (I'm glad I didn't because the movie is almost entirely defined by its final fifteen minutes.) But Bebot is the character that I get most invested in.  Bebot is heroic by default for most of the movie.  He sucks.  Oh my goodness, does he suck.  But we don't know that going into the movie.  One of the major questions that the first acts asks is, "Does Bebot overcome his own insecurities to be the man that Insiang needs?"

That's not the question of the movie.  It's a complete mislead.  Ultimately, Insiang is a fascinating movie because it seems like it is going to be some low-hanging fruit.  We think it's going to be about misery the entire time and that Insiang is just going to become Tonya as she grows older.  Nope.  Not that at all.  Insiang almost becomes a commentary on other films that deal with rape.  It teases telling the same story.  It seems like Insiang is going to embrace the worst case scenario.  We know pretty quickly into the film that Bebot isn't going to become this grand hero.  But it really is about how it shouldn't always be the man's story in every case.  Bebot sucking is probably the most realistic version of what goes on in real life, given that he uses Insiang for sex instead of fighting Dado.  I'm going to go even further, stressing that Insiang gives him a reasonable --if not slightly challenging --option of getting married and moving out.  He then stresses that Insiang never trusts him.  She imbues him with trust and he instantly betrays that trust.

But that's why the third act works so well. It's not even the whole third act.  It's the last fifteen minutes, as I said earlier.  The movie really made me think about that natural cycle of misery and that hurt people hurt people.  But instead, we get this sweet revenge story.  I have to be honest.  When Insiang starts smiling at Dado, I really almost quit the film.  Honestly.  Okay, I told myself that I was going to quit the film, but I never do that.  I was just ready to write a scathing blog about the trope of the victim loving her rapist.  When it came down, in the final minutes, a story about how a woman uses her sexuality to destroy her enemies, coupled with the notion of how she refused to be a victim, despite a lifetime of being told that she was...yeah, that was good.  I know it was probably a run-on sentence, but I really wanted you to feel the exasperation of that moment.  I mean, the back of my brain tickled the notion that this could all be a revenge story on a grand scale.  But with so little time left, I didn't think that they could squeeze that in.

I don't know if I like the final beat though.  Again, the revenge story is pretty tightly packed in.  There's never really a wink to the camera that lets us in on the protagonist's plans.  But part of the real joy was the fact that Insiang's mother Tonya is equally culpable for all of the horrors that happened to her.  Now, the Catholic school teacher is all about forgiveness.  But I don't love that Insiang says that she loves her mother.  It's a bit that almost seems contrary to the message of the film as a whole.  Insiang is overlooked as an actual threat throughout the film.  She's the prize for people as opposed to showing any sense of agency or pride.  It seems like, to everyone else, Insiang is just Insiang, unthreatening and accepting.  When we discover that all of that is a bit of a show, it's a heck of a dismount.  But then saying that she still loves her mother, it's a bit of a Nerfed ending, slightly undoing the powerhouse of a hit at the end of a film.

All this being said, I don't know if I loved it or not.  I mean, the end makes it pretty great.  But I also know that this isn't necessarily a movie I could recommend to...anybody?  Part of it comes from the almost soap opera quality to the whole movie.  It's good.  It's not a soap opera.  But a lot of it seems a bit underbaked.  Either way, I enjoyed it a bit.