At her husband’s campaign rally, a woman sings a kundiman, the classic sad Philippine love song. He is across the room with his mistress. She knows. Everyone in the room knows. She sings on. This scene contains the whole film: conjugal performance as political technology. The Philippines in 1990 is arranged around the same machinery in new costumes. It is melodrama and noir and political comedy at once, and it moves like a soap opera on purpose, because that is what people were actually watching. They came to the screenings in numbers. Not long afterwards, they came to Brocka’s wake.