Lino Brocka | Ang Tatay Kong Nanay (My Father, My Mother) / 1978

the drag queen’s son

by Douglas Messerli

 

Orlando Nadres (screenplay), Lino Brocka (director) Ang Tatay Kong Nanay (My Father, My Mother) / 1978

 

If one marvels at the buoyancy of the late 20th century Philippine film industry, there are two names that help to explain it: Kidlat Tahimik and Lino Brocka, the later of whom is partially responsible for the surfeit of LGBTQ films still being created in that country.

      One of Brocka’s central films is his comedy-drama Ang Tatay Kong Nanay (My Father, My Mother), was shot, amazingly for its subject matter, in 1978, an incredibly prolific period for the director, who also filmed Mananayaw, Gumising Ka, Maruja, Hayop sa Hayop, and Rubia Servios among other works during the same year.

     Father/Mother is a somewhat long—almost two hours—and rather discursive work ranging over so many different issues that it alone challenges, long before it was popular to do so, any singular identity of LGBTQ individuals.

      The film begins by suggesting that its central figure, hair stylist Dioscoro Derecho, better known as Coring (played by one of the most popular comedians of Philippine cinema, Dolphy [Rodolfo Quizon]) is a rather haggard drag queen, watching in tears as his friends camp it up and dance out the night. Coring, it seems, cannot get over the abandonment of his previous boyfriend/son/lover Dennis (Phillip Salvador), who after Coring paid for his education ran off to another city, a situation that has its echoes in the character of Bernadette Bassenger (memorably played by Terence Stamp) in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) who lost his young lover Trumpet to the fumes of peroxide.

       Coring’s friends not only mock his inability to enjoy the evening, but gang up in a taxi on their way home to destroy Coring’s one remaining treasure of that relationship, a letter from Dennis. The cater-wauling group, like the rather self-hating and friend-baiting gang of The Boys in the Band—yet another echo of this highly influential film—finally escape in flight as first Coring bails after which the cab driver forces the others to follow.

      After that night on the town one can hardly imagine the somewhat tired but yet talented parlorista he appears to be the next day. Living in the comfortable, if not fashionable house his father left him, he is a community regular despite his flamboyant behavior, celebrated by neighborhood figures who live far more destitute lives than he does.

       But that new day also holds a remarkable series of events beginning with the reappearance of his beloved Dennis, who has now evidently joined the American navy in order to help support the infant son he carries with him, but whom Coring—so overwhelmed by the homecoming of his beloved protégé—barely notices.

       Dennis, so we discover has unintentionally impregnated a hooker, Mariana Jimenez (Marissa Delgado), who not only soon after left Dennis, but moved on to financially greener grasses. Scheduled for almost immediate duty on a departing ship, the young man abandons the boy, later called Nonoy (Niño Muhlach), to the care of his longing elderly lover.

       Coring can’t say that he hasn’t been warned by his clients, many of whom are also cross-dressers, about the near-impossible odds he will face in raising a young boy, particularly given his lifestyle and the tatty neighborhood in which lives and works. How will he possibly care for the child and work at the same time? What kind of guidance can he offer to a child given his flair for the dramatic and outrageous aspects of life? On his meager wages, how will he pay for a son?

      Much of this film, in fact, is given over to just those questions, with Coring seeking out a strange familial-like support, ways to financially balance his own needs with those of an always growing boy, and his attempt to provide his son with the moral values that might represent a normalization outside of whose boundaries the child’s father has lived throughout his life.

      If the film appears now to reverberate with the pop comedy of a commercial film such as  the 1985/1987 film (Trois hommes et un couffin / Three Men and a Baby), Brocka predictably approaches his work with a far darker tone.

      Coring clearly does not perceive his own life’s trajectory as fitting with the future what that he imagines for the boy, and his gradual toning down of his personality and his unexpected criticism of those in his shop who, in front of the boy, uncontrollably project their queenly personae, loses him customers as well as, we are certain, some of his own self-respect.

     Brocka, presumably, might almost be faulted for his character’s tacit disapproval of high-camp behavior—which is, in itself often a tactic with which to survive the normative, disapproving world in which effeminate homosexuals live—but given the early date of a film confronting audiences with such a wide-range of truly controversial LGBTQ issues, I think it might be prudent to forgive both the director and his screenwriter, Orlando Nadres.

       In the very same year the French-Italian film La Cage aux Folles got around these issues by simply ignoring them, as it were not even an issue worth questioning for a young boy to grow up atop a Saint-Tropez gay drag club with a male drag queen parent, Albin Mougeotte, who with the boy’s blood-father helped raise the perfectly normative heterosexual boy Laurent. Brocka and Nadres quite obviously approach a similar situation more seriously.

   As After Dark critic Noel Vera wrote, in a biographical summary of Dolphy’s career at the time of the entertainer’s death in 2012: 

     

“If there's any comedy in the picture, unlike with most of Dolphy's movies, the humor arises from character rather than situation, and Dolphy here reveals himself as a superb character actor. Witness his discomfort at dealing with Dennis (the physical attraction he feels so intense he almost feels faint); witness too the growing sense of maternal love he feels for Nonoy, Dennis' child....

     More, there's a handling of homosexuality that is startlingly deft, considering when this was made. Coring doesn't believe in gay empowerment—when Nonoy catches him in drag, he makes excuses; when the boy puts on lipstick (in an attempt to play an American Indian), Coring, misunderstanding, reprimands the boy. Brocka shows us a gay man who fails to transcend his times (Coring believes homosexuality is a flaw—or worse, a sin), who nevertheless does his level best to be a parent to the child; watching Coring bumble along in desperate befuddlement, often against the dictates of his own instincts, creates a complex knot of feelings in the viewer. You feel your heart quietly breaking in sympathy for the man, the same time you find yourself (despite the film's overall serious tone) chuckling in amusement.”

 

    The “drag” episode is particularly poignant, as Coring is convinced by his friends to drop his parental duties for just one night and return to perform, as he had in the past, in the notorious “fashion” shows held in local neighborhoods. This event, held in a school playground, attracts Nonoy simply by its amplified sounds, the child escaping the guard of Coring’s housekeeper to watch, with a mix of curiosity and wonderment, the tacky show in which drag queens march down a small viewing stand replete with emcee (Joey Galvez) before strutting and posing before the appreciate audience below.

     If there is any evidence that the actions with which Coring has been involved for his entire life are societally verboten we recognize it when the police, with clubs raised, suddenly appear in an attempt to close down the event. Coring takes cover beneath a metal-supported bleacher, suddenly discovering Nonoy standing beside him. The look on Coring’s face is one of horror and regretful release, as if all that he has attempted to keep out of the boy’s consciousness has been for naught.

     Angrily, he pulls the boy out of the rubble of his dream-night and walks him home, his make-up dripping from what are surely his tears of fear and embarrassment. Yet the boy seemingly takes it all with amazing innocent, as if he has just witnessed a special treat, a playful costume party in which men are permitted to dress up as women. It’s a touching scene that reveals, especially by film’s end, the absurdity of Coring’s attempts to hide his own natural proclivities.

     Despite these corrective incidents, however, one cannot imagine a move loving and supportive father than Coring, who clearly dotes on the boy as if he were truly his own child germinated by his long-ago lover.

      All of that changes, however, when Dennis suddenly returns on leave and without warning visits his and Mariana’s son while Coring is at work. Dennis, as has previously been suggested, is not someone who thinks carefully about his actions, and now basically kidnaps the kid for the day, portraying the boy’s “uncle” as he takes him to an amusement park and buys him small trinkets.

       Returning home to discover Nonoy missing, Coring and his friends go on a mad search for the boy, who finally shows up with Dennis, a relief and a somewhat sad pleasure for Coring of seeing his “other” son for at least one night. Nonoy watches his uncle leave with some sadness, demanding that he come back for a visit soon.

       This episode creates a major tonal shift in the entire work, as we now discover another, more frightening aspect of Coring’s identity after Dennis, also visiting Marianna, reveals to her their son’s whereabouts.

       Since leaving, Dennis the ex-hooker has married a wealthy man whose death soon after has made her wealthy, transforming her into a kind a dictatorial head of household that Marianna might have conjured up from reading about Imelda Marcos—who we might recall was ousted from role as the First Lady along with her Filipino President husband Ferdinand only a year previous to the making of this movie.

     Most of the merry window’s days are now apparently spent redecorating her palatial manor, inspecting it out of fear for any trace of insect or other animal life (even a small turtle leads her into a fury of revenge), and maltreating her numerous staff-members. Delusional, she determines that all she is missing is the presence of her own son.

       While Coring quickly shows her the door after she, too, briefly kidnaps the boy for a shopping spree, he realizes that he will never be able to outwit her lawyers and can never offer Nonoy the opportunities her money represents. Almost sheepishly, he bows to her demands, requesting only that she leave the boy with him for just a little while longer so that he may acclimate Nonoy to the change he is about to suffer.

       If previously any anger that Coring expressed to the boy as out of love, he now appears to scold and even taunt the boy for no obvious reason, refusing to even give him a few coins to buy his bird—a present from Marianna—a small pack of birdseed, and demanding the boy return home when he attempts to display the bird to some of his friends in the street. If at first one might imagine that he is taking out his own anger and hurt upon the child he about to lose, we recognize, more importantly, that he is still attempting to teach the boy to love him a little less. After each angry outburst, the actor Dolphy hurriedly turns away from the camera as if hiding his own bodily pains and subsequent tears for what he believes is his necessary behavior.

      When the transition comes, it does not work well, at least from Nonoy’s point of view. In Marianna’s spotless house he is simply another trinket she has collected who doesn’t fit into her orderly plans of extravagant dinners and late-night parties. The child is refused entry even into her own bedroom, while being given nothing which might truly entertain him in the long empty days he seems confined to the house’s equally empty rooms.

      Refusing to the even eat, Nonoy goes on a kind of personal strike which raises his mother’s ire as she attempts to force him to behave as the model son whom he has imagined might give her solace and company. The boy runs away, returning home at another moment when Coring is again dressed in drag. But this time he quickly embraces the boy with all his love, Nonoy reporting that he has run away and that if he is sent back he will run away again, ad infinitum, as long as it takes for Coring to once more become his father or, looking at the man dressed as a woman who stands before him, his mother. And so, with tears flowing from the crossdresser’s eyes, the movie ends much as it began.

     As I wrote about the gentle film above, You Are Not Alone, 1978 was a particularly mean, if fascinating, year when it came to the depiction of LGBTQ people. These two films were notable exceptions, Brocka’s work becoming a touchstone for honest portraits of queer folk for a long time to come.

 

Los Angeles, December 4, 2020

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (December 2020).

 

Alan Parker | Midnight Express / 1978

the big crime

by Douglas Messerli

 

Oliver Stone (screenplay, based on the book by Billy Hayes and William Hoffer), Alan Parker (director) Midnight Express / 1978

 

Alan Parker’s 1978 prison film Midnight Express is not an LGBTQ movie in the least, but it is of interest within this context precisely for what is missing in the film. If there was ever a work of cinema that, despite its many homoerotic images, was created within the umbrella of violent xenophobia and homophobia it is this film.

     Originally, Midnight Express was intended to be a prison escape vehicle for actor Richard Gere. And it might well have been an exciting one given the true story by Billy Hayes and William Hoffer upon which it was based, in which the imprisoned Hayes, after having been moved to Imrali Island prison, steals a rowboat which he rowed approximately 17 minutes through a tempestuous storm across the Sea of Marmara before hiking by foot and catching a bus to Istanbul, before swimming across the Martiza River to Greek freedom.

     In the film screenwriter Oliver Stone winnowed down the true adventure story into a fictional, uninspiring series of events in which the character of Hayes (played by Brad Davis) attempts to bribe the brutal head guard Hamidou (Paul L. Smith) to free him, but is instead taken to an empty attached building in which the guard intends to rape him but, when Hayes pushes him off, falls back into a rack of wall hangers, impaling himself. (In truth, the figure upon which Hamidou is based was shot and killed at an Istanbul café by an ex-prisoner weeks earlier). Dressing up as a guard, Hayes grabs up the outer door key and walks into freedom, even doing a little victory leap as he realizes he has finally escaped.

      It’s truly odd that the film creates a possible fictional homosexual incident at film’s end while utterly refusing to depict the actual gay relationship between Hayes and his fellow prisoner, the young Swedish man Erich (Norbert Weisser) that perhaps helped him retain his sanity throughout much of his prison stay. But I’ll return to this issue later.

      It is, in fact, fascinating for how Stone and others involved in this film chose to exclude so much of the truly revelatory events of Hayes horrific Turkish adventure to replace them with violent, xenophobic, and homophobic incidents. You might almost say that the filmmakers went out of their way to create of hate film out of what might have been a truly inspirational and spiritually uplifting LGBTQ-friendly adventure saga, even if personally I’m far more interested in the internal prison scenes than in any portrayal of escape the movie might have depicted.

     But let us start from beginning. In the film, the young, willfully naïve American student Billy Hayes, traveling with his girlfriend, Susan (Irene Miracle) on holiday in Istanbul, Turkey in 1970,

straps 2 kilograms of hashish bricks to his chest, without telling Susan. Despite his quite evident nervousness and, at one point, his determination to almost back out on his smuggling intentions, he makes it through the terminal check. But this was a time in Turkey of several outside terrorist threats and airplane bombings, and as they approach the actual plane, he is met with another check as they board the plane on the tarmac. Patted down by guards, he is immediately arrested and detained.

       Despite Billy’s understandable fears as he undergoes further body and luggage checks, Parker infuses the events with a somewhat comic putdown of Turkish forces as Billy is interrogated again and again by Turkish guards who speak little if any English as they, in turn, are upbraided by their superiors for their incompetence when they find, during the final compete strip-search, that the prisoner has also hidden a couple of bricks in his boots.

       I’ve seen such incidents played out in other authoritative regimes in the Soviet Russia (where I successfully smuggled out unapproved art and black market items), Poland, and East Germany, but do we really need such Keystone Kop antics at the very moment that our young “hero” is most terrified about what has befallen him? When they all gather round for a photo-op to advertise Turkish efforts to crack down on drug smuggling, even the actor doesn’t seem to know how to behave as he too breaks out in a silly grin. It appears the director didn’t even perceive the inappropriateness in his mockery at that moment of Turkish police.

      Soon after, Hayes is whisked away by a supposed, English-speaking ally, whom he nicknames "Tex” (Bo Hopkins) who asks him to point out the cabbie who sold him the stuff; but after attempting and failing at a fairly exciting early escape, Billy discovers what he will relearn again and again throughout the narrative: he can trust no one. The English-speaking figure who may be connected to the consul is, in fact, a Turkish liaison, who is just as ready to kill the kid as see to help him get a lesser sentence. And we realize at that moment, as does Billy, that his situation is far more serious than he previously might have imagined.

        But before we proceed to the internecine battles and complexities of the Turkish justice system, let us back up for a moment and reconsider the truth as expressed in the book upon which this film is based.

        First of all Billy Hayes was not some naïve kid who had, almost on a lark, determined to take home some hashish to sell only to his best friends. In fact, Hayes had made three previous successful smuggling trips before the one in which he was caught in 1970, and he was not traveling with his girlfriend at the time. He was, however, obviously naïve about what being caught might represent. Even today is a strong advocate of drug legalization. As Hayes himself expresses it: “I was smuggling drugs. I'm from the '60s, I don't think people should be arrested for it. Don't put people in jail—teach your kids about it.”

        You can hardly blame Stone for not incorporating this into his script, however, since that fact had not been included in the Hayes-Hoffer book or was mentioned by Hayes during the filming, since, as he expressed it in a later Variety interview, “My lawyer informed me I would be opening myself up to arrest in the U.S. by admitting prior smuggling trips. We were also concerned that the Turkish government would ask for my extradition, so it was clear to us I needed to protect myself.” In fact, Stone has claimed on at least one occasion that had he known the truth he would not have signed on to write the script.

       As we can easily perceive, moreover, there are a great many benefits to representing Billy as a first-time innocent since it makes his imprisonment and the extreme punishment doled out by the Turkish justice system seem absurd, while positioning the character as a slightly delinquent 23-year-old with whom we can empathize and about whom we can feel a great deal of sympathy. Certainly, it justifies his later furious outbursts when, after having served three years as a basically model prisoner, his punishment is suddenly extended to life.

      It might have been fascinating, however, to see what might happen in a film in which the handsome and likeable Billy had actually smuggled out hashish (known in the US mostly as cannabis and marijuana) several times. Would the audience of the day immediately have turned upon him, or even felt that the outrageous sentences he received were justified? Or might we have begun to become a bit enlightened on the ridiculousness of arresting and imprisoning men and women for possession and use of a drug which today is increasingly recognized as relatively mild and, in numerous cases, even beneficial in helping certain medical conditions. It truly might have been fascinating if Stone had further explored the ideas which Billy expresses in the first part of his final words to the judge after he has been re-sentenced to life imprisonment—a sentence rendered, in part, because of the Turkish attempts to show the world, particularly with pressure from the US, that they were serious about outlawing drugs—in the context of knowing about that character’s earlier behavior. Today the character’s beginning argument in that scene—at a time when many states and nations have reconsidered and totally altered their attitudes toward cannabis—resonates with new meaning:

 

                 When I’m finished you’ll sentence me for my crime. So let me ask

                 you now. What is a crime? What is punishment? It seems to vary

                 from time to time, from place to place. What’s legal today is suddenly

                 illegal tomorrow because some society says it’s so. And what was

                 illegal yesterday is legal because everybody is doing it, and you can’t

                 put everybody in jail. I’m not saying this is right or wrong. I’m just

                 saying that’s the way it is.

                      I’ve spent three and a half years of my life in your prison, and I

                 think I’ve paid for my error. And if it’s your decision today to sentence

                 me to more years then I’m....

   Had we had the same perspective then as we do today, we might have realized that the absurdity of his arrestment and the impossibly long sentences might as well have been applied to US prisons as it was directed in this film upon the Turkish prison system and their confused sense of justice. Indeed, what if the Billy in the film was not a beautiful white kid from New York who had been attending school at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (in the very same year, incidentally, when I was attending the University of Wisconsin in that same city) but an unemployed black man from Alabama or Texas? It might have meant for a truly profound statement about prisons and injustice internationally.

     Unfortunately, Stone’s script suddenly goes berserk, launching a diatribe through is character of the Turkish people in general:

                 

               I’ve been playing it cool. And I’ve been good. And now I’m

               damn tired of being good. Because you people gave me the belief

               that I had 53 days left. You hung 53 days in front of my face and then

               you just took those days away. ...The concept of a society is based

               on the quality of that mercy, its sense of fair play, its sense of justice.

               But I guess that’s asking a bear to shit in a toilet. For a nation of pigs

               it sure is funny you don’t eat them. Jesus Christ forgave the bastards,

               but I can’t. I hate. I hate you, I hate your nation, and I hate your people.  

               I fuck your sons and daughters because they’re pigs. You’re a pig.

               You’re all pigs.

 

     When you have a “hero” whose qualifications for that role might seem a little bit tainted, you need, evidently Stone and Parker feel, to paint all the others around him as horrific monsters. As critic David Denby correctly argued, Midnight Express is “merely anti-Turkish, and hardly a defense of prisoners’ rights or a protest against prison conditions.” In her book Turkish Reflections: A Biography of Place writer Mary Lee Settle wrote: "The Turks I saw in Lawrence of Arabia and Midnight Express were like cartoon caricatures, compared to the people I had known and lived among for three of the happiest years of my life." In her New Yorker review Pauline Kael quite sarcastically observed: "This story could have happened in almost any country, but if Billy Hayes had planned to be arrested to get the maximum commercial benefit from it, where else could he get the advantages of a Turkish jail? Who wants to defend Turks? (They don’t even constitute enough of a movie market for Columbia Pictures to be concerned about how they are represented.)"

After the release of this film, Turkish tourism fell off nearly 95%, making Hayes one of the most hated people in modern Turkish history.

      Hayes has repeatedly said that not only did he not curse out the judge who sent down the life-time sentence, but that, outside of his experiences in Sagmalcilar jail, he loved Turkey and its people; and after the movie he put himself in danger by returning to Turkey to proclaim his admiration of the country and its people.

      In the film, the character’s now justified anger results in his attacking his fellow Turkish inmate who, in revealing their attempts to escape through the catacombs below, caused the arrestment and torture of his friend, Jimmy (Randy Quaid), who had already lost a testicle due to a previous beating. In the movie Billy goes on a rampage, insanely pulling out a station of sinks in order to beat and bite off the tongue of the hated snitch, Rifki (Paolo Bonacelli)—all which land him in the criminally insane ward from which he finally escapes.

      But in truth. nothing like that ever happened. He did have a temporary mental breakdown and was locked away for a while in the prison sanitorium, but no violence was involved he claims. And basically he was treated well in the prison, spending most of his time in utter boredom. Even the seemingly brutal foot-beating he received on his first day in prison after stealing a blanket, he recalls, was “an example of falaka, a light beating, and there was no sex attack. They cane your feet and to outsiders it seems like a horrible thing but it’s not that bad. At the time, I thought it was killing me, but I soon discovered that it wasn't a bad beating. Later on, I discovered what a bad beating was—they would break bones if they thought you had hash or information they wanted.”

Clearly, the years have softened Hayes’ perspective of his prison life, although it still sounds rather horrific.

      Yet the violence and xenophobic hatred of the film was apparently created in the studio, not in the bowels of Sagmalcilar. By this time, however, the director and his writer had invested so much love into their central figure that they were nearly desperate to show him suffering as a nearly Christ-like figure.

    Perhaps the very best decision Parker made was to cast Brad Davis in the part of Billy. Davis, a bisexual who later died of a suicide as he neared the last stages of AIDS in 1991, was so extremely photogenic that cinematographer Michael Seresin and Parker can hardly keep their hand-held camera off of him. When they are not showing the ballooned-headed faces of rotund Turks who all look like they were painted by the Columbian artist Fernando Botero, Davis’ sculpted face appears at the center of nearly every group frame, his hairy pectorals accentuated whenever possible, and his rear fully displayed when permissible.

     If someone told me that British director Parker, who was married twice to women and fathered five children was secretly gay and had the hots for Davis, I wouldn’t bat an eye in surprise. Clearly, Rainer Werner Fassbinder saw Davis as the perfect gay Genet figure for his last film, Querelle, his camera picking out the same body parts while allowing his actor to use them.

     The trouble of focusing on Davis’ beauty in Midnight Express is that, for the most part, it was not “permissible.” Columbia studio head Daniel Melnick proclaimed that there would be no sexual scenes, and originally wanted the entire show scene—wherein the Billy and Eric work out almost balletically in tandem before showering off, moving closer together, touching, and even kissing—entirely cut.

     Fortunately, the scene remains, but instead of continuing with the expected moment of sexual release, Billy turns away, vaguely shaking his head in the negative. That small gesture says almost everything about this film, which rejects not only the truth of the actual events—in Hayes’ book he does not shake his head but becomes Erich’s lover—but with the way this film rejected all the important truths it might have explored instead of the violence and hatred upon which it is centered: the need to question the very reasons for imprisonment, the importance of challenging racial hatreds, and the necessity of maintaining personal identity and the expression of sexuality in order to survive. Even the failed prison movie of 1971, Fortune and Men’s Eyes handles these concerns better, and as early as 1928 Sex in Chains had very well expressed the love that develops between male prisoners. And finally, one must ask if in court he claims to have been fucking all Turkey’s men and women, when and how did this ever occur? Even Stone’s writing seems to be telling a lie.

     By 1978, moreover, in a decade that had seen major works of LGBTQ cinema by the likes of Fassbinder, Luchino Visconti, Rosa von Praunheim, Sidney Lumet, Lino Brocka, Lasse Nielsen, Derek Jarman, Ron Peck, Wolfgang Petersen, and others, to say nothing of Andy Warhol of a decade earlier there was no longer any excuse to refuse to express homosexual relationships on film, especially in prison. Midnight Express appeared, it is important to remember, a full 8 years after Stonewall. Americans should no longer have had to been told only half-truths of such important stories.

     The irony of Hayes’ statement as expressed in the film itself might easily be applied to the blinkers put on this movie by its writer, director, and studio head: “'Homosexuality ... is a big crime here, but most of them do it every chance they get.” The hypocrisy of that observation was not simply about the Turks, it turns out, but about the US filmmakers who refused to show what they allowed their character to put into language.

 

 

Los Angeles, May 13, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (May 2021).