Reined in by this pressure, Brocka imparted to his films a latent political meaning that could not be made explicit. Most of the films that concern Capino here were made during Marcos’s regime, under a constant threat of state censorship. Capino combines historiographic and interpretive methods, claiming these films as inescapably products of their own time while highlighting how their sociopolitical representation speaks to that history. Martial Law Melodrama reveals the political meanings in Brocka’s films that are hidden beneath the innocuous appearance of popular mainstream cinema.

Is the film’s final scene an antiauthoritarian statement made in reference to Marcos’s dictatorship? Or does Bona’s subversive action signify a feminist awakening? More unexpectedly, is it possible to extract a gay subtext from the film’s narrative-a reading suggested by French screenwriter Jacques Fieschi-that casts Bona as an alter ego for Brocka himself? For Capino, such divergent decodings are the result of a wealth of signifiers in Brocka’s work that attest to a Filipino film culture “engaged with the politics of its day” (xiii). The film’s crude realism and troubling scenes of domestic violence offer a starting point for Capino’s investigation of “inscriptions of politics and history” in Brocka’s melodramas made during the martial-law era of Ferdinand Marcos’s regime (1972–86). Capino begins his fascinating Martial Law Melodrama: Lino Brocka’s Cinema Politics by describing how images from Bona have remained imprinted in his memory since childhood. Balancing highly emotional scenes with a quasi-documentary depiction of decaying Manila streets, Brocka reconfigures film melodrama into a defiant political act. Bona watches her lover scream in agony as she carries out her vengeance with the same serenity with which she had formerly carried out his bidding. At the end of the film, after being told by Gardo that she should leave his home, Bona gives him one more bath-this time with boiling water. Illustrating the imbalance of their relationship, Bona bathes her lover every night, ensuring the water is always warm enough for his liking, even after he brings other women home for his sexual adventures. She dedicates her life to serving Gardo full-time, in spite of the many abuses to which he subjects her. Bona gives up the comfort of her middle-class home, leaving behind her family and boyfriend, to live with Gardo in a Manila slum. In Lino Brocka’s Bona (1980), Filipina star Nora Aunor plays the titular character, who grows infatuated with Gardo (Phillip Salvador), a B-movie actor and stuntman.

From Film Quarterly, Spring 2020, Volume 73, Number 3

Movie footage of martial law news