For madness unleashes its fury in the space of pure vision.
- Michel Foucault
Persistent
rain falls, reminiscent of Tarkovsky’s rains, supplied by dark,
ponderous skies overhead. Desolate landscape, stark diorama: Rock, sand
and boulder. These are, in truth, a wasteland of lava and volcanic
debris. Farther behind looms Mayon Volcano in the background, an
imposing, threatening monolith of nature. Here and there, trunks and
stumps of trees stand, battered, windswept, leafless and lifeless.
Suspicious calm, suspicious rondure of newly turned terrain: something
else fattens and bloats this land. Except for the percussion of rain,
nothing now stirs, until we see a speck of life in the distant
background, a man we learn shortly, slowly making his way across
difficult terrain. This man is Benjamin Agusan, a former activist and a
poet of some renown, returning from a long exile in Russia to his hometown of Padang in the Southern Luzon
region of Bicol. We see him weeping, disconsolate, not unmoved by the
dark spectacle he has witnessed, and the grave irony is: these are his
last, desperate days of sanity and reason.
Understand
that this man returns to an unrecognizable land in the aftermath of a
natural catastrophe that has devastated his native ground and much of
the neighboring countryside. Understand that he returns with a heavy
personal freightage: the dead of the past, the deceased of the present,
the onset of madness and the madness of conscience. Like a ghost, with
no fanfare, he returns to the bosom of childhood friends, Catalina the
sculptor, a former lover, and Teodoro, a man of many artistic talents
who has opted for a simple life as a family man and a fisherman. Each
one has sustained a familial or personal loss in the wake of this
calamity, but we gradually realize through the thicket of dialectical
discourse, their favorite pastime, that their sense of loss is made
doubly bitter by intense resentment with a corrupt and callous regime.
Filmed in stark and brooding black and white, Death in the Land of Encantos
catalogues not just the casualties of natural calamity but the
casualties of state repression and dereliction. Enacting the tragic but
possibly heroic story of one Benjamin Agusan with many personal and
political overtones, writer-director Lav Diaz intersperses his 9-hour
epic with damning actual documentary footage taken in the aftermath of
Typhoon Reming, a super typhoon that unleashed not just its own fury but
Mayon Volcano’s destructive wrath. What these footages invariably
paint, through a series of interviews with locals in December 2006, is a
portrait of a people devastated by wrathful nature, degraded psyche and
dehumanizing regimes. This is the Bicol region, but it could just as
easily be Basilan or Baguio in this miserable archipelago, it wouldn’t have mattered.
Benjamin
Agusan’s story embodies a story that is all our own, his is the
allegorical tale of one long-suffering nation. Little by little, we
learn through snippets of flashbacks and exposition about the painful
verities of his life: his mother going mad and dying in an asylum, his
sister subsequently committing suicide; his father abandoned to die
alone; and Hamin himself, while sojourning in Russia, developing the
symptoms of lunacy. We learn through Hamin’s confrontation with a
shadowy military operative that his activism and political poetry have
earned him arch-enemies among the military. We learn of his torture at
the hands of this same man. We learn of the probable death of Amalia,
Hamin’s lover, at the height of the typhoon. Hamin is embattled on all
sides, his tormentors encompass all kinds: man, himself, nature.
The descent into madness, thus, figures prominently in Death in the Land of Encantos.
Madness here is not a simple determinism of heredity but a function of
unbearable witness. What overwhelms Hamin is not just the anguish of
personal tragedies but that of havoc on a nation. He is not a faultless
soul, but we witness that neither is he a poet insulated in an ivory
tower. Towards the end, the strain of madness becomes more frequent. We
see him sleeping in ungodly spaces, wedged between rocks, sprawled on
waysides. We hear him literally addressing his ghosts. We hear of him
wandering aimlessly in various stages of unreason. But his last few
moments of lucidity are defining, none more so than what transpires at
denouement: a recitation not of his poetry but of his most profound
creeds and allegiances.
Against
this backdrop of mental collapse, of death and devastation, however, is
the story of friendship. Hamin, Teodoro and Catalina are veritable
kindred spirits: friends and ex-lovers who know each other’s darkest
secrets and even recite poems to each other. These friends virtually
talk in codes, their conversations are the stuff of scholarly
discussions. They may have outgrown some of their idealistic ardors but
they remain socially attuned: theirs is a bitterness against “crocodiles
and rapacious kind” who prey on the country. They deplore the latest
political killings, but what of their involvement? Token? Gestural?
Corrupt
artists, as much as corrupt politicians, come in for stinging critiques
here. Cultural ciphers, seekers after fame, socially myopic – these are
what artists are, according to Catalina and Teodoro. Beyond heroic
commitments to causes and ideologies, artists merely seek the cult of
the self. Yet there is a strong suspicion of a redemptive moment at the
end for Hamin and what he stands for. In Heremias, Diaz, with almost
didactic intent, gives his title character a defining moment to salvage
and transcend his passive soul and he obliges. Here, in Death in the Land of Encantos,
redemption has an ambiguous edge: as Hamin braves the last moments of
torture, he recites the most defiant poetry he knows, the National
Anthem. Whether this is a martyr’s act or his death wish as imminent
madness confronts him, the truth might just vindicate him.
reviewed: January 27, 2010
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