Petersen Vargas probes Manila’s raw realism in ‘Some Nights I Feel Like Walking’
The true star of Some Nights I Feel Like Walking (2024, Petersen Vargas) is Metro Manila, which is a shame because it figures only as half of what started as an intriguing take on the city that suffers from its own suffocations. Manila is always reliable as the cinematic foil of duress—the work of highlighting humanity within sordid places.
You can feel that director Petersen Vargas knows Philippine cinema history, with traces of Lino Brocka’s realism. Then there’s Ishmael Bernal’s searing wit and Mel Chionglo’s queer imagery. Like his forebears, Vargas focuses on the aberrant body as a marker of Manila grit in this social realist piece.
The movie revolves around a motley crew of male sex workers who are tropes of the outsider and the dispossessed, moving through poverty and violence. Yet these young men are the most mobile in the story. They flit between grungy cinemas and lush provincial jungles.
The best thing the film has to offer is the way it is lit and shot. Yet beautiful cinematography and crisp mise-en-scène do not assure formidable storytelling. The script could have benefited from tighter editing to avoid indulgence.
The movie dipped when the young men ventured out of Manila into a series of surrealist vignettes. Manila may be grounded in grit and reality, but its constant sensory assault transforms it into something surreal—violent rather than fantastic. It feels like a story with too many asides, so the point became incidental. The dead body is a plot point for the lessons to be learned by the two lead characters. Well, at least this is what Manila is truly known for in cinema: a location for dehumanization. In this film, the province becomes a reclaiming of some sort, but still violent and unwelcoming at one point.
The meandering subplots weighed down the story’s gravity. The film could have benefited from focusing on the transporting of a dead body. After all, queering is to run counter, to decondition. Yet the movie risks chasing the orbit of melodrama and unrealistic proclamations of body and possession that are rife in heteronormative cinema.
To be fair, Philippine social realist cinema is about creative ways of showcasing bodies as disposable—thrown into prison, dumped into trash, or dismembered. Though Manila is the star, the movie eventually offers a short bright spot: while wandering in the province, the young men glimpse freedom and love caught between queer celebration and Christian cruelty
What is Philippine cinematic realism now, most notably under the new Marcos regime? The first Marcos era in the 1970s and 1980s saw the rise of social realist cinema.
Today, does realism survive only as abject spectacle—paraded before European cineastes eager for grand declarations about the “truth” of the human condition—or as a kind of deconditioning, a visual assault tied to moralistic judgment, in a city never known for goodness? Nothing lyrical here. Just bluntness, which is really what Manila is.
You may reach Chong Ardivilla at kartunistatonto@gmail.com or chonggo.bsky.social
