MOVIE REVIEW : A Profile of Director Brocka

Controversial Philippine film director Lino Brocka has made more than 50 films during the last 20 years, but “Macho Dancer” (Nuart), which takes us into the dangerous subculture of male go-go dancing and prostitution in Manila, is the first of his films to be shown in a non-ethnic Los Angeles theater. Sunday, the Nuart begins a three-day run of “Signed: Lino Brocka,” Christian Blackwood’s illuminating 1987 documentary on Brocka and his work.

The film introduces us to a major Third World director long overdue for international recognition. Also, in dealing with an avid political activist (Brocka was intensely anti-Marcos), it provides valuable background for understanding the latest attempt to overthrow Corazon Aquino’s government.

Brocka, an articulate man in his 40s, was born in a small town in the Philippines and had a traditional upbringing, but quit college, in moral outrage, when he discovered it was his mother’s lover who was footing his bills. He spent two years in the early 1960s as a Mormon missionary in the leper colony in Molokai, an experience--not dealt with as deeply in the film as it should have been--that helped sharpen his social conscience.

Though he is openly gay, Brocka is the only internationally renowned director in a macho, heavily Catholic country. He has been jailed for his political activism, and continues to endure the curse of government censorship, even though he had a hand in writing the Philippines’ new constitution.

Brocka began in the lowest positions in the theater and has alternated between working on commercial soap opera films and on films of personal interest. There’s an intriguing glimpse of a 1970 film, which he says was one of the first Filipino films to deal seriously with homosexuality. His hero in the film is a respected married man who gives in to his true sexuality, with disastrous results, a dramatic conclusion that Brocka admits was his only acceptable option for Filipino audiences then.

Brocka abandoned film making briefly after the assassination of Benigno Aquino to actively protest the Marcos government. Five of his films had dealt with the plight of the abject poor, prompting criticism from Imelda Marcos for not projecting the “right” image of the Philippines.

“Signed: Lino Brocka” tells us as much about Manila and the Philippines as it does about Brocka, and leaves us wanting to know much more. We’re shown the most impoverished, ramshackle sections of Manila, teeming with jeepneys and emblazoned with vivid billboards, some of them advertising Brocka films.

Brocka talks of 70% to 80% of his countrymen living below the poverty line, of the need for the Catholic Church to stop encouraging the poor to accept suffering as their inevitable fate, and of the danger of arming vigilante groups. The film ends with him preparing to shoot “Macho Dancer,” which typically for--Lino Brocka--was to enmesh him in fresh controversy.