Brocka’s Inay starts appropriately enough with a sad song: the mother (Alicia Vergel), a retiring teacher, is serenaded by her colleagues while her son Maning (Dindo Fernando) looks on, half-sad, half-exasperated, and half-dubious. The loss of an apparently great and well-loved teacher mirrors the loss of traditional values as represented by the mother, and the loss of childhood from the provider’s perspective. It is Brocka’s take on Yasujiro Ozu’s 1953 Tokyo monogatari, where selfish and ungrateful children turn their back on their aging parents and equally, to the history and culture that is slowly being replaced by the then rapidly changing Japanese society. Brocka gave his own twist on the story, making explicit the economic basis of the conflict, the resistance of tradition against the creeping mores of urbanity, and the power struggle between child/present and parent/past.
Unlike Ozu, Brocka did not make his parental figure as tragically innocent or simple as Ozu’s mother and father, whose willingness to flow with the changes represented by their children heightened the sense of the children’s betrayal. Brocka’s mother isn’t exactly the most endearing person in the world (immediately after her retirement, she wakes up Maning’s entire family on a Sunday and calls him and his doting wife (Connie Reyes) irresponsible and lazy for letting their children stay in bed so late), nor is she the most self-sacrificing, selfishly starting drama with every woman she thinks is replacing her role as provider for her children. It isn’t just a past that is criminally being swept aside for the forward drive of the present, but a past that is stubbornly reasserting itself the hindering the necessity of adapting to change. The final image of the mother wittily conveys this stubbornness both in the mother’s assertion of power and the child’s impulse to resist: finding out that Maning’s third child is finally born after hearing it cry, the mother runs to the baby, carries it and wags her finger in an attempt to impose herself onto the baby to make it stop crying. The freeze-frame of her waging her finger and the baby crying is comparable to the final fight scene between Lucia (Adela Legra) and Tomas (Adolfo Llaurado) in Lucia (Humberto Solas, 1968), where the frozen emotion isn’t that of conclusion, but a sense that the struggle, although somewhat tragic, will indeed comically continue. Unlike however the beaming face that ends Tokyo monogatari, the vagueness isn’t couched on philosophy, but rooted on social context.
The mother’s differing relationships with her children reveals that the children’s slight rejection (because their rejection isn’t as obviously contemptuous as Tokyo monogatari’s) isn’t merely out of selfishness and ingratitude. With Maning, the mother self-righteousness is borne out of Maning’s poverty because he chose to teach at a public school like his mother instead of going for the corporate jobs that his siblings went for. The brunt of the past strikes most viciously against the people that the present has left behind, and the mother’s vindictiveness is a reminder of a history defined by colonial and postcolonial oppression. The mother’s communication with her Romy (Orestes Ojeda) on the other hand reveals that very Filipino-Hispanic tradition of maharlika, or a society that is ruled over by the very rich few. Not only does the maharlika rule over the society, it demands respect from the minions it rules over. Romy became rich after he marries a woman from a rich family. The mother’s interaction with Romy and Daisy is one of reverence, as if age matters very little in the face of inequality. Laid side by side with her treatment of Maning, it seems the mother cannot possibly lecture Romy and his family because the society that he represents is exactly the society that defines the past.
Unlike Ozu, Brocka did not make his parental figure as tragically innocent or simple as Ozu’s mother and father, whose willingness to flow with the changes represented by their children heightened the sense of the children’s betrayal. Brocka’s mother isn’t exactly the most endearing person in the world (immediately after her retirement, she wakes up Maning’s entire family on a Sunday and calls him and his doting wife (Connie Reyes) irresponsible and lazy for letting their children stay in bed so late), nor is she the most self-sacrificing, selfishly starting drama with every woman she thinks is replacing her role as provider for her children. It isn’t just a past that is criminally being swept aside for the forward drive of the present, but a past that is stubbornly reasserting itself the hindering the necessity of adapting to change. The final image of the mother wittily conveys this stubbornness both in the mother’s assertion of power and the child’s impulse to resist: finding out that Maning’s third child is finally born after hearing it cry, the mother runs to the baby, carries it and wags her finger in an attempt to impose herself onto the baby to make it stop crying. The freeze-frame of her waging her finger and the baby crying is comparable to the final fight scene between Lucia (Adela Legra) and Tomas (Adolfo Llaurado) in Lucia (Humberto Solas, 1968), where the frozen emotion isn’t that of conclusion, but a sense that the struggle, although somewhat tragic, will indeed comically continue. Unlike however the beaming face that ends Tokyo monogatari, the vagueness isn’t couched on philosophy, but rooted on social context.
The mother’s differing relationships with her children reveals that the children’s slight rejection (because their rejection isn’t as obviously contemptuous as Tokyo monogatari’s) isn’t merely out of selfishness and ingratitude. With Maning, the mother self-righteousness is borne out of Maning’s poverty because he chose to teach at a public school like his mother instead of going for the corporate jobs that his siblings went for. The brunt of the past strikes most viciously against the people that the present has left behind, and the mother’s vindictiveness is a reminder of a history defined by colonial and postcolonial oppression. The mother’s communication with her Romy (Orestes Ojeda) on the other hand reveals that very Filipino-Hispanic tradition of maharlika, or a society that is ruled over by the very rich few. Not only does the maharlika rule over the society, it demands respect from the minions it rules over. Romy became rich after he marries a woman from a rich family. The mother’s interaction with Romy and Daisy is one of reverence, as if age matters very little in the face of inequality. Laid side by side with her treatment of Maning, it seems the mother cannot possibly lecture Romy and his family because the society that he represents is exactly the society that defines the past.
The mother’s relationship with her only daughter Daisy (Chanda Romero) is predictable in that she treats her as society treats women: as bearer of a culture’s very identity. The relationship here isn’t merely one of an oppressor and the oppressed. Repeatedly, the mother reveals how proud she is of her daughter, and how she is the most responsible and reliable of the siblings. Unlike the conflict-laden first meetings between the mother and the other three siblings, the mother’s first interaction with Daisy is very calm, and the daughter—unlike the daughter-in-laws in Ozu’s film—is neither ecstatic nor unhappy about her mother’s visit. It seems that Daisy is merely resigned to the fact that that is the way things work, the mother visits her children. However, it is also Daisy who causes the most trouble. After the mother finds out that Daisy is having an affair with a married man (a fact delivered with such simplicity and giveness as Bernal’s films about infidelity, many made around the same time), and is bearing his child without any intent of marrying him, the mother declares Daisy a whore and causes a scare after she collapses of anger. Compared with the innocence of the young Daisy, represented by the photograph that the mother carries around of Daisy’s first communion, this version of that child represents a totally different value system, a totally different outlook on life—that is, a bearer that brings a cultural identity that is alien from the identity that the mother represented. The conflicts between the mother and daughter were the most explosive and devastating because the depiction of two clashing value systems isn’t merely ideological, but a display of two women whose very being—womanhood, if you wanna go in that direction—is threatened by each other’s presence.
Finally, there’s Alex (Ace Vergel, appropriately enough the mother’s son in real life), the youngest of the four siblings who also inhabits the oddest position of all of them. He is a rich, self-made executive, but he doesn’t seem to have the economic baggage that defines Maning or Romy. He is also “liberated,” but doesn’t have Daisy’s sexual baggage. He is clearly the mother’s favorite, but it is palpable how confused the mother is in dealing with him. He brings his sexual conquests back home for his mother to see, but his conscience more than weighs on him as he painfully admits to his mother his promiscuity. His apartment is atop a supposedly very high building overlooking Manila, and Brocka takes great pains to show the mother’s suffering everytime she ascends to stairs to his apartment (she doesn’t want to take the elevator in fear of getting stuck midway to the apartment), even framing her Vertigo-style without the accompanying disorienting Vertigo shot. Looking at his relationship with his maid (who acts as a surrogate mother to him, a relationship the mother finds extremely displeasing), Alex does live the lifestyle of a big spender, but is almost apologetic in the way he subsequently must treat the people below him. Unlike Romy, he is unafraid to bring his poor brother’s family to Manila as guests. Unlike his siblings, he isn’t necessarily stuck in reliving the injustices of the past, nor is he so adamant in his push for the future that he alienates his family, especially his mother. It is as if he represents the indefinable yet concrete nature of the present, found balancing itself with the backwards-trajectory of history and past, and the forward march of the future. Like his apartment, he is afforded the bird’s-eye view of human progress afforded the future, but also finds his feet planted in the ground below.
It is in this setting that the mother finally realizes that her children have indeed grown up. Although earlier she insists that the mother may stop caring for her children, but the children will never stop needing their mother, the Christmas dinner in Alex’s house, where Romy, his wife, Daisy, and Alex come for dinner but leaves for other engagements reveals that the situation is actually reversed: it is the mother who will always be in need of children to care for. Her realization’s tragedy is recognizably a Filipino one: it’s Christmas, and there’s no family (and extended family) to celebrate it. But her move back to Maning’s house the next day reveals that Brocka isn’t necessarily just suggesting mere abandonment. The mother is revealed to be free all along, moving from one house to another not out of necessity, but of the sheer pleasure of changing allegiances and relationships. This sketch of familial relationship complicates blood ties by suggesting that rather than a rigidly defined connection, a family’s relationship itself is negotiable, fluid, and shifting, just as people’s position within history and social change is equally a balance between forward and backward, stops and gos. In the end, when the film harks back to the first scene when her colleagues celebrate the mother’s retirement from teaching, we aren’t reminded of the sad song but of Maning’s face, dubious of such displays of certainty of the linearity of history, and the happy rendition of “For (S)he’s a Jolly Good Fellow” that follows the teachers’ sad song, where her coworkers form a circle around her and dances back and forth around the mother.
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