The title is a Biblical reference to the Book of Daniel 5:1-31, wherein the last Babylonian king Belshazzar holds a feast at which sacred vessels confiscated from Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem are used to drink wine and further profaned when the revelers toast to the gods of gold and silver, of bronze, iron, wood and stone. Suddenly, a mysterious hand appears and writes on the chamber wall "mene mene tekel upharsin", which defies interpretation until the prophet Daniel interprets it to read "you have been weighed and found wanting." This Biblical story is the source of the popular idiom "the writing on the wall" as a euphemism for impending doom that is so obvious only a fool would not see it coming. It also provides the origin for the similar expression "your days are numbered."
You Have Been Weighed and Found Wanting lays out its impending doom in the film's opening sequence: a sepia-saturated flashback wherein an albularyo (traditional/folk medicine practitioner) performs an abortion on Kuala (Lolita Rodriguez), as the baby's father Cesar (Eddie Garcia) restrains her and covers her mouth to silence her cries. An example of feticide and not pro-choice—Kuala having been clearly coerced—the sight of her aborted fetus drives Kuala insane. Cesar then abandons Kuala to her fate as the village's scabrous idiot as he persists as an incurable lecher.
When Neil Young caught a revival screening of Weighed and Found Wanting at the 2009 Viennale, he reported to The Auteurs that Brocka considered his commercially successful eighth feature his "first novel", which prompted Young to envision "the sprawling nineteenth century fictions of George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell when watching this humanistic exploration of small-town prejudice, one which covers pretty much every stratum of society while relating a melodramatic, almost soap-opera-like story of sexual hypocrisy, abortion, jealousy and young love. As usual with Brocka, happiness is elusive and short-lived, and to be a sensitive or sympathetic individual is to be doomed to misery and/or death. But while the ending is typically downbeat, Brocka does offer a glint or two of optimism—for which, given the starkly grim finales of most of his oeuvre, we must be grateful."
Both Vera's profile of Brocka and the program capsule are abbreviated from earlier versions that expand in intricate detail the role Weighed and Found Wanting had in establishing Brocka's career in the mid-'70s and his eventual influence on Philippine cinema. "Tinimbang," Vera wrote in his earlier review, "was like a rock flung through a plate-glass window; the film was a herald call, officially the first in what was to be called the '70s Golden Age of Philippine Cinema."
After having abandoned Kuala, Cesar becomes one of the richest men in his village and sires a son Junior (Christopher de Leon in his first role). At first, Junior takes pleasure in all the privileges provided by his family's social position—an opulent home, popularity, good looks, a girlfriend who's the prettiest girl in town (shades of Cybil Shephard!)—but, then his pleasure curdles. His father reveals himself as a lecherous philanderer, his mother a hectoring shrew, his girlfriend fools around with another boy and is summarily married off, and his friends prove to be louts. Junior's perspective shifts and he recognizes everyone around him as "ignoramuses, hypocrites, spiritual grotesques", except for the town's outcasts—deranged Kuala and the leprous Berto—who he befriends, despite his father's admonitions. The film ends, Vera synopsizes, "with Junior acting out the action described by the film's title—he stares at every town folk in the eye, judges them, and finds them all wanting"; a dramatic moment helped enormously by the broad canvas and large ensemble Brocka employed to create his melodramatic epic.
Vera contextualizes that Brocka was essentially telling his life's story, drawing from his memories of San Jose, Nueva Ecija, and of the people there. "Junior was Brocka—the sensitive young man, disillusioned with the status quo and yearning for something different, something more; he was also Milagros [Laurice Guillen], the politician's bastard (Brocka himself was the illegitimate child of a political figure). You might say that the secret behind Brocka's intensity, behind his close identification with the outcast and oppressed, was that he himself was an outcast—painful knowledge that would make him more open to the plight of others, to fellow outcasts in life."
This is especially apparent in the sideshow narrative of the effeminate teacher who makes unsuccessful passes at Junior and is shown prissily skirting puddles during a rain shower. This makes the young men laugh and—relating the image to Berto—Junior says it was funny to watch a man acting like a woman. Berto does not bite. Instead, he asks Junior if he would laugh at Kuala for her idiocy or himself for his leprosy? As these two outcasts have been pictured as two of the most decent people in the film, the effeminate homosexual is thereby aligned with decency. For 1974, this was an amazingly brave alignment on Brocka's part.
In broad, overly-assured strokes Kane Wheatley-Holder reduces the psychological complexity of Weighed and Found Wanting to a socio-political allegory of resistance: the common man against the Marcos regime. I, however, prefer the more nuanced insights offered by Richard Bolisay at his site Lilok Pelikula. Bolisay observes that Brocka's filmmaking was "driven by his force and brilliance as a political observer than as a political activist" and warns against erroneously boxing him "into a solely political filmmaker which he isn't. His films show many faces of politics, and not just the one that drives people into streets to protest." Differentiating even further, Bolisay writes: "Filmmakers are not just makers of film. They are also makers of political discussion. It is like saying writers just write, they don't think. Brocka … made films not only to depict the tumultuous years of the Marcos regime and its after effects but also to awaken the minds of the people by not just being political, but by being real and honest. The seventies and the eighties were the years of unrest, but not all films made during those decades were expressions of dissent."
Junior's story and his climactic act of judgment (resistance?) is not, however, what Vera finds to be the film's true point of interest. As type, Junior "is hardly original" and joins "a gallery of small-town youths who learn about disillusion and heartbreak." What's more, Vera characterizes Junior as "something of a self-righteous prig—de Leon plays him as if he's too good for the likes of his father and those hypocritical grannies. It's a superior stance too easily assumed; you feel he hasn't quite earned the right to do so." Vera criticizes de Leon's performance as "downright thin." No, the film's presiding power lies in "the intense yet simply told story of love found at the bottom of the world" between the town's most miserable inhabitants: the homeless lunatic Kuala and the leprous Berto, nearly lunatic himself in his loneliness. Vera considers that O'Hara may have written the best role for himself and mentions in his Senses of Cinema appreciation of Mario O'Hara: "In Brocka and O'Hara's treatment of the character, you see a rare (for Brocka's films) ambiguity—Berto in his loneliness and sexual hunger is a somewhat frightening presence; when he first looks at Kuala, it is with a predatory glint in his eye. We later learn of Berto's true nature—shy, sensitive (or rather, oversensitive), full of an affection for others that he doesn't dare express. It's a fascinating character, especially as Brocka had asked O'Hara to play him; O'Hara agreed, and does a magnificent job. Which is as it should be, because as people in the know put it, he was really playing himself." Vera concludes: "Rodriguez and O'Hara make the relationship that blossoms between them effortless, yet utterly real—Rodriguez as Kuala responding to Berto's attentions hungrily, even greedily (the way a child would); O'Hara as Berto suddenly finding himself functioning as guardian and father as well as lover. The couple are the most successful evocation of love in any of Brocka's films, I think, and by far the most moving."
Mario O'Hara and Lolita Rodriguez had worked together on an earlier Brocka film Stardoom (1971), which Vera describes as "a Jacobean melodrama (with great performances by Rodriguez as the backstage mother, and O'Hara as the unwanted son)", and later portrayed lovers again in Gumising Ka, Maruja (Awaken, Maruja, 1978), "Brocka's rare (and for the first half, well-made) gothic ghost story."
Vera likewise raises a provocative critique of Brocka, observing that the "intense identification he felt towards his characters is the foremost virtue of his storytelling; at the same time, [that] it was his biggest vice. If he had a tendency to like certain characters—to get under their skin and look through their eyes—he also had an equal tendency to shut others out—to condemn and deny them their full measure of understanding." He argues that Brocka has wasted the potential characterizations of Cesar and Milagros. After her seduction of Junior, Milagros simply vanishes from the film, Vera complains, "And you miss her; you want to know what happened to her, how she ultimately fared after her one-night stand with Junior." Eddie Garcia's Cesar "could have been a crucial role in the film, the correlative to de Leon's Junior—where Junior is a young innocent waking up to compassion, Cesar could have been an aged hedonist haunted by it, mirror images lit from different angles." These two characters "fall on the borderline that separates those who deserve Brocka's condemnation and those who deserve his compassion; they are either swept to one side of the border or forgotten, and the film's complexity suffers as a result."
03/15/10 UPDATE: Watching Lino Brocka's You Have Been Weighed and Found Wanting (1974) a second time projected and with an audience revealed a palpable discomfort with Brocka's melodramatic style (reminiscent of the overblown melodramatics of Sirk or Fassbinder). Though Dave Kehr noted at the New York Times that this "broadly popular cinema of sex and soap opera transformed itself into a vehicle for strong social commentary and a political force to be reckoned with" and further observed that "Brocka seems less interested in psychosexual conflict for its own sake than as a reflection of the inequalities and injustices at the base of the Philippine system", the SFIAAFF audience didn't seem to quite know how to take the film's histrionics.
Though writing about a separate Philippine film, Noel Vera's description of the audience reception applies equally here: "They were laughing throughout much of the film, but it wasn't easy, derisory laughter; if anything, it was a terse release of tension, the kind of laughter you hear from someone fully aware he should know better but feels nervous, nevertheless." This was especially apparent in the scene with the gay schoolteacher (YouTube segment 11, below), which elicited the loudest laughter. Knowing how this scene was a set-up for Junior's conversation with Berto in the next, I was amused by how the SFIAAFF audience became quiet and contrite once they realized that Brocka was chiding them for being complicit in ridiculing the effeminate gay man. This is a complicated dynamic, however, which raises a distinction between laughing at someone at their expense as opposed to laughing with someone in the sense of sharing a cultural in-joke. In the 35+ years that gay liberation has fought for its place at the table since Brocka filmed You Have Been Weighed and Found Wanting, it would be absurd to assert that an effeminate male no longer elicits laughter—as, conceivably, any gender reversal elicits laughter—but, arguably that laughter has shifted in degree away from cruel judgment to savvy bemusement or—to a certain extent—a kind of "you go, girl" identification? The audience reaction to these two hinged scenes underscores a certain timeliness to Brocka's film that otherwise might be perceived as "dated." The struggle for human dignity among the marginalized remains timeless.
On second viewing, I also noticed the manner in which Brocka juxtaposed Catholic iconography—primarily images of Jesus—as backdrops against which the hypocrisy of his characters becomes silhouetted. This is especially noticeable in the film's opening flashback where Cesar reacts to Kuala's aborted fetus. He's positioned in front of a painting of the compassionate heart of Jesus. One visually absorbs Brocka's criticism of patriarchal veracity. Further, there's a distinct alignment of the film's narrative trajectory with the Catholic ritual calendar, particularly apparent with Kuala's baby being born during the Christmas season.
You Have Been Weighed and Found Wanting is available on Netflix. Otherwise, it's available on YouTube in subtitled segments: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, and 16.
03/16/10 UPDATE: Noel Vera and I have been exchanging comments on Facebook regarding Brocka and this film. He's synopsized our conversation at his site Critic After Dark. Essentially—based upon Berto's query to Kuala if that was her "real name"—I asked Vera if Kuala's name had a hidden meaning? He came up with this: "Might add that looking around, the name 'Kuala' might have some significance, other than being an unusual name for a Filipina, means in both Malay and Indonesian 'estuary,' that muddy region of a river where fresh water merges with salt water. Certainly Kuala in the film might be considered by the men in town 'muddy' or unclean goods, and that she represents a mix of innocent and hedonist (a hedonist rendered innocent by insanity), age and youth, mother and whore."
That's a fascinating riff, whether O'Hara/Brocka meant it or not. Unaware of linguistic demographics in the Philippines, it makes me further wonder if a Malay/Indonesian name for the character of Kuala would further set her apart and characterize her as an outsider? I wonder how integrated the Malay/Indonesian languages are in Philippine culture?
About Elly (Iran dir. Asghar Farhadi)—Director Farhadi deservedly won Best Director prize at 2009's Berlin Film Festival for this complex psychological thriller about a group of young, upper-middle class Tehranis on holiday at the Caspian Sea. After a harrowing, near-tragic event, Elly, a teacher and interloper in the group who's been set up for some uninvited matchmaking, goes and disappears. The film becomes not so much "about" Elly, but about the deceptive, flawed personages who are left to deal with the aftermath of her disappearance. This was Iran's 2009 Oscar submission, and it's a glimpse into an Iranian social milieu we rarely see, at least in films which get exported. My favorite Iranian film since 2005's Iron Island. (Seen at the 2010 Palm Springs International Film Festival.)
City of Life and Death (China dir. Lu Chuan)—Lu spent five years making this stunning masterpiece about the brutal 1937 siege of Nanking by Japanese occupation forces. Brilliantly walking the line between massive widescreen epic (cast of thousands, impressive sets, sweeping score) and intimate art film (B&W, hand-held camera), the film is constructed as a series of tangentially connected set pieces. A group of resistance fighters battle the enemy while perched atop bombed-out buildings. P.O.W.s are marched along atrocity-strewn roads en route to mass execution. In the film's central story, a Chinese collaborator, a German businessman (real-life figure John Rabe) and a young schoolteacher struggle with increasing desperation to maintain the integrity of the city's International Safety Zone, with its 300,000 refugees. Perhaps most surprising is the film's broadminded portrait of a conflicted Japanese sergeant and his relationship with a comfort woman. This month's scheduled U.S. theatrical release of City of Life and Death has been indefinitely postponed while distributor National Geographic Entertainment "negotiates" with the Chinese Film Board. Best to see it at SFIAAFF—this is one film that demands a big-screen experience. And be sure to check out the schedule changes which affect the film.
The Housemaid (South Korea dir. Kim Ki-young)—For 2010's Out of the Vaults selection, SFIAAFF has chosen this disturbing 1960 doozy which has been restored by Martin Scorsese's World Cinema Foundation and the Korean Film Archive. Rat poison, abortion, blackmail, suicide, marital infidelity, murder and a caged squirrel all figure into this transgressive, anti-consumerist cautionary tale of a music teacher and the treacherous live-in maid who shoehorns her way into his home. From the dripping opening titles, to the nerve-racking score and sound design, to Kim's determined, constantly roaming camera, The Housemaid is an unsettling experience that should be enormous fun to watch with a crowd at the Castro Theater. (Seen on streaming video at The Auteurs.)
Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest,Part 4 & Part 5 (China dir. Yang Fudong)—Anyone who's curious what contemporary avant-garde Chinese cinema might look like won't want to miss this. And while I normally have a low threshold for ponderous artiness, I found myself engaged throughout. SFIAAFF will be screening two of the piece's five parts with separate admissions. While they're mostly self-contained, there are overlapping motifs and stylistic similarities—both were shot in B&W with zero dialogue and feature studied compositions, slow and purposeful camera movements, and full frontal nudity. Part 4 is set amidst a seaside community of kelp harvesters and dried cuttlefish cultivators. Part 5 takes place in a modern day Shanghai seemingly overshadowed by nostalgia for the city's opulent past of cafes, bathhouses and rooftop baseball (?!?). A coterie of business-dressed men and women, presumably the titular seven intellectuals, lug suitcases across both sea and city landscapes. Of the two parts, I'd probably recommend the more varied and playful Part 5.
The Forbidden Door (Indonesia dir. Joko Anwar)—Gambir is a successful sculptor of pregnant women who lives a chic lifestyle. He also suffers from erectile dysfunction and has a beautiful wife with her own Forbidden Door in their home. He becomes obsessed with a Lynchian private club where patrons watch unspeakable things being done to people on live TV, including an abused boy who keeps sending him messages for help. These are the key elements of this ultra-stylized metaphysical thriller from Indonesia, which reaches its apotheosis with a Christmas dinner scene worthy of Grand Guignol. Fortunately there's sufficient substance to warrant all that style, at least until the film's rather creaky denouement.
Talentime (Malaysia dir. Yasmin Ahmad)—In her final film (the talented filmmaker passed away last year at age 51), Yasmin Ahmad explores themes that are recurrent in all her works, namely love and loss and the need for tolerance in a multi-cultural/racial/religious society like Malaysia. The story focuses on three students who are finalists in a high school talent competition, each possessing their own set of familial tribulations. The film has a bittersweet, corny charm to it, but is hampered by some overly broad supporting characters, mawkish songs, abrupt editing and an overabundance of Debussy's "Clair de lune."
Like You Know It All (South Korea dir. Hong Sang-soo)—With Hong you either admire his persistence of vision or become really irritated/bored over how he essentially makes the same film over and over again. I'm pretty much in the second camp, but am still interested enough in how he reworks his themes to jump ship just yet. His latest contains all the signature Hong moves—an immature protagonist who's approaching middle-age and has a career in the arts, a bifurcated story structure, a trip away from home and lots of public drinking that leads to fighting or fucking or both. Hong's avatar this time out is an art-film director. In the first half he juries an out-of-town festival (falling asleep during films) and reconnects with an old friend. (I believe this section contains Hong's first dream sequence!) The second half finds him guest-lecturing at an out-of-town university and reconnecting with an old mentor. In both cases he leaves behind a wake of petty resentments and pissed-off people. Many Hong fans are considering this film one of his best.
Dear Lemon Lima, (USA dir. Suzi Yoonessi)—This debut feature about a half Yup'ik Eskimo girl coming to terms with her heritage plays like a sweet and snarky after-school special. Thirteen-year-old Vanessa is the token minority student at a well-to-do school in Fairbanks, Alaska. She's appointed a team captain for the school's annual Snowstorm Survivor Competition, and enlists fellow nerds to do battle against her self-obsessed ex-boyfriend. Some fine performances, worthy intentions and snazzy visuals are nearly enough to overshadow the film's mega-cuteness and strained quirkiness. A shocking tragedy just before the final act nearly capsizes the whole enterprise.
Prince of Tears (Taiwan/Hong Kong dir. Yonfan)—This overwrought, yet stodgy tale of passion and betrayal during the communist witch hunts of 1950s Taiwan was Hong Kong's Oscar submission for 2009. It's based on director Yonfan's memories of growing up in that era, during which time he must have witnessed lots of impossibly gorgeous women and men languorously exhaling cigarette smoke. Come for the history lesson, stay for the truly sumptuous art direction (also by Yonfan). (Seen at the 2010 Palm Springs International Film Festival.)
The People I've Slept With (USA dir. Quentin Lee)—Nothing gives me less pleasure than to slag a festival's Centerpiece Film, but man, this was no fun at all. Putting a broad, Asian-American spin on the sex comedy genre, we watch as a self-avowed slut (Karin Anna Cheung) discovers she's pregnant and sets off on a laborious mission to find the father with the help of her gay best friend. One candidate turns out to be Mr. Right (Archie Kao), and she (cluelessly? maliciously?) withholds the fact of his dubious paternity until seconds before they say their wedding vows. Ha ha ha. On the plus side, Cheung and Kao have an amazing chemistry in their scenes together, which might have worked wonders in a different movie. And I did crack up at a line where Cheung bemoans finding yet another white pubic hair.
Before finding words to describe my pleasure in viewing my first Lino Brocka film You Have Been Weighed and Found Wanting (1974), I'd like to render a few comments on the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival (SFIAAFF) and this year's focus on Filipino and Filipino American Cinema. When Festival Director Chi-hui Yang first mentioned to me that the festival hoped to build connections with the Bay Area's Filipino American community by "bringing them into the festival", I was impressed with CAAM's strategic outreach to the second largest community in the Bay Area after the Chinese; but, I was also slightly confused because I had long imagined the Filipino community as being more of a Latino community by way of shared colonial histories and a Catholic substratum. In retrospect, I realized this understanding had been shaped by a 1994 Mexican Museum exhibit "Paraiso Abierto a Todos" curated by Enrique Chagoya, and featuring the work of Philippine artist Manuel Ocampo.
I phoned my friend Tere Romo, former curator for The Mexican Museum, and asked her what she recalled of that exhibit. She remembered that the Manuel Ocampo retrospective was already in the works when she arrived on the scene and—though she did facilitate it—it had largely been set into motion by curator Enrique Chagoya and fellow artist Rupert Garcia, who were both enthusiastic about the political dimension of Ocampo's work; a dimension they felt affirmed a shared identity between Mexicans, Mexican Americans, Chicanos and Filipinos.
I asked Tere if it had been the exhibition's intention to diversify the Mexican, Mexican American and Chicano community by focusing on a Filipino artist? Romo confirmed that Chagoya and Garcia approached the Mexican Museum to mount an exhibition of Ocampo's work simply because they loved his work and wanted to show it; but, Tere saw it as the perfect opportunity—not only to extend the community to draw in another audience for the sake of drawing in another audience—but, more, to enunciate linkages already present historically, socially and culturally. She accomplished this by setting up a complementary exhibit in the orientation gallery next to Ocampo's retrospective. She drew pieces from the Mexican Museum's collection that showed the actual influences via the Manila galleon trade in Mexican art. For example, she looked at the Chinese influence on Mexican laquerware and floral rebozos. The Museum's collection even had a Filipino buto—a statue of a saint—which confirmed a direct reference. These trade items manifested during the time period when Mexico was—in a sense—the viceroy for the Philippines. Trade passed through Acapulco, was transported across Mexico to Vera Cruz, then transferred to Spain. In the process, handlers—often artists themselves—influenced by the work from China and Japan, adapted the imagery.
Having now experienced the Filipino community approached by both the Mexican Museum and the Center for Asian American Media (CAAM), I can more fully appreciate what Dina Iordanova has proposed in her contextual essay "Mediating Diaspora", published in Film Festival Yearbook 2: Film Festivals and Imagined Communities (2010:12-44).
The concept of "imagined communities" comes from Benedict Anderson's 1983 study Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, wherein Anderson proposed "an imagined political community" as a definition for "nation". Iordanova found this applicable to film festival communities. She writes: "The festivals that we zoom in on here are all linked in some way to the concept of the nation as 'imagined', precisely as Anderson conceives it, and, in most cases, to 'diaspora' as well. Members of the community probably will never meet face-to-face; however, they may have shared interests or identity as part of the same group." Film festivals, however, instigate community by being a live event that convenes "only in one place at a time, usually at regular intervals as yearly events. For the festival to happen, organizers and audiences must come face-to-face in exactly the same place at exactly the same time. They practically suspend the 'imagined' element of the community by substituting it with a very real one that is, nonetheless, configured around the same axis of imagination that drives the ideas of nation and nationalism. There is a double-step process when transnationally-positioned film festivals are involved. On the one hand, audiences and programmers involved with the festival are invited to experience themselves, by an undisguised act of imagination, as an extension of a community that is 'headquartered' somewhere else but to which they, by virtue of their very attendance at the festival, now relate to through a mental image of affinity and through the act of their very real togetherness. Yet, a secondary act of imagination is implied as well, linked to the need to experience a certain degree of identification with imaginary, fictional characters whose stories are told in the films projected at the festival. In the 'live' space of the festival, organizers and audiences form a community, an actual one, that congregates face-to-face for the purpose of fostering an 'imagined community' that comes live in the act of watching a film and imagining distant human beings becoming part of one's own experiences. Thus, the festival's set-up extends an invitation to engage in what is essentially a political act of imagined belonging and to continue the nation building process that is pre-supposed by extending it to the diaspora and beyond." (2010:12-13, emphasis added.) This concept of festival attendance as "a political act of imagined belonging" speaks to me on many different levels.
SFIAAFF's focus on Filipino Cinema finds precedent—according to Variety reporter Christopher Alford—in a comparably-mounted program at the 2006 Hawaii International Film Festival whose "generalist approach of the festival," Iordanova observes, "cuts across ethnic divides and aims to draw large crowds of diverse backgrounds." In a way, Iordanova adds, festivals such as the Hawaii International and SFIAAFF "work with a political vision of a certain imagined community and target a diasporic audience that is intrinsically diverse." (2010:24)
Here, Iordanova expands her thesis to juxtapose diaspora with "the global city". She writes: "Within multicultural societies, film festivals related to diasporas and 'imagined communities' all happen at the periphery of the mainstream public sphere." Though conceding that some skeptics criticize that such ethno-specific film festivals not only remain isolated from each other but contribute to "the profound fragmentation of an ideally public sphere", Iordanova balances with an alternate viewpoint that celebrates multicultural hybridization, "undoing diaspora in favor of the global city concept." In other words, though "the existence of various 'imagined communities' within the multicultural sphere may lead to fragmentation, there are also processes of hybridization and integration, of 'situated' yet mobile identities that come about as a result of [what Dr. Avtar Brah (1996:1, 187) has termed] 'the honing of diaspora'." (2010:33) Mobile identity is an apt term, especially in light of SFIAAFF's "Filipino Or Not?" phone game app.
All of this is to suggest that I no longer see SFIAAFF as a film festival catering to diasporic identities as much as a festival committed to celebrating its hybrid citizenry in a global city. Their focus on Filipino cinema confirms as much and allows for the Latino community to share equally in solidarity.
Here I will reiterate Michael Hawley's consummate overview of the Filipino sidebar: "One of the strands running through 2010's festival is a Focus on Filipino and Filipino American Cinema, the highlight of which is a long overdue tribute to Lino Brocka. Openly gay and often at odds with Ferdinand Marcos' regime, Brocka directed 60-plus films between 1970 and his death in 1991, most of them melodramas with a social/political bent. To the best of my knowledge, with the exception of one-off screenings of 1988's Macho Dancer (for better or worse, his best known film in the U.S.), the Bay Area hasn't seen a Brocka film since the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF) showed Dirty Affair in 1992. (And if memory serves, the screening I attended was cancelled after the film broke midway through). Even the venerable Pacific Film Archive lists only one Brocka screening in its entire online archive; again the 1992 SFIFF presentation of Dirty Affair.
"The SFIAAFF mini-retrospective consists of only four films, but they seem very well chosen. Yang explained that SFIAAFF wanted to program more, but prints were extremely hard to acquire. 1975's Manila in the Claws of Neon is a neo-noir about a country boy in the mean city, which I first saw at the 1980 SFIFF under the title Manila in the Claws of Darkness. (Oddly, the film is a.k.a. Manila in the Claws of Light). SFIFF also screened Brocka's mother-from-hell masterpiece Insiang in 1984, but I missed it. Bayan Ko is the film that got Brocka's Filipino citizenship revoked, and a print had to be smuggled out of the county for its competition screening at Cannes in 1984. The fourth selection is 1974's You Have Been Weighed and Found Wanting (what a title!). All four films will be screened in 16mm or 35mm prints.
"The rest of SFIAAFF's Focus on Filipino and Filipino American Cinema can be found scattered throughout the line-up. "Classic Filipino American Shorts" is, well, exactly that. From this year's Documentary Competition comes Ninoy Aquino & the Rise of People Power, about the revolutionary leader, political prisoner, exile and martyr to the cause of Philippine democracy. Manilatown is in the Heart—Time Travel with Al Robles is part of the CAAM@30 Documentary Showcase and the latest from director Curtis Choy (The Fall of the I-Hotel). From the Narrative Competition we have the world premiere of Gerry Balasta's The Mountain Thief, a docudrama about one family's struggle to live amidst a garbage dumpsite. And finally, the one I'm most looking forward to, Raya Martin's hyper-stylized allegory of early 20th century American colonialism, Independencia."
I also replicate my capsule review of Independencia from the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival:
Listening expectantly in the dark is Miguel (Sid Lucero), the son in Raya Martin's lustrous Independencia who—crouched still with vigilant eyes—hears the sounds of war approaching within a raging storm that ravishes the Philippine rain forest. The wet foliage—as Joni Mitchell phrases it—"looks like slick black cellophane" and as if to emphasize the film's irreality, Martin purposely employs theatrical devices and fabulist artificiality to emphasize not only the history of his country, but the history of his country's cinema. Martin describes Independencia as "an intimist film in the woods."
Patrons of the Pacific Film Archive in the past academic year will undoubtedly recognize Joe Garrity as the charmingly droll box office cashier who now and again ushers the auditorium as well. I keep recommending that he simply refer to himself as an "ushier" but Joe resists; sensitive—I suspect—to accusations of not knowing how to spell.
In the social weave of Bay Area film culture, Joe has had an intriguing background for one so young. He's spent time in Chile immersing himself in the Spanish language, interned for Saturday Night Live, and administers his own YouTube Channel where he showcases the short films that he and his twin brother Phil have created. Here are three clever examples of how they've utilized their twinship to comic effect.
In Doublemint, Joe and Phil Garrity mash commercial advertisement with action genre to expose chewing gum as a potential gateway drug.
In Twinversion, the Garrity brothers do their bit to battle the "twinjustice" of being misidentified and rehearse a job interview with Alice's ("Who are you?") Caterpillar. How they decided who should part their hair where invites a provocative investigation. Personally, I think their moustaches set them apart, don't you? Joe's could be licked off by a cat tongue and Phil's invites visions of megalomaniacal fascism.
In Bill and Dave, the Garrity Brothers go twin squared and imagine themselves as offscreen infants while channeling their twin father and uncle.
All three shorts have been written and directed by Joe Garrity, whose B&W 16mm short Ferris Wheel on Fire—a childhood memory of an amusement park—will be included in "Fleshed Out: Films by UC Berkeley Students", PFA's annual showcase of campus talent screening on Thursday, March 11, 7:30PM, and curated by UC Berkeley students Meaghan Curran, Sophie Raskin, Max Siegel, Johnny Starks, and Celeste Vasquez, as part of an internship offered by UC Berkeley's Film Studies Department and PFA, under the guidance of Kathy Geritz, with the assistance of Jonathan L. Knapp. Presented with support from the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Endowment.
"Art isn't easy / every minor detail is a major decision / have to keep things in scale / have to hold to your vision."—Stephen Sondheim
"Vision" is one of those double-edged properties—much like a looking glass—that, at first, promises pleasure for reflecting back something new to the spectator, but which—as is often the case in our fickle and vain consumerist society—eventually offers reflections all too familiar and, thus, undesirable and (dare I say?) unattractive. It's way too easy to demand that Vincent Van Gogh paint us another "Starry Night" rather than face the reflection of our unbridled consumerist desire. In other words, it's far too easy to blame an artist for our dissatisfied appetites. And when it comes to cogent criticism, the effort required to distinguish one from the other is a plummet down the rabbit hole indeed.
Ironically enough, criticism based on consumerist dissatisfaction is just this side of criticism based on a nostalgic adherence to source materials—in this case Lewis Carroll's beloved Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Alice's Adventures Through the Looking Glass—and one might even consider these two poles of criticism to bear the polarized countenance of Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum. So far, what I'm hearing in response to Tim Burton's inflection of the Alice story is the sibling tussle between those two perspectives; elbows to the ribs and all. Perhaps much of this tussle could have been avoided had Burton elected to entitle his project Alice in Underland?—which, as far as I'm concerned, would have worked much better, been more exact, and dissolved many an expectation, evening the playing field.
While Twitch teammate Jim Tudor acknowledges that Tim Burton is "one of the pre-eminent visual stylists in the world of filmmaking", he's quick to side with commercial interests to complain that Burton "has generally had nothing new to say since his earliest, most triumphant works" and that Burton's Alice is a "shockingly conventional tale—a Campbellian hero's journey." As a student of Joseph Campbell's who has watched his influence ebb and flow over the decades, it no longer surprises me when the monomyth is reduced to the "conventional" instead of being recognized appropriately as the source font of cultural inflection for millennia. Such unbridled ennui suffered by so many young critics—wanting something perpetually new from our beleaguered visionaries—seems to forget what Alice learned in Wonderland: "The hurrier I go, the behinder I get." That's a sage warning. In the race for new style, new product, new vision, do we forget to encourage the few visionaries we have? Mileage varies, of course, even when moving way too fast. And hip dismissal such as College Humor's caricature of "Tim Burton's Secret Formula" (via our friends at /Film)—undeniably truthful as far as the truth of caricature warrants and eliciting the expected guffaw—does little in my estimation other than to momentarily supplant genuine vision with kneejerk insight. Granted, kneejerk insight satisfies low attention spans than—here's the word again—deep reflection requires.
As a good friend once told me, "The silent mirror forfeits" and, therefore, in any narrative involving a looking glass, one hopes that the mirror will speak back and that self-reflection will engage how one imagines their identity and how they keep that imagined identity in scale. For me this has long been the presiding lesson of the Lewis Carroll stories: imagination and scale. And—contrary to all the complaints that Burton has drifted too far from the original material—I find he has in fact reinvigorated Carroll's most salient themes, especially through his visual design.
Keeping an imagined identity in scale is the selfsame challenge that presents itself when such beloved literary works as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass are adapted—i.e., imagined—for the big screen. It is, afterall, a difficult transition from a little book to a big screen. Industrial compromise requires nibbling first on this and sipping next on that to even make it through the door. In my humble opinion, Tim Burton has imagined a wondrous world playful with scale and expressed it in such a way that it applies to the awkward process by which a young person discovers a confidence that fits (give and take some shrinkage) for them. His Alice in Wonderland is as much a "just-so" story as it is one about "muchness." For those who criticize that he has lost his touch, for crying out loud, go find another visionary and enjoy them for one or two films before your critical ennui sets in and—while you're at it—why not question why your ennui keeps rearing its weary head? For all his obvious failings of repetition (one could also see them as creative reiterations), Burton's works of art remain some of my most anticipated, and the Hollywood landscape would be rendered far more anemic should he be discouraged from expressing his vision because fans want him to make another Nightmare Before Christmas.
Since the silent 1903 filmic adaptation of Alice in Wonderland—currently available for viewing courtesy of BFI—adherence to John Tenniel's illustrations has been a near given and the rule by which adaptations have been evaluated. The popular imaginary has a dear affection for these visualizations, which—again—concern scale, not the least being physical growth. Should Alice be a little blonde-haired girl in a blue dress or can she be—as Burton sees her—a young woman in a blue dress? Reams have been written—and it is widely well-known—that Alice Liddell, Carroll's inspiration, actually had dark hair and a short fringe so from the get-go there has been a wrestling within the popular imaginary of not only how this girl should look like but who she really is. That, after all, is the informing question posed by our hookah-smoking caterpillar. And in Burton's version, the Dormouse's doubt darkens Alice's presence in Underland.
So setting aside all we want from Tim Burton, I'd like to take a look at what he's given us. Tim Burton's achievement in his vision of Alice in Wonderland is to situate self-inquiry against social expectation. His is one of those important tales that warn against the false marriage and that promise a young woman that she can become herself all on her own and without the hindrance of the male. Jim Tudor is quick to reduce this to "a typically anachronistic female movie heroine", which begs a gendered argument against all those typically anachronistic male movie heroes that fanboys never seem to question. I concur more with guest Twitch contributor Mike Sizemore's quite fair observation: "It's also refreshing to see a female lead have so much fun in an adventure while reminding Alice's target audience that doing six impossible things before breakfast is something to be held onto no matter how old you are."
More pertinently, I would argue that like most fairy tales, the Carroll books are not really children's literature and have always been darkly psychological books intended for adults and—as psychology is, in my estimation, organic and evolutionary, anchored in the body—it only stands to follow that the psychological strength of a story will adapt to the zeitgeist of the time. Now some people don't like this. They prefer that a story stay anchored in a certain time and will, let's say, complain that Burton has sexualized a children's story—and that's all very fine and good for unapologetic nostalgists—but, it doesn't strike me that this is what Burton wanted when he re-imagined the story of Alice and—true to his own vision—he has retold the story for our time, for better or worse (and, in this case, admittedly both). The fact that there is an ongoing adjustment throughout the film—a constant struggle to find the right size—speaks I think to the indeterminacy and insecurity of any given time, especially our own.
There are dangers of conflation in the script; but, these dangers have been around since the story first began to be imagined. Some of those conflations have inspired irritation for generations—most notably, the conflation of the Queen of Hearts with the Red Queen—but, such conflations become scriptural strategies that deal not only with the compression of narrative time but narrative image. Conflation and compression, incidentally, are merely different ways of being different sizes. If there is any conflation I object to in Burton's reconfiguration of the Alice tale, it's the worrisome blend of Alice with an armored Joan of Arc. I somewhat understand why Burton stretched this battle for independence towards an image of chivalric militancy against a dragon, even as I concur with Roger Ebert that audiences today require filmmakers to end otherwise involving narratives with "routine and boring action." Ebert asks: "Why does Alice in Wonderland have to end with an action sequence? Characters not rich enough? Story run out? Little minds, jazzed by sugar from the candy counter, might get too worked up without it? Or is it that executives, not trusting their artists and timid in the face of real stories, demand an action climax as insurance? Insurance of what? That the story will have a beginning and a middle but nothing so tedious as an ending?" In my estimation, that's cogent criticism. Fanboys, question your appetite for action and how it hinders vision.
For all these grumpy critics who don't like what Tim Burton has imagined with this story, perhaps they need to nibble on—or sip from—something that will shrink their large heads to a proper scale of imagination? Failures of imagination have more to do with being unable or unwilling to suspend disbelief: the most time-honored of spectatorial requirements. Merely buying a ticket doesn't do it. It isn't that a director is responsible for making a spectator suspend disbelief; that has to be allowed from the spectator himself. And if you're going to be hugging a book too hard or holding on to a desired visualization too intensely, you might not see the mordant and hallucinatory wonder laid out before you, which deserves due respect.
Finally, in terms of characterizations, Mia Wasikowska bears the pale countenance of a young girl turning into a young woman, perhaps forced to by the social demands being placed on her. Her paleness becomes a visual accent to the disturbed colors of Underland. Along with his concern that Alice desperately needs a Wonderland nap, Jim Tudor writes intriguingly about his concern that such pallor merely guises Burton's penchant for cinematic alter-egos. However, truth is, this is a visual element present since Tenniel's illustrations, which even Ebert admits were alarming. "Why," he wondered as a young boy, "did Alice have such deep, dark eye sockets?" Shall we levy a complaint against Lewis Carrol for writing such obvious pallid alter-egos as well? Or is it time to wonder what Alice's exhausted countenance suggests?
Johnny Depp—with customary flair—has become the Mad Hatter and invested a tone of self-doubt that complicates his portrayal with the anguish of someone who is aware of—but has no control over—encroaching madness. Once again I concur with Mike Sizemore: "Traumatized and suffering from split personalities, it's a nice touch that in his few coherent moments he seems aware that he's gone insane allowing Depp to briefly add a little humanity to the character." Contrary to Twitch teammate James Marsh's harsh assessment, this is the first time I've ever felt anything for the character of the Mad Hatter other than bemusement and that's totally due to Depp's pitch-perfect performance. Further, I like that Depp is not immediately recognizable under his costuming and makeup effects. He looks more like Elijah Wood than himself. I will concede, however, that the dance is silly and distracting, but then so is our zeitgeist.
Helena Bonham Carter's grotesque Red Queen hazards a one-note performance; but, then, this suits the character's megalomania. I didn't expect much range from such a petty tyrant. As Knave, Crispin Glover comes across cruel and irreal. The weakest performance, by far—and here I wholeheartedly disagree with James Marsh—was Anne Hathaway as the White Queen. Glenda, she ain't, though she flits around like she's supposed to be. Wrong story, Anne! The other actors, who are primarily voice actors—Alan Rickman, Stephen Fry, Michael Sheen, Timothy Spall and Christopher Lee—all do admirable jobs disguising their British celebrities in enlivened portrayals.
I do hold valid Jim Tudor's complaint regarding the eleventh hour shift to 3D; but, again, see this as a consequence of consumer appetites. Studios are struggling to keep moviegoers coming to the theaters and 3D remains an effective lure. I actually intend—in sheer deference to Kurt Halfyard—to watch Alice in Wonderland again, in 2D, more because I find that 3D glasses mute color and I want to see Burton's palette in full array.
In conclusion, I would say, "Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!" In other words, beware critics, and see the film for yourself. It may not be your cup of tea, but at least you can say a chair was found for you at the tea party.
Of the five documentaries I previewed on DVD screener for this year's San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival (SFIAAFF), my favorite is one doc-purists might disavow. Indeed, when Variety reviewed Uruphong Raksasad's Agrarian Utopia last year they tagged it a narrative feature, while SFIAAFF is showing it under their Documentary Showcase banner. Whatever. Lyrical, advocative and exquisitely shot, this portrait of rice farmers in Northern Thailand shouldn't be missed.
Scenes of rice planting and harvesting are blended with activities like beehive foraging, mushroom cultivation and snake hunting—extracurricular necessities for these farmers who are essentially hired laborers drowning in debt. Raksasad, who is originally from this area, acts as his own cinematographer and what he captures is unforgettable—men hand-threshing rice stalks by the light of a kerosene lamp, time-lapsed electrical storms zooming over verdant paddies, the horseplay of children, the daunting task of training a water buffalo. His "characters" appear unconscious of the camera's presence, making us privy to intimate conversations that frequently revolve around fiscal struggles (and which frequently take place during the acts of cooking and eating). The film is bookended with political rallies that place the farmers' plight in the context of recent upheavals in Thai society. If I have one quibble with Raksasad's film, it's that women's voices are largely absent.
Two other worthwhile SFIAAFF docs fit a more traditional mold, and both concern a Japanese American male with life-changing ties to the U.S. military. Eight years in the army qualified Richard Aoki to become Field Marshall (and an early arms supplier) for the Black Panther Party. Who would have guessed that the iconic marching, drilling and chanting of the Panthers was orchestrated by a self-described "baddest Oriental to come out of West Oakland."
Directors Mike Cheng and Ben Wang filmed Aoki for the last five years of his life and spin a captivating narrative with archival materials, interviews and speeches. Born in San Leandro in 1938, Aoki spent part of his childhood in Topaz Relocation Camp, after which his family moved to Oakland. Following his army stint, he enrolled in Merritt College where he met Panther founders Huey Newton and Bobby Seale (the latter appears extensively in this film, along with Panthers communications secretary Kathleen Cleaver). In addition to the Panthers, Aoki was involved in the Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA) and more notoriously, the Third World Liberation Front, which instigated the largest student strike in U.C. Berkeley history. He would end up spending most of his life in academia, while remaining a staunch and greatly admired activist. Curiously, the film makes little mention of Aoki's life outside his activism.
In 2006, Lt. Ehren Watada became the first commissioned officer in the U.S. military to refuse deployment to Iraq. In her incredibly moving new film Lt. Watada, Oscar®-winning director Freida Lee Mock (Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision) looks at this brave, thoughtful young man and the journey his refusal to be "part of something deeply illegal and immoral" took him on. After graduating magna cum laude with a business degree in 2003, this non-pacifist Eagle Scout, mindful of 9/11, joined the army with a desire to protect his country. In 2006, however, after having researched our reasons for invading Iraq, he decided that deployment there would be a violation of his military oath. Watada offered to resign and twice offered to fight in Afghanistan. The army refused. They offered him a cushy, non-combative job in Iraq, which Watada refused. Mock's film expertly lays out what happened next, detailing three years of court martial limbo during which time Watada continued to speak out and dig his hole deeper. Lt. Watada is part of a SFIAAFF spotlight on Frieda Lee Mock, and after the festival's only screening of the film on March 14, the director will take part in an on-stage interview.
Another SFIAAFF documentary by an Oscar®-winning filmmaker is the North American Premiere of A Moment in Time by Ruby Yang (The Blood of Yingzhao District). Her film looks at the phenomenon of American Chinatown movie theaters—particularly here in San Francisco—and the role those theaters and the films they screened played in the Chinese community. From melodramas that made Chinatown matrons weep, to the kung-fu pics which established new models of Asian masculinity (and whose themes of loyalty and revenge carried over into Chinatown gang life), these films served as a link to the homeland and were a reflection of community not found in Hollywood films.
San Francisco's Chinatown has had as many as five theaters operating simultaneously and A Moment in Time profiles several, including the Grandview (which had its own film studio) and the Great Star (which if memory serves, is where I saw my first Jackie Chan flick, Operation Condor 2: The Armour of the Gods.) At times this doc overreaches by attempting to provide an entire history of Chinese cinema and consequently loses focus. There are also some strange digressions, like the young woman who praises her current boyfriend for the soy and oyster sauces in his cupboard, while bemoaning the ex who had ketchup and baked beans in his. But overall, it's a satisfying look at a bygone era. By 2000 there wasn't a single remaining Chinatown theater anywhere in the U.S. A Moment in Time will screen with Eric Lin's short, Music Palace, which looks at New York City's final Chinatown movie theater.
Sports documentaries are about as far outside my interest zone as you can get, but I checked out Brigitte Weich's Hana, dul, sed… for that rare glimpse of life in North Korea. The film's first half traces the ascendancy of its women's soccer team—culminating in a 2003 Asia Cup win—with profiles of four players and lots and lots of requisite training and game footage. (They get revved-up for a U.S. match by visiting the country's Anti-American Museum). After losing a 2004 Olympics qualifying match to Japan, all four women are forced into retirement. That's when the film gets interesting, as we watch them deal with life as ex-sports stars. While hardly a portrayal of "average" North Koreans (they get to keep their nice state-given Pyongyang apartments and get extra food rations as "Players of the People"), we get to know them and experience the world from their POV: the wide boulevards devoid of auto traffic, the palatial subway stations, a beauty parlor visit, an outing to the National Zoo with its caged dogs and kitty cats, couples rowboating on the Taedong River and a bounty of Socialist Realist poster art (most of it helpfully translated). This film is definitely worth a look.
"What a title!" Michael Hawley quipped regarding the 1974 film Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kulang (You Have Been Weighed and Found Wanting), one of the four films featured in the Lino Brocka mini-retrospective that comprises part of the focus on Filipino and Filipino American cinema in the 28th edition of the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival (SFIAAFF).
The title is a Biblical reference to the Book of Daniel 5:1-31, wherein the last Babylonian king Belshazzar holds a feast at which sacred vessels confiscated from Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem are used to drink wine and further profaned when the revelers toast to the gods of gold and silver, of bronze, iron, wood and stone. Suddenly, a mysterious hand appears and writes on the chamber wall "mene mene tekel upharsin", which defies interpretation until the prophet Daniel interprets it to read "you have been weighed and found wanting." This Biblical story is the source of the popular idiom "the writing on the wall" as a euphemism for impending doom that is so obvious only a fool would not see it coming. It also provides the origin for the similar expression "your days are numbered."
You Have Been Weighed and Found Wanting lays out its impending doom in the film's opening sequence: a sepia-saturated flashback wherein an albularyo (traditional/folk medicine practitioner) performs an abortion on Kuala (Lolita Rodriguez), as the baby's father Cesar (Eddie Garcia) restrains her and covers her mouth to silence her cries. An example of feticide and not pro-choice—Kuala having been clearly coerced—the sight of her aborted fetus drives Kuala insane. Cesar then abandons Kuala to her fate as the village's scabrous idiot as he persists as an incurable lecher.
When Neil Young caught a revival screening of Weighed and Found Wanting at the 2009 Viennale, he reported to The Auteurs that Brocka considered his commercially successful eighth feature his "first novel", which prompted Young to envision "the sprawling nineteenth century fictions of George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell when watching this humanistic exploration of small-town prejudice, one which covers pretty much every stratum of society while relating a melodramatic, almost soap-opera-like story of sexual hypocrisy, abortion, jealousy and young love. As usual with Brocka, happiness is elusive and short-lived, and to be a sensitive or sympathetic individual is to be doomed to misery and/or death. But while the ending is typically downbeat, Brocka does offer a glint or two of optimism—for which, given the starkly grim finales of most of his oeuvre, we must be grateful."
Noel Vera—a writer and programmer based in the Philippines, and author of Critic After Dark: A Review of Philippine Cinema (2005), named after his influential blog—has contributed an informative profile of Lino Brocka ("Lino Brocka: The Heart of Philippine Cinema", abbreviated from a longer version) for the festival's program along with capsules for the four Brocka films in the retrospective. Of Weighed and Found Wanting, he synopsizes: "You Have Been Weighed and Found Wanting was Brocka's rare attempt to do melodrama on a large-scale canvas; it's a panoramic view of society in a small provincial town, from its wealthiest citizen to its most wretched outcast. The film seems inspired by several sources: Federico Fellini's 1953 I Vitelloni, for one (the sensitive youth who leaves town to come back a celebrated artist), and also Peter Bogdanovich's 1971 The Last Picture Show (the mysterious older man who turns out to be the catalyst and mentor for the youth's transformation into manhood). Two other sources I should cite: 
José Rizal's social-reform novel Noli Me Tangere, which is the source for the mother (driven insane by the loss of her child) and her leprous husband, and also Brocka's own life: the town where he filmed was the same one he lived in as a bastard child. Mario O'Hara wrote the script from a story idea by Brocka, and gives a great performance as Berto, the leper. The film was both a critical and commercial success when it came out in 1974; it began the '70s golden age in earnest, and remains one of the period's key films."
After having abandoned Kuala, Cesar becomes one of the richest men in his village and sires a son Junior (Christopher de Leon in his first role). At first, Junior takes pleasure in all the privileges provided by his family's social position—an opulent home, popularity, good looks, a girlfriend who's the prettiest girl in town (shades of Cybil Shephard!)—but, then his pleasure curdles. His father reveals himself as a lecherous philanderer, his mother a hectoring shrew, his girlfriend fools around with another boy and is summarily married off, and his friends prove to be louts. Junior's perspective shifts and he recognizes everyone around him as "ignoramuses, hypocrites, spiritual grotesques", except for the town's outcasts—deranged Kuala and the leprous Berto—who he befriends, despite his father's admonitions. The film ends, Vera synopsizes, "with Junior acting out the action described by the film's title—he stares at every town folk in the eye, judges them, and finds them all wanting"; a dramatic moment helped enormously by the broad canvas and large ensemble Brocka employed to create his melodramatic epic.
Vera contextualizes that Brocka was essentially telling his life's story, drawing from his memories of San Jose, Nueva Ecija, and of the people there. "Junior was Brocka—the sensitive young man, disillusioned with the status quo and yearning for something different, something more; he was also Milagros [Laurice Guillen], the politician's bastard (Brocka himself was the illegitimate child of a political figure). You might say that the secret behind Brocka's intensity, behind his close identification with the outcast and oppressed, was that he himself was an outcast—painful knowledge that would make him more open to the plight of others, to fellow outcasts in life."
In broad, overly-assured strokes Kane Wheatley-Holder reduces the psychological complexity of Weighed and Found Wanting to a socio-political allegory of resistance: the common man against the Marcos regime. I, however, prefer the more nuanced insights offered by Richard Bolisay at his site Lilok Pelikula. Bolisay observes that Brocka's filmmaking was "driven by his force and brilliance as a political observer than as a political activist" and warns against erroneously boxing him "into a solely political filmmaker which he isn't. His films show many faces of politics, and not just the one that drives people into streets to protest." Differentiating even further, Bolisay writes: "Filmmakers are not just makers of film. They are also makers of political discussion. It is like saying writers just write, they don't think. Brocka … made films not only to depict the tumultuous years of the Marcos regime and its after effects but also to awaken the minds of the people by not just being political, but by being real and honest. The seventies and the eighties were the years of unrest, but not all films made during those decades were expressions of dissent."
Junior's story and his climactic act of judgment (resistance?) is not, however, what Vera finds to be the film's true point of interest. As type, Junior "is hardly original" and joins "a gallery of small-town youths who learn about disillusion and heartbreak." What's more, Vera characterizes Junior as "something of a self-righteous prig—de Leon plays him as if he's too good for the likes of his father and those hypocritical grannies. It's a superior stance too easily assumed; you feel he hasn't quite earned the right to do so." Vera criticizes de Leon's performance as "downright thin." No, the film's presiding power lies in "the intense yet simply told story of love found at the bottom of the world" between the town's most miserable inhabitants: the homeless lunatic Kuala and the leprous Berto, nearly lunatic himself in his loneliness. Vera considers that O'Hara may have written the best role for himself and mentions in his Senses of Cinema appreciation of Mario O'Hara: "In Brocka and O'Hara's treatment of the character, you see a rare (for Brocka's films) ambiguity—Berto in his loneliness and sexual hunger is a somewhat frightening presence; when he first looks at Kuala, it is with a predatory glint in his eye. We later learn of Berto's true nature—shy, sensitive (or rather, oversensitive), full of an affection for others that he doesn't dare express. It's a fascinating character, especially as Brocka had asked O'Hara to play him; O'Hara agreed, and does a magnificent job. Which is as it should be, because as people in the know put it, he was really playing himself." Vera concludes: "Rodriguez and O'Hara make the relationship that blossoms between them effortless, yet utterly real—Rodriguez as Kuala responding to Berto's attentions hungrily, even greedily (the way a child would); O'Hara as Berto suddenly finding himself functioning as guardian and father as well as lover. The couple are the most successful evocation of love in any of Brocka's films, I think, and by far the most moving."
Mario O'Hara and Lolita Rodriguez had worked together on an earlier Brocka film Stardoom (1971), which Vera describes as "a Jacobean melodrama (with great performances by Rodriguez as the backstage mother, and O'Hara as the unwanted son)", and later portrayed lovers again in Gumising Ka, Maruja (Awaken, Maruja, 1978), "Brocka's rare (and for the first half, well-made) gothic ghost story."
Vera likewise raises a provocative critique of Brocka, observing that the "intense identification he felt towards his characters is the foremost virtue of his storytelling; at the same time, [that] it was his biggest vice. If he had a tendency to like certain characters—to get under their skin and look through their eyes—he also had an equal tendency to shut others out—to condemn and deny them their full measure of understanding." He argues that Brocka has wasted the potential characterizations of Cesar and Milagros. After her seduction of Junior, Milagros simply vanishes from the film, Vera complains, "And you miss her; you want to know what happened to her, how she ultimately fared after her one-night stand with Junior." Eddie Garcia's Cesar "could have been a crucial role in the film, the correlative to de Leon's Junior—where Junior is a young innocent waking up to compassion, Cesar could have been an aged hedonist haunted by it, mirror images lit from different angles." These two characters "fall on the borderline that separates those who deserve Brocka's condemnation and those who deserve his compassion; they are either swept to one side of the border or forgotten, and the film's complexity suffers as a result."
Though writing about a separate Philippine film, Noel Vera's description of the audience reception applies equally here: "They were laughing throughout much of the film, but it wasn't easy, derisory laughter; if anything, it was a terse release of tension, the kind of laughter you hear from someone fully aware he should know better but feels nervous, nevertheless." This was especially apparent in the scene with the gay schoolteacher (YouTube segment 11, below), which elicited the loudest laughter. Knowing how this scene was a set-up for Junior's conversation with Berto in the next, I was amused by how the SFIAAFF audience became quiet and contrite once they realized that Brocka was chiding them for being complicit in ridiculing the effeminate gay man. This is a complicated dynamic, however, which raises a distinction between laughing at someone at their expense as opposed to laughing with someone in the sense of sharing a cultural in-joke. In the 35+ years that gay liberation has fought for its place at the table since Brocka filmed You Have Been Weighed and Found Wanting, it would be absurd to assert that an effeminate male no longer elicits laughter—as, conceivably, any gender reversal elicits laughter—but, arguably that laughter has shifted in degree away from cruel judgment to savvy bemusement or—to a certain extent—a kind of "you go, girl" identification? The audience reaction to these two hinged scenes underscores a certain timeliness to Brocka's film that otherwise might be perceived as "dated." The struggle for human dignity among the marginalized remains timeless.
On second viewing, I also noticed the manner in which Brocka juxtaposed Catholic iconography—primarily images of Jesus—as backdrops against which the hypocrisy of his characters becomes silhouetted. This is especially noticeable in the film's opening flashback where Cesar reacts to Kuala's aborted fetus. He's positioned in front of a painting of the compassionate heart of Jesus. One visually absorbs Brocka's criticism of patriarchal veracity. Further, there's a distinct alignment of the film's narrative trajectory with the Catholic ritual calendar, particularly apparent with Kuala's baby being born during the Christmas season.
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