Magellan [2025]

 With his hypnotic film Magellan – through co-existence of sublime beauty and harrowing monstrosity – Lav Diaz delivered a searing peek into the horrors, madness and violence of colonial adventurism, and a trip into the heart of darkness. Sitting alongside such spellbinders on this theme as Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Martel’s Zama, the great Filipino auteur’s smouldering latest exercise in formal rigour and slow cinema – at a “mere” 2 hours 45 minutes it’s among his “crispest” works, but there’s apparently an 8-9 hour director’s cut waiting somewhere – depicted a demythologized examination of the colonial campaigns to Malaysia and the Philippines by 16^th century Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan (played by Gael Garcia Bernal, an international star, which is a first for Diaz, even if in a non-heroic turn). It begins with the capture of Malacca under Afonso de Albuquerque’s command, in which Magellan participated and returned with a slave. Back home in Lisbon, while dealing with the accusatory gaze of widows of dead compatriots and marriage to Beatriz (Ângela Azevedo) who nurses him to health, he first tries in futility with the Portuguese king and then successfully convinces the Spanish king to sponsor a crazy circumnavigation voyage. The film – composed through ethereal and visually splendorous static frames straight out of classical oil paintings – thereby covered the exhausting expedition that begun Magellan’s descent into zealotry and brutality, and then his obsessive attempts at converting Cebu’s residents en masse into Christianity, while punishing “heretics”, that ended in bloody carnage. Epic in scope, minimalist in form, staggering in ambition and viciously powerful in its anti-imperialist stance, this is a bold new direction in Diaz’s life-long meditations on his country’s past and present.

Director: Lav Diaz

Genre: Drama/Historical Epic/Biopic/War/Adventure

Language: Portuguese/Spanish/Cebuano

Country: Philippines

History of Ha [2021]

 Lav Diaz’s sublime 4-hour gem History of Ha bore the hallmarks of “slow cinema” and the free-spirited Filipino maestro’s oeuvre – formally rigorous, structured around a metaphorical and deeply existential voyage, infused with trenchant political commentaries, filmed in entrancing single takes and stark B/W, and with continuous interplays between silence and conversations. It’s foregrounded on Philippines’ murky and turbulent political history, wherein even its most respected leader Ramon Magsaysay had problematic shades associated with his stint – his anti-Marxist Cold War interventions, militarism, and links to the US – while two repressive, brutal right-wing rulers, viz. Marcos and Duterte – ironically alluded to as “leader from the South” and “leader from the North” in the film, even if they were deliberately anachronistic as the film is set in 1957 – would dominate the country’s political scenes in the future. Akin to Hou’s masterful The Puppetmaster – which portrayed a puppeteer amidst complex, tragic political forces – the protagonist here’s Hernando (John Lloyd Cruz), a well-known ventriloquist and socialist poet, who retires around the same time as Magsaysay’s death in an aircraft accident. As his country’s dark fate gets sealed and his personal life is thrown into despair upon his fiancée’s decision to marry a landlord to help pay her family’s debts, the lonely and disillusioned man embarks on a directionless cross-country voyage and takes refuge in self-imposed silence – speaking, where unavoidable, through his puppet Ha. During his odyssey, he’s joined by three oddball characters – a do-gooder nun, a brash prostitute and a lost teenager – who all wish to go to an island where gold rush is underway, and finds himself in a disturbing psychological tussle with a despotic local strongman (Teroy Guzman) who’s a Marcos/Duterte stand-in.

Director: Lav Diaz

Genre: Drama/Political Drama/Road Movie

Language: Tagalog/English

Country: Philippines

From What Is Before [2014]

 Lav Diaz powerfully centered From What Is Before – his brooding, majestic 5 ½ hour tour de force – around the rise and establishment of Marcos’ US-backed right-wing, repressive military dictatorship in 1972, in the name of “saving the republic” by weeding out “anti-national and communist elements”. Its richly atmospheric portrayal of the upending of a grimy rural community’s dynamics through infiltration of outside forces, reminds one of the Tarr magnum opus Sátántangó; its compelling but circuitous depiction of a place being engulfed by fascist forces, was reminiscent of Haneke’s masterful The White Ribbon; and, towards the end, it strikingly showed the vicious paramilitary units who appeared like mirror images of their Indonesian counterparts in the brilliant and harrowing diptych The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence. Diaz set this disconsolate microcosmic tale in a remote, barren, impoverished, rain-washed coastal village, where indigenous faith comingle with Christianity, and the residents exist in fragile eco-balance – a kind-hearted Father (Joel Saracho); a mentally ill girl (Karenina Haniel) both cared for and exploited by her elder sister (Hazel Orencio); a resolute farmer (Perry Dizon); a lecherous winemaker; etc. The balance initially gets shaken with a few eerie occurences – hacking of a rich landowner’s cows, burning down of houses –; then gets severely disturbed – through the dubious motives of a nosy peddler, a double suicide –; and finally gets irrevocably shattered with the arrival of the army and their henchmen, placing the village under curfew leading to Marcos’ proclamation of nation-wide martial law. The delicately moody visuals of the harsh landscapes captured through stunning B/W photography, along with the progressive tonal variances and deliberate pacing, magnificently foreshadowed the impending sociopolitical doom and devastation.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Lav Diaz

Genre: Drama/Rural Drama/Political Drama/Ensemble Film

Language: Filipino

Country: Philippines

Norte, the End of History [2013]

Lav Diaz’s mammoth and magnificent Norte, the End of History – ironically, the Filipino master’s shortest film despite its staggering 4-hour length – is as epic in its thematic breadth and ambition, as it’s intimate in its evocations. A modern day adaptation of Crime and Punishment, the Dostoyevskian movie touched upon such themes as morality, coincidence, guilt, and the futility of justice and redemption. Fabien (Sid Lucero), a smug, arrogant, potentially reactionary and pathologically disilussioned guy, who’s left law school midway despite his academic brilliance, murders the greasy loan shark Magda (Mae Paner) because of his belief that all bad elements must be expunged and exterminated from the society; he becomes an aimless drifter thereafter, and the devastating consequences of his pat rationalization of good and evil are felt near the end when, after many years of estrangement, he visits his devout and placid elder sister. A parallel strand revolved around an impoverished couple, Joaquin (Archie Alemania) and Eliza (Angeli Bayani), who’ve staked all their belongings to Magda; though he’s accused of the crime and imprisoned, he refuses to lose his sense of idealism; his soft-spoken wife, in a heart-wrenching turn, takes up the cudgels of earning a modicum of survival for her two kids. Interestingly, the film started on a verbose note, filled with abstract debates in a mock-serious tone, but grew increasingly bleak, contemplative, melancholic and even troubling as it progressed. Filmed in a mix of medium and long shots, and comprising of a number of single takes – which, especially where there were meandering conversations within them, struck me as deceptively brilliant – this is a complex, intriguing and meditative work that both demands and rewards patience.

Director: Lav Diaz
Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama
Language: Filipino
Country: Philippines