ust as its intro's slaughterhouse apparatus violently destroys pigs, so too does the crushing poverty of the Philippines—specifically, the countryside slums of Tondo—crush the titular heroine of Lino Brocka's 1976 Insiang, a woman trapped in an environment of destitution and abuse against which she can only struggle violently, and vainly. The first Philippine film ever presented at Cannes, Brocka's portrait of familial treachery and societal abandonment (written by Lamberto E. Antonio, based on a TV script by Mario O'Hara) channels its Sirk/Fassbinder melodrama through the filter of neorealism, its story's heightened emotions kept at a simmer by an aesthetic at once verité-blunt and yet shrewdly, meticulously composed. Nowhere is the director's command more understated and potent than during a sequence in which tender melancholy music is used to link Insiang (Hilda Koronel) and boyfriend Bebot's (Rez Cortez) lovemaking to her next-morning discovery that he's absconded, the underlying connotation being that Insiang's desperate idealism and subsequent disillusionment are two sides of the same coin. Certainly, her misery's roots extend all the way home, where harping mother Tonia (Mona Lisa), bitter about her husband's departure, first kicks her financially strapped in-laws to the curb so she might have her young lover Dado (Ruel Vernal) move in, and then proceeds to badger her daughter (a similar target of husband-related anger) into a Machiavellian rage. Beset by maternal resentment, Bebot's love-'em-and-leave-'em callousness, and Dado's rapist tendencies, Insiang plots her revenge, with Brocka expertly dramatizing the (understandable, if not prudent) reasons for each character's behavior. What registers most forcefully isn't Insiang's literal plot twists and turns as much as its principal mood of lonely powerlessness and the reactionary impulse to strike back against intractable forces and situations by any means necessary, an undercurrent conveyed by Koronel's guileless countenance and the director's unaffected depiction of the impoverished setting and its beleaguered inhabitants. In a sense, Insiang's defiant machinations cast the film as a lurid, twisted ode to feminist self-actualization. But with his misery-wrought finale—and its tangled knot of obstinate, volatile, unfulfilled feelings and desires—Brocka makes sure that any minor triumph enjoyed by his morally and emotionally warped protagonist is tempered by an overriding dose of bittersweet sorrow and despair.

Feature: The 44th New York Film Festival