The city of woe in cinema

MANILA, Philippines - Dante wrote in the Inferno that passing the Gate of Hell, one is immediately assailed by cries of agony, led by the opportunists, those souls who in life were neither for good nor evil but only for themselves. There is this grim inscription found in the Gate of Hell, according to the poet:

I am the way into the city of woe.

I am the way to a forsaken people.

I am the way into eternal sorrow…

Abandon all hope ye who enter here.

The Filipinos’ ire over Dan Brown’s fourth novel, Inferno (released this summer), made me remember humanity’s love-hate relationship with that ambivalent place where dreams blossom and wither — the city. This is exactly how the city fared in the life of Dante or Durante Alighieri himself, poet of the Divina Commedia, the literary epic consisting of three cantiches or books: Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso.

When my husband and I first visited the most populous city of the Tuscan region in Italy — Florence — we made sure that we would be able to go inside the cavernous basilica of Sta. Croce, because Dante’s memorial cenotaph stands there. But we knew that his bones lay in another city, Ravenna of the Emilia Romagna region, at the Church of San Pier Maggiore (later called San Francesco), where Bernardo Bembo, praetor of Venice, erected a tomb for him in 1483, and where another Bernardo, Dante’s friend Canaccio, engraved with scorn: Parvi Florentia mater amoris (Florence, mother of little love), because the poet died in exile from the city of his birth, ambition and towards the end of his life, anguish.

He passed away a bitter man in Ravenna at the age of 56 in 1321 because Firenze, as the Italians call Dante’s city, confiscated his properties, then slammed its gates on his face, after he allied himself with the wrong political faction. Fighting with the White Guelphs, who were wary of the Pope’s political influence, earned for him the ire of no less than the supreme pontiff, Boniface VIII. Of course, being a writer, he would have the last say, because he would condemn this pope to the eighth circle of hell (reserved for the fraudulent) in his Inferno, even while Boniface was still alive.

Close to 800 years after the death of il Sommo Poeta (“the Supreme Poet”) , we are intrigued by the medieval vision of hell in the Inferno, because Brown situated Manila in “the gates of hell” with “six-hour traffic jams, suffocating pollution and horrifying sex trade.” This spawned unending debates, all of which Brown must have relished as he laughed his way to the bank, with the free publicity our balat sibuyas of a national pride gave his newest suspense thriller.

Manila, which the great Filipino National Artist for Literature, Nick Joaquin, called “the city of my affections and the ever loyal city” in his Portrait of the Artist as Filipino, has made cinema history portraying other cities: As Jakarta in Peter Weir’s 1982 drama The Year of Living Dangerously; Bangkok in Jonathan Kaplan’s 1999 thriller Brokedown Palace; and Panama City in Showtime’s 2000 biopic Noriega: God’s Favorite. Several classic war films, among them Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 Apocalypse Now and Oliver Stone’s 1986 Platoon and his 1989 Born on the Fourth of July, used the Philippines as a stand-in for Vietnam.

The recently-concluded fourth Bourne Legacy, is the first big-budget Hollywood movie to represent the capital as itself. It featured action scenes that drew a portrait of the city as a teeming metropolis, including a helicopter hovering above Ayala Ave., a long car chase through Pasay Taft, crowd scenes at the Marikina City Market, San Andres Market, Navotas Fishport and the heaving throng and traffic along Ramon Magsaysay Blvd., Nagtahan, Intramuros and Jones Bridge.

One unforgettable film about the woebegone city is Maynila sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag, which won Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor at the 1976 FAMAS awards. Recently, it was shown as part of the Cannes Classics section in the 2013 Cannes Film Festival.

My husband and I were classmates in our sophomore year when the film was shown in 1975 and our Sociology professor at UST’s Faculty of Arts and Letters required us to watch it. Based on Edgardo M. Reyes’ novel serialized in the weekly magazine Liwayway in 1966, Sa Mga Kuko ng Liwanag depicted the plight of the poor provincianos who seek a better life in the city but fell prey to predators. This allegorical novel focuses on the sweethearts Ligaya Paraiso (Paradise) as the poor man’s search for a happy life, and her beloved Julio Madiaga (Perseverance) as the common tao brutalized by the hostile city.

National Artist for Literature, Dr. Bien Lumbera, sees Reyes’ despairing insight in “a painful journey which unfolds the exploitation of workers in city construction sites, the poverty of slum dwellers, the violence seething among the ranks of the unemployed and foreign control of Philippine economy.”

In 1974, Mike de Leon, grandson to LVN Pictures’ matriarch, Doña Sisang, stumbled upon the script earlier written by his fellow Atenean Clodualdo del Mundo Jr. and decided to make it the maiden offering for his new production company, Cinema Artists. Lino Brocka, who has received recognition for his previous work, the classic Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kulang (Weighed But Found Wanting) was approached by De Leon to direct the adaptation. Brocka, true to his UP Diliman upbringing, took this as an opportunity to create a biting commentary about the urban poverty of the Marcos Martial Law. Brocka also requested Del Mundo to rework a few scenes. Del Mundo recalls: “Lino suggested additions to the screenplay of Maynila to make it more commercial. He knew what would sell to the masses.”

The independent production was shot on actual locations around the vicinity of Manila with a shoe-string budget, featuring a newcomer, Bembol Roco in the stellar role of Julio, opposite a former teenybopper, Hilda Koronel, in the defining role of Ligaya. It has since become one of the few Filipino films that is consistently placed among the world’s Top 100 films of all time and the only film from the Philippines that entered in the list of the book, 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die.

Those versed in the classics would see an archetypal story here, from the Greek mythology of Orpheus and Eurydice, best recounted in Ovid’s Metamorphosis. Orpheus had the ability to charm all living things and even stones with his music, and such was his love for his wife Eurydice that he dared to descend to Hades, the Underworld, to retrieve her after she was fatally bitten by a snake. In the case of Julio, it was not the abode of the dead that he transgressed to save his beloved, but the bowels of the cruel city, where he had to commodify his manhood to ransom his lost sweetheart.

And who can forget City After Dark, originally titled Manila by Night, a 1980 drama film directed by another UP bright mind, Ishmael Bernal and produced by Regal Films’ Lily Monteverde in 1980? Released at the height of the Marcos regime, the film unmasks what the then Metropolitan Manila governor was trying to cover up behind walls lining the main thoroughfares — unemployment, prostitution, drug addiction and lack of decent housing.

Considered as one of Bernal’s master ouvres, it centers on people with shady pasts and bizarre presents, caught in the mill of the unrelenting city life, all in the span of one night. The broken lives of the characters played by William Martinez, Charito Solis, Cherie Gil, Johnny Wilson, Rio Locsin, Alma Moreno, Orestes Ojeda, Lorna Tolentino and Bernardo Bernardo intertwine as dawn breaks over the city of their delusions.

Although the movie was originally titled Manila by Night, authorities were presumed to have asked Bernal to change the title so as not to specifically malign their city. The original film, which was two hours and 20 minutes long, was heavily censored so that the released edited version was only 90 minutes. The “New Society” vanguards deleted all negative references to Manila as well as what was deemed foul language. However, at the time of its release, many Filipinos felt that this was a crowning glory of the second golden age of Philippine cinema.

Both films’ ending immortalizes the unforgiving city where the harsh admonition of Dante’s Inferno is etched in stone. The city will exact its pound of flesh and drop of blood from the hapless characters: Julio who will perish in the hands of the mob and the motley souls of the damned who have to endure the masquerade of daytime respectability, only to be possessed by its demons when darkness comes.

Of course, the resilient faith of the Pinoys could transcend these films’ tragic take on the city mired in the gates of hell, and find solace in Brazilian inspirational writer, Paolo Coelho’s tweet: “Dear Filipinos, your souls lead to the gates of heaven.” But tell this to Dante, Brocka and Bernal — three masters of the harrowing narrative of urban decadence, who all died in their 50s, without seeing the redemption of their city of woe.