‘Cain and Abel’ REVIEW: The Melodrama of Violence
‘Cain and Abel’ REVIEW: The Melodrama of Violence
Ellis and Lorenz reflect on their ongoing sibling rivalry, which at this point in the movie, has already elevated to an armed rivalry filled with collateral damage and dead bodies.
Lino Brocka’s auteur sensibilities are composed of two parts: the melodramatic mainstream appeal and the underlying sociopolitical meaning. It’s a method of filmmaking particularly common with his works, especially in his 1982 film, Cain and Abel. Starring Philip Salvador and Christopher De Leon, this modern retelling of the popular Old Testament story isn’t just a by-the-book narrative, but one that does strides to inject and place contemporary problems under its gung ho violence and dramatic sibling rivalry.
A TALE OF TWO BROTHERS: Lorenz and Becky (left, Philip Salvador and Baby Delgado) are a married couple living in Doña Pina’s home and are looked down upon by the elderly matriarch. Ellis, on the other hand, is the more beloved younger sibling despite bearing a bastard child with the house maid, Rina.
The film opens with a pair of child siblings fighting over a toy. While it doesn’t find any apparent significance at the moment, the rest of the film is already set in stone from this opening frame. The child siblings are the grandchildren of Doña Piña, the matriarch of a landowning clan in an unnamed province. She is the mother to Lorenz (Philip Salvador) and Ellis (Christopher De Leon), who take the mantle as Cain and Abel, respectively. They are brothers with a large plot of land primarily operated by the older Lorenz. Ellis, on the other hand, is a college student dropout who returns to the ancestral house in order to claim ownership to the land which his older brother operates. It is from here that the film proceeds to cultivate the bloodbound rivalry that ties these conflicted brothers together.
Without delving into spoiler territory, this film is largely melodramatic and gung ho on the surface. The brothers bicker and argue; accidental deaths push them to wage an armed war against each other; the film lives through this bullet-riddled mess and gunfire. The brothers’ rivalry is extensively elevated through its character arcs concerning the film’s female characters—Piña, Cita, Rita, and Becky. Each of these women hold a significant relevance to both of the brothers, and each pushes the narrative forward in a controversial and arguably exploitative manner. The fact that their stories mostly take up only half the movie shows their sustained relevance with respect to the rest of the movie. Regardless of how one sees their place though, the subtext of this film is largely defined by them as well. The underlying culture of violence, misogyny, and cyclical nature of suffering find their place in the plot thanks in no small part to the combined efforts of these four different women.
THE WOMEN OF ELLIS: Ellis is revealed as the womanizing and sleazy brother of the two. Pictured here are Rina (Cecille Castillo, left), whom he has a baby with, and Cita (Carmi Martin, right), whom he is dating at the start of the film.
Going beyond its soapy qualities and disposable treatment of women lies a critique that is worth looking into. There is a serious criticism of the masculine approach to conflict resolution which is the root of all the film’s violence and suffering. Lorenz and Ellis are practically two different embodiments of the male persona (Lorenz is hard-headed whereas Ellis is soft-spoken and meek) which the film argues as being forced to converge around the hypermasculine nature of violence. Coupled with the unending cycle of violence is definitely a story that survives beyond the generic and accessible. It’s an intricate parallel to the still-relevant macho feudalism culture that the Philippines is mired in, and all of this to be successfully packed in an action-drama that also makes an urgency out of familial conflict and strife is just damning to see.
I think this is where most of Cain and Abel rests its laurels on. With Lino Brocka’s regular dosage of mainstream sensibilities, the sociopolitical commentary behind this movie is neatly packaged into the film’s 110 minutes. Does that mean it’s a noticeable one? Not really. There is a tendency for this film to brandish its mainstream appeal in such a distracting way that the rest of the film’s tribal violence and problematic friendships are partly lost in noisy gunfire and smoky tears. To that end, the film isn’t successfully holistic in feeding its audience the message, and it pushes the film a few steps back from its more deserving Brocka contemporaries (Manila in the Claws of Light, Insiang).
Doña Pina (Mona Lisa), already ailing and close to dying, reflects on the cycle of violence her two children entered into.
At the very least, the performances in question don’t bog down the film to a more laughable one. Amidst the culture of violence and collateral damage are the questions of problematic friendships and the purpose of killing. It’s elements like these that are only successfully raised thanks to the performances of Christopher de Leon and Philip Salvador as the siblings. A lot of the film relies on being able to display their complicated feelings for each other in the face of their turf war, and both actors do what they can to sell that feeling all the way to the rolling credits. Extra mention also goes out to the rest of the supporting cast (Carmi Martin, Ruel Vernal, Mona Lisa, just to name a few). Despite some of them receiving some partially incomplete or uninteresting character arcs, they still deliver passable performances that avoid further distracting from the film’s sociopolitical interior.
But the strengths of this movie don’t stand all the time. It’s greatest drawback is its melodramatic nature, which has the burden to constantly hook its audience in so that the film’s heavy socio-political commentary could be finely understood. It’s something that isn’t the fault of the performances, but rather in how the story constructs its sequences around these. Not even extra layers like Dona Piña’s embodiment of a matriarchal God and the strong-willed femininity of Cita, elements which this review does not have time to dig through, are enough to rescue this movie out of the box of good-but-not-great Filipino movies of the period. It’s an unfortunate bloody affair that finds itself mired in its own conflict.
Cain and Abel can be seen on iWant and KTX for 99 pesos.
