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I CONFESS to being biased against Pio de Castro III’s Soltero ever since I heard the premise. A Filipino film about loneliness? Filipinos are some of the most gregarious people in the world — the warmest, friendliest, most hospitable; the (darker side) fondest of gossip, of backbiting, of mob rule. Filipinos, I’d have said, are the least likely to know loneliness, particularly on the big screen; most Philippine cinema depict teeming slums full of corrugated shacks crammed with squatters. Filipinos know the despair of overcrowding, not loneliness.
But that’s not entirely true; one of Brocka’s best-known films (