“Insiang: One Happy Family”
By Noel Vera (www.bigozine2.com/theshop/books/NVcritic.html)
Insiang is arguably Brocka’s masterpiece --- it’s his most intense work, the intensity sustained from beginning almost to end. It has the best-structured screenplay of all his pictures (by Lamberto Antonio, based on the original television script by Mario O’hara); it’s also one of his most typical, and atypical of even most other Filipino films.
The film is comparable to Shakespeare’s most elegantly plotted play, Othello, except in Insiang the focus is less on Othello’s downfall and more on Iago’s creation. Insiang shares many characteristics with Iago --- like Iago she is consumed by hatred; like Iago, she is the perfect murderer, able to kill through the indirect manipulation of others.
Insiang is atypical of Brocka’s work, in that it’s unusually tight and coherent (look at Brocka’s other films --- Tinimbang ka Ngunit Kulang (You Were Judged and Found wanting, 1974,) and Maynila sa Mga Kuko ng Liwanag (Manila in the Claws of Neon 1975) --- for examples of meandering, scattershot scripts). It’s also the rare Brocka film that displays true ambiguity --- by the end of the film, it’s almost impossible to establish for certain who was good and who evil, who the raped and the rapist (again, look at Brocka’s other films, particularly the later ones --- Bayan Ko (My Country, 1985) and Orapronobis (Fight for US, 1989) for simplified notions of good and evil). You blame and sympathize all three alike, dancing helplessly in an interlocked chain of lust and loathing.
The film is unique in another sense --- Philippine cinema is dominated by the twin themes of love of mother and survival of the family; almost all Filipino films revolve around some aspect of either two. Insiang takes these two great, overarching themes and, with an unmatched ruthlessness, dashes them to the ground, shatters them, reveals them to be the fallacies that they really are. The film is saying: “there are no guarantees, not from family, not even from mother; if anything, the most painful betrayals are inflicted by mother and family. You are ultimately alone.”
http://rapidshare.com/files/338932789/INSIANG.part1.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/338945583/INSIANG.part2.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/338958259/INSIANG.part3.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/338968610/INSIANG.part4.rar
Language: Filipino, Tagalog, English (English hardsubs)
no pass
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