Recensioni de* critic*

The brilliance of Manila in the Claws of Light lies partly in its multiple tensions. First, gritty realism occurs alongside poised stylization. De Leon’s artful cinematography unfolds in jarring contrast to the city’s ugliest sights. His panoramic shots and deep-space compositions emphasize the breadth, congestion, and horrid majesty of sprawling shantytowns.

If the middle film of Brocka's great trio, Manila in the Claws of Light, stands as the director's finest achievement (it is the film that Lav Diaz credits for jump-starting his own interest in cinema as an art form), this is in part because it so vividly and fully captures the emotional, physical (and thus political) tenor of the city.

The movie's palpable, deeply lived-in realism is among its great attractions, largely because the film isn't just a story about a young Filipino Everyman, but because it's also a de facto record of Manila in the 1970s.

[Julio] often comes off as a tragic innocent, more symbol-of-a-debased-nation than flesh-and-blood person. None of that, however, mitigates the power of the final third, in which Julio's quest comes to a head and the metropolis where he has tried desperately to survive bares its unforgiving talons.

With action ranging from Julio's recruitment by a male prostitute to the murder of a co-worker whose family lost their land to corrupt officials, Brocka fulfills the aesthetic promise of the title: the sharp-edged, rough-toned images reveal torments and abominations with exhilarating, combative energy.

Manila can be seen as a precursor to Jia Zhang-ke's recent A Touch of Sin, with its extended scenes of working-class struggle punctuated by moments of harrowing, highly stylized violence. Like Jia, Brocka suggests that violent reactions should be expected from a society that preys on its vulnerable.

It's rough around the edges, but in that same way 70s American films were, with a nearly perfect balance between formal beauty and a realist sensibility... Starkly pessimistic, the film is unrelenting in its unveiling of Manila's oppressiveness and in its portrayal of an impoverished citizen's loss of hope in the city.