There is, up to a certain point, the exclusion whereby we short-circuit those who are sick and reintegrate them in a sort of marginal circuit, the medical circuit.
- Michel Foucault
Melancholia, the
latest masterwork from revered Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz, smolders
with the embers of black emotions and delivers on the promise of its
portentous title. A film about bereavement and loss, Melancholia
documents the tragic plight of desaparecidos,
those forced to disappear, and those dispossessed by their
disappearance. While there is a dark lingering on personal and private
sorrows, the sorrows emanate and resonate equally from social and
ideological solicitudes.
Running
at a meditative and heavy 450 minutes, Melancholia proceeds ponderously
and woundedly in this saga of the bereaved and the disappeared,
recalling such films on the same theme and subject as Luis Puenzo's The
Official Story. In Melancholia, however, there is the likeness of a
double madness -- one born out of the sorrows of its characters and the
other born out of their artificial efforts to overcome these sorrows.
Meanwhile, the imagining of the dead is close to idealization, sheer
heroes in the fictive mind (romantic even to the very end). So there
lies the emotional crux of the living in this film: how to move on, how
to forget, against the cruel tenor of memory.
Memory
here is conscience itself, a burden but a necessary evil. It is not
just an unshakable scourge that will not let up, but a kind of register,
a document of history that will never let injustice go uncommented and
unvindicated, certainly not those inflicted by the muscular fascism of a
government. Here, the coercions of artificial solutions such as
psychology – a kind of ideological state apparatus, Orwellian and
Althusserian, that returns those who deviate and dissent to the control
of society – is no match for the inexorable onslaught of painful
remembrance. There is no forgetting. Time, with all its clichés, is no
healer.
When
we meet them at the outset, the bereaved are not unlike fugitive
characters from a Pirandellian play, converging on the amphitheater of
Sagada: Alberta, Rina and Julian, all bereaved by the loss of their
revolutionary spouses. They have sought refuge in psychological
treatments, as well as support groups meant for their kind, but they
remain tormented by grief and and anguish. Immersed in one character
after another, Alberta
as a prostitute, Rina a nun, and Julian a pimp – all assume characters
in the hope of reorienting and reconnecting with life. By any
appearance, their experiments are ill-advised: Rina is inconsolable with
despair and uncertainty; Alberta
breaks down in tears while in bed with a customer; and Julian has
scrambled his moral compass, assuming the persona of a procurer, a
character straight out of his fantasies.
Characters in Melancholia – like the learned and literate artists in Death in the Land of Encantos
– have a literary cast to them. There is little chance of encountering
them in everyday life. But for once, it is reassuring to see a filmmaker
redefining what is possible in film, and the splendid thing is, his
characters are convincing in their sharp individuations, whether they be
artists, writers, widows, or rebels. Through long, unflinching takes in
unrelieved monochrome, these characters take shape and come full
circle, full of fierce wit and learning, raw feeling and emotion, dark
bile and vitriol, making their own tormented humanity much more tragic
and lacerating to witness.
Thus we find Melancholia’s characters reassuming their real lives in the capital. Far from the prostitute of Sagada, Alberta
is the youthful principal of an elementary school while Julian is an
established writer and the proprietor of a publishing house. Rina, by
now, is prematurely dead, presumably of suicide. Between Julian and Alberta,
who must also reassume a difficult role as a mother to Hannah, a young
girl also orphaned by the disappeared and severely traumatized, the
dynamic of hope and capitulation will play out. As Melancholia traces
the threads of its dark denouement, we sense that many of its
expositions are no less important and relevant.
Here, as in its companion piece, the equally vitriolic and similarly themed Death in the Land of Encantos,
Lav Diaz uses various mouthpieces to lay bare his various indignations
and convictions, personal and social, ideological and political. Diaz
has no want of strong opinions prompted by the abuses of the
establishment and the entrenched. In Death in the Land of Encantos,
there are stinging rebukes against the fascistic military, thieving
government officials, and even artists blatantly lobbying for the
National Artist Award. This time, aside from skewering the big targets,
Diaz levels his criticism against the corruptions in the educational
system and those in the realm of commercial cinema.
But,
while crying injustices remain, and while towards the end of
Melancholia, repressive state apparatuses are overwhelming and ruthless,
Diaz tries to leave us with subtle reassurances. We see a quiet and
lyrical imagining of how Renato, Alberta’s
husband, must have coped with the prospect of death. Trapped on all
sides in a remote forest by advancing military troops, he lays down his
gun by his side as rain falls like a reprieve. Exchanging it with pen
and paper, he writes a letter never to be sent, a haunting letter about
his greatest sorrows. About the fate of his country, its numberless
pains, never seeing Alberta
again… Thereafter, a bittersweet moment as we see his remains, and
those of his comrades, borne in a procession by villagers on his way to a
modest burial. There is no better way to die. Let his sorrows be our
own too.
reviewed: January 6, 2010
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