Critics reviews

Beyond ethnographic verisimilitude (in itself a dubious marker of quality, especially for underrepresented national cinemas), the (Pyhrric) triumph of Insiang is how it illustrates the district itself bearing down on its inhabitants, the sinuous alleyways and cluttered canals mapping the physical and psychic burden of a downtrodden, poverty-ridden population.

Released the same year as Nagisa Oshima's In the Realm of the Senses, Brocka's film maintains a similarly unsparing focus on sexual violence and the simultaneously physical and psychological prison it creates for its victims. If Insiang is dubiously feminist in any strict sense, its persistent focus on Insiang's eye line suggests a passageway into her mind and experience that more common rape-revenge thrillers wholly omit.

It must be said that the artistic quality of his films varies widely, and that may explain why film preservationists and festival curators keep coming back to Insiang as Brocka's one unassailably compelling masterwork... A small film in some respects, it is also an uncanny, resonant blend of neorealism and melodrama.

By turns lyrical and crude, laid-back and feverishly overheated, Lino Brocka's "Insiang" (1976) is at once original and yet so familiar that you may find yourself annotating it with cinematic footnotes as the story unfolds... Throughout, Mr. Brocka, working with his excellent director of photography, Conrado Baltazar, creates images of startling power, like that of bloody hands clutching in the void.

This intense, furious melodrama, by the Filipino director Lino Brocka, fuses its narrative energy with documentary veracity... Brocka's method is unflinching: filming on location in a slum neighborhood in Manila, where work is scarce and even backbreaking jobs are coveted, he fills the drama with the desperate striving of its residents and the steady film frame with the elements of their subsistence.

Very few close-ups and a cello on the soundtrack add a kind of ennobling distance, the slum presses down - a place where everyone knows everyone else's business - and I could've done without the symbolic faucet drip-drip-dripping into a water drum (someday the drum will overflow...) but there's no doubt the final shift into out-and-out melodrama is fully earned.

Inevitably, inasmuch as the title implies character identification and individuality, Brocka's harrowing, indelible, and unsentimental canvas is an encompassing sociopolitical national landscape of rootlessness, suppression, and moral bankruptcy that define the nature of endemic poverty.

Is Brocka a mediocre to bad director who nonetheless remains one of the Philippine's few cinematic representatives on the world stage, thus allowing his output a free pass? Or was Insiang, by any standard, simply a hokey, silly piece of cheese that has earned its reputation because of its status as Third World Art, a mode of production necessary for its creators but also a terrific justification for critics willing to use the neorealism defense to bolster an otherwise unremarkable film?

The first Philippine film ever presented at Cannes, Brocka's portrait of familial treachery and societal abandonment channels its melodrama through the filter of neorealism, its story's heightened emotions kept at a simmer by an aesthetic at once verité-blunt and yet shrewdly, meticulously composed.

[It's] centered on a teenage girl struggling to stay afloat in the overwhelming, dehumanizing poverty that surrounds her. Her mother, who operates a tiny fish market, takes in a local hood as a lover, but the thuggish pretty-boy is clearly more interested in Insiang. After he rapes her (in a single-take sequence astonishing in its curtness and brutality), Insiang plans her revenge—a revenge that is also a revolution against the unseen government that endorses the system of exploitation.