Marilou Diaz-Abaya's Moral, with a"bright, hard-headed screenplay" by Ricardo Lee (who wrote LinoBrocka's Jaguar), skates a path between pulp fiction and feminist politics intelling of four middle-class women who had been friends in college. In the yearsbetween 1979 and 1982, a period of growing social unrest in the country,"each is trying to find her own way in an apparently modern, but stillfundamentally feudal-colonial society°. (The film) falls into shape beautifullyand builds a good deal of earned sympathy for the characters." One woman'sambitions are frustrated by the everyday machismo of her husband; another is afailing nightclub singer; a third, drawn to the counterculture, becomes a drugaddict; and a fourth clings to her affection for a now-gay husband. The stuff ofsoaps, but not here; censored for its political content on its release in thePhilippines, "Moral charts a brave course of dissident sympathies."(quotations from Elliott Stein, Film Comment)