Contemporary youth is swallowed by the darkness of the Marcos-era capital in Ishmael Bernal’s meandering nocturnal epic, Manila by Night. So bleak was its vision that it was blocked from release by first lady Imelda Marcos who objected to the film’s characterisation of her beloved city and insisted that all references to Manila be removed which is why the film was retitled City After Dark in an attempt to distance itself from the realities of urban life under the authoritarian regime.
Bernal opens however with a scene of aspirational suburban living at the home of a wealthy family as they prepare for an evening out attending a live gig by eldest son Alex (William Martinez), an aspiring folk singer. In a quiet city bar he performs a wholesome cover of the ’69 Crosby, Stills & Nash classic “Teach Your Children”, but the otherwise serene atmosphere is abruptly shattered by gunshots ending the performance and scattering the spectators. The choice of song is in itself instructive in hinting at the generational divide between the apathetic Alex and his respectable middle-class suburban mother Virgie (Charito Solis) who we later discover is carrying a degree of shame over her past as a sex worker and has perhaps overcompensated in her desire to ensure her children become successful members of a conservative society.
As the song says, Alex too is incapable of understanding his parents’ youthful suffering and finds himself lost in the nighttime city. On the one hand he’s dating a young woman of a similar social class who may be joking when she talks about their marriage but is evidently more serious about the relationship than he is while they retreat to a hotel room experimenting with sex and drugs. On the other hand he’s also experimenting with a gay man, Manay (Bernardo Bernardo), who is also in an awkward relationship with bisexual taxi driver Pebrero (Orestes Ojeda) who has two children and a wife while simultaneously dating naive and innocent country girl Baby (Lorna Tolentino ) currently working as a waitress at a diner where a sleazy pimp keeps hassling her to become a sex worker promising megabucks from wealthy Japanese clients.
The presence of the Japanese as external economic force is in its own way a reflection of the desire many of the young people have to leave the Philippines, such as that of blind sex worker Bea (Rio Locsin) who is also involved with Alex but hoping to move to Saudi Arabia with her boyfriend Greg (Jojo Santiago) who has been offered employment there but later discovers that he’s been scammed, temporarily stranded in Bangkok until managing to arrange his passage home. Mass unemployment is a constant spectre, Baby’s father also out of work but lamenting the only job prospect he’s found pays so little and is so far away as to be economically pointless. Lack of other options later causes Greg to attempt to manipulate Bea into participating in live sex shows without her full consent while many of the women are forced into sex work in order to support their families. When Baby falls pregnant, realises Pebrero won’t marry her, and is sacked from the diner she too is pushed into accepting the sleazy customer’s offer but ultimately cannot go through with it. Meanwhile, Pebrero’s wife Adelina (Alma Moreno) is also exposed as a sex worker catering to wealthy Japanese clients rather than the nurse she had claimed to be leaving every day in a crisp white uniform for the hospital and later paying a heavy price for her duplicity.
The crowded tenements inhabited by Baby and Adelina where several members of a large family share a single room stand in stark contrast to Alex’s well-appointed suburban home complete with servants his mother makes a point of talking down to, but what may start for him as a reckless curiosity rebelling against his comfortable life becomes a self-destructive odyssey through midnight Manila in which he eventually becomes addicted to drugs. In a climactic scene, Virgie and her husband batter him with nearby objects while the camera cuts ironically to a series of religious icons and a large statue of Jesus looking down on the scene of chaos before Alex abandons his family to reunite with Manoy. The capture of his friend Kano (Cherie Gil), a tomboyish lesbian in love with an unreceptive Bea, by the police is framed as a kind of crucifixion, the torturing of youth by an implacable authority which restricts its freedom and presents it only with despair.
Adelina had tried to warn Baby that in order to survive Manila she would need to become “wiser than the men”, but the city is itself full of duplicities and secrets and Baby perhaps ironically the only one finally able to escape its false promises. The perhaps more hopeful coda in which a less curious Alex appears to awaken from his slumber lying peacefully in the light of a new dawn was apparently a concession to the censors but still leaves him lost in a kind of limbo neither in one place nor another but perpetually wandering. At once a portrait of a city lively and free with its series of gay discos and drag nights, weird cults in parks, and nighttime callisthenics classes, and of a place marred by exploitation and hopelessness, Bernal’s odyssey through through Manila by night finds only an elusive hedonism born of internal despair in the intense repressions of authoritarianism.
Trailer (dialogue free)
Windows on Worlds 