NORTE, HANGGANAN NG KASAYSAYAN (Lav Diaz, 2013)

As far as Lav Diaz remains the capable puppeteer pulling his strings, Fabian Viduya serves as the director's vitriolic mouthpiece, the bitter voice of commentary spouting a deeply rotten state of things rooted in a deeply flawed history and a pseudo-scientific society, this time as filtered through the self-destructive philosophies of the West. Inhabiting Norte's narrative, Fabian is a powder keg, a loose cannon ready to explode. Anyone versed enough in Western critical thought and philosophy may discern how he spouts contradictions that try to evade, but only betray, an entrapment in dangerous thinking, whether it subscribes to the specters of postmodernism or something else, one that's bound to end in grief and tragedy. 

Fabian foresees a "Zero Society," a scenario, presumably, after the end of history, the end of ideology, where infinite pluralism and pandemonium reign, symptomatic of a widespread but faulty appreciation of postmodernism. To counteract this apocalyptic belief that anything goes, Fabian proposes the elimination of "what is wrong," but what is wrong to his mind is even more all-encompassing: his very own family, his unscrupulous usurer, his feckless self, anything that may represent evil. Thus what is right may be a question mark given the near totalization of what is wrong. What seems to loom large and imminent before him is the ideology of capitalism, which he observes and suffers on a daily basis. Otherwise his position seems overdetermined by the abstractions of theories and the burdens of imagination, never as utopian as what he may envisage in his dark den of books.

As Norte's discursive context, the choice of postmodernism and other pseudo-sciences such as religion is well-calculated. As an ideology, postmodernism is no longer as peremptory and relevant as it used to. Perhaps, for instance, Fabian should even be glad that European hegemony and the European grands recits are over and done with. Decentering or delimiting the meta-narratives of the West will allow us to cultivate our own national narrative, or retrieve our own glorious past. Instead, Fabian is caught up in a personal dialectic with himself: he seems to see no redeeming value in finishing his studies, none in Magda the usurer who lends at an exorbitant interest, none in his rich, capitalist sister despite her willingness to set him up for life, and perhaps none at all in himself if he fails to bring about the fruition of his notions of a utopian scheme of things. To the discursive puppet, Fabian, hostage to Western aporia, it all seems to hinge upon the outright negation of what is wrong, what is rhizomatically evil, a solution that is purely theoretical, doctrinaire, easier said than done.

What is most striking about Norte, then, in the context of depiction and discourse, is its embodiment of a Filipino protagonist in a radically foreign, postmodern mold -- distinct from the voiceless subalterns and the oppressed that dominate our present cinematic lore. Postmodernism is nothing new as an aesthetic and stylistic methodology, favored for a while by such filmmakers as Raya Martin (e.g. anti-narrativity,auto-referentiality and so on), but Norte's novelty lies in its unique central character: a postmodern creature, a Cartesian ego, depicted in an extreme crisis of self-awareness and contradiction. Postmodernism is a European discourse and yet here we encounter its tendencies lurking among us in ways that recall a Bruno Dumont or a Michael Haneke film. Reexamining it with scrutiny, however, will bear the writer-director out. For one Diaz sharpens his end-of-history thematics with the flipside of millenarian euphorics – made more pronounced and conscious by Diaz's references to Mayan and Filipino-cult doomsday scenarios. Fabian’s psychological meltdown is not just the product of conceptual cooptation by Westernized learning but also of cultural and sublunary complexities that encompass us in the idea of an actual end of times. 

Fabian's flawed vision may foresee the world's imminent collapse, but his thinking remains not ahead of the times but behind it. European postmodernism does not signal the world's end since it has since been undercut by such schools of thought as Third Culture, Post-Theory or Post-Criticism, and Cognitivism. European continental philosophy is now just one of many available philosophies, no longer the monolithic arbiter of critical or philosophical thought. If Fabian had exerted himself enough in his studies, he would have been spared the ill effects of defective perspective and ideology. Perhaps even spared committing the same ghastly murders as detailed in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. (But of course, it will be said, that's the film's very point, a variation on Dostoevsky's novel.)

Norte is not, however, a mere portrait of addled intellectuality and the lunacy born out of it. Norte may be Diaz's stern reproach of the West itself – how its ideas and ideals have corrupted us and the rest of the world. (On the other hand, Norte itself, as a film product, might be an act of gratitude, a catering to the liberal West, especially Europe, where many of Lav Diaz's masterworks during the last decade have been feted, have found home and have made their screening debuts.) Norte itself is a classical movie (in its enshrined binary opposition, however, it may be viewed as structuralist and thus anti-humanist as well) but timeless in pitting good and evil in all their complicated antinomy and dynamic. While the murderous Fabian represents someone who deludedly thinks he is ridding the world of the evil of capitalism, his reverse is the classical, martyr-like (if perhaps fatalistic) Joaquin Atillano, an inherently good man, seemingly too ironically good, who gets convicted and jailed for the crimes Fabian has committed. 

As a kind of Filipino everyman, Joaquin Atillano answers his trials and tribulations by dint of virtue. In prison, Joaquin does not become the hardened and brutalized human being; instead, it seems to bring out the most noble deeds in him. Even when distance and absence separate him from his family for years, he steadfastly remains rooted in goodness. He is a living, breathing transcendence: in his dreams, he journeys in astral travels and visits his family in faraway Ilocos. Tarkovskian shades of our own paranormal and mystical phenomena take place here. This is Diaz’s roundabout conviction made manifest -- the reciprocal of Fabian’s warped unconscious -- that in spite of the distinct presence of evil in the world, Diaz still puts faith in the tenacity and uprightness of man. Postmodernism and other insidious ideologies may confound us, but Diaz will not leave this up to the perils and deadlocks of such a discourse, only to the identifiable contrast of evil against which to put virtue in true relief. (Does Joaquin seem to simulate virtue? Certainly not.) If the world is inexorably approaching the apocalypse, man must persist -- despite the prospects of extinction and dissolution -- in transcendent goodness.

Title in English: Norte, The End of History 

MELANCHOLIA (Lav Diaz, 2008)

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

DEATH IN THE LAND OF ENCANTOS (Lav Diaz, 2008)

 

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

AGONISTES (Lav Diaz, 2009, work-in-progress)

The ancient Greeks invented and defined the term apropos of our everyday fate. Agony. Ours is one born out of a myriad of cataclysms – both natural and auto-inflicted. Lav Diaz’s Agonistes, an admitted work-in-progress but already fully formed, meditates on the Filipino’s most pressing worldly struggle, his struggle to break out of material poverty and the non-material consequences of poverty. Hints, however, point to a more eschatological theme – the centrality or the simultaneity of the spiritual struggle.

Directing from his own script, Diaz transposes the ancient term agonistes to latter-day Philippines. He singles out the classic strugglers of contemporary times, the working-class men and the peasants, to shoulder grinding poverty. In truth, it can be said that the agonist has been a favorite fixture of Diaz’s other films: Heremias is both agonized and anguished, so is Hamin in Death in the Land of Encantos, tortured and demented at once. Epic but individual in scope, mythological and biblical in character, Diaz’s stories are veritable stories of struggles, sagas of agony.

Agonistes opens with a grandiose sequence of robust buildings under construction in Manila. This is the magnificence that, on a sudden, contrasts with the slumped figure of one construction worker, a young man named Juan. As he narrates what he has witnessed to Manoling, an older, brotherly fellow worker, he has been traumatized by the sight of one of his co-workers being buried alive in wet concrete at the construction site. But the occupational dangers are not the end of it – the rainy season soon floods the metropolis and makes it impossible for them to reach their workplace.

These two become so desperate that, over a drinking session, they latch on to a kind of Pascalian wager. Manoling has revealed a secret of treasure supposed to be buried in his family’s land somewhere in Bikol. If they find it, they are set for life. If not, it’s just a matter of a few days’ work and a matter of looking a little silly, perhaps. They aren’t even thinking of that: Manoling is just “tired” of the daily grind.

Quitting their jobs, they emerge in Bikol one day, purchase digging equipment and get to work. They meet Manoling’s brother who farms the land but whose wife Loleng is terminally ill with a lung disease. As the trenches deepen, Juan and Manoling only manage to turn up rusty metals and an old military boot. Manoling’s brother seems content to live a farmer’s life and jokes in the background about a share of the spoils. At dusk, all of them often – including the bed-ridden Loleng -- gather to watch the magnificent – otherworldly? – sunset.

Agonistes is a miserabilist ode to materialism – or an oblique one to spiritual “reorienting.” Or perhaps, their unresolved dialectic. As the almost Syssiphian diggings go on, the crash and crunch of shovels against sand and gravel alternate with the sound of Loleng’s deathly and fatal coughing. As Juan and Manoling pursue their treasurely dreams, they seem oblivious to the specter of death, the possibility of afterlife. Like a colossal god, Mayon Volcano towers in the background to shame their pointless efforts. The Pascalian wager of the search for treasure can thus be read as an allegory on misplaced faith itself, the pursuit of false gods.

Even in this rough cut, Agonistes holds up as an excellent film. The layers of meaning are already robust. The simplistic notion, for instance, of the materialistic agonist (represented by Juan and Manoling) is elevated by the presence of other kinds of agonists: Loleng, the terminally ill agonist whose struggle is physical illness and presumably coming to terms with her faith; and Manoling’s brother, outwardly content, but something else deep down.

It’s a world of lingering shadows, and Diaz complements his classic themes with black and white cinematography. It serves him well again – appropriately eerie and reminiscent, among others, of the work of Bela Tarr. Diaz’s compositions are painterly -- he must have studied classic portraiture in preparation for this -- which reinforces the timelessness and universality of his themes, whether it is a reckoning of the ills of the contemporary Filipino or not. Diaz’s work will transcend the borders of time and space and nationality, our agony aunt for all time.

reviewed: October 26, 2009

FLORENTINA HUBALDO, CTE (Lav Diaz, 2012)

Florentina Hubaldo represents the Tess of the d’Urbervilles of Lav Diaz's emergent diegesis of Bicol. (Slowly but surely, he is constructing a cinematic geography around his native land -- the topography of Mayon Volcano is now all but trademark -- with works situated thereabouts like Death in the Land of Encantos and Agonistes). Like Thomas Hardy’s hard-luck heroine, every sort of misfortune has befallen the young Florentina. Florentina’s father is a savage beast, the embodiment of evil, brutally killing her mother, enslaving Florentina and prostituting her even before she has grown into full womanhood. Florentina is so violently banged up by her father that she suffers from chronic traumatic encephalopathy and, as a result, must constantly and traumatically remind herself of who she is. Any plan of an escape that she dreams of is often quashed by her father’s brutal and drunken omnipresence, her being continually chained to a bed, and an inutile grandfather, who discourages her with inexplicable fatalism. All circumstances conspire to doom Florentina to a tragic fate. 

This story of agony seems to have been conceived by Lav Diaz as an amplification of an earlier 2-hour film entitled Agonistes, admittedly a rough draft, a work in progress, when it was shown a few years ago and had since been withdrawn from circulation. This lost piece of Diaz’s filmography has returned here and been refurbished to serve as a flipside to the fate of Florentina, a moral fable about two misguided poor souls desperately searching for lost treasure in the shadows of Mayon Volcano. Their desperation, they will soon realize, may not be so desperate vis-à-vis the tragedy of Florentina. Of late, Lav Diaz has favored the idea of mise en abyme, the idea of two or more disparate stories existing within a single film, acting like mirrors reflecting each other, producing supplementary or complementary reflections, or an amplification, whether through distortion or exaggeration, of its desired themes. This is evident here, as much as it is in last year’s magnum opus, Century of Birthing, with its intricate story-within-a-story structure.

On the surface, Lav Diaz's mature aesthetics remain intact. There is a handsomeness to the visuals here, a cleaner, less grainy and higher black-and-white contrast to the cinematography than we are accustomed to that suggests an upgrade of technological wherewithal. Florentina Hubaldo, however, also makes apparent its dramatic rawness, that it might also be a work in progress. The Cinemanila programme pegs the running time at 5 hours, but the version shown was nearly 6 hours long. This version of Florentina Hubaldo evinces scenes that lack artistic rigor and run obligatorily long. Long takes are Diaz's métier, only this time they feel like longueurs; a kind of tedium, from a sense of lacking narrative tension on the screen, overtook me, a kind of fatigue perhaps after having gladly sat through all of Diaz's lengthy mature works -- from Batang West Side to Century of Birthing. There is tightening at the editing end to be done.

Diaz also misjudges the ending of his film. Sacrilege to second-guess someone like Diaz, who knows a thing or two about narrative structures and storytelling to say the least, but the conclusion is pure anticlimax. Disappointing, since this is where he usually distinguishes himself, surcharged as he has often been with the most powerful, most unforgettably resonant epiphanies in film history to punctuate many of his masterworks. This is a 6-hour film without a pay-off, sadly. Between two choices – the fate of Florentina and her equally ill-fated daughter, on one hand, or the fate of the two treasure hunters on the other – Diaz has to choose wrongly.

Diaz merely repeats himself. The architectonic redundancy lies in concluding the film with Florentina’s eventual escape from the clutches of her father. No need at all: this particular detail by then has already been narrated and emphasized by the Good Samaritan – brother to one of the treasure hunters -- who would help Florentina and adopt her daughter. This anticlimactic ending takes up a better part of an hour and merely proves to be uneventful, interminable, and torturous -- not because of Florentina's symptomatic display of CTE, but because it is obligatory, and willfully repetitive in its purpose. To my mind, instead, there is some unfinished business in the fate of the two treasure hunters. Their search for treasure has only led to their discovery of an elusive and maddening gecko. There are possibilities left to explore there – the idea of a false, or a worthy, transcendental signified -- represented by the gecko, perhaps. What becomes of them? What is there for them to glean from their failures to find treasure and from the tragedy of Florentina? Is it enough to leave us with the ironically bourgeois rationale: the social and moral illusion that everyone, including these two desperate souls, should count themselves thankful for their lot in life, simply because there are human beings less fortunate than them like Florentina?

If Diaz's modest purpose is not a moral tale but pure, self-evident mimesis -- that is, a stark portrayal of evil and the unspeakable casualties it may cause -- Florentina Hubaldo is sufficient. It is patent and dramatic enough, even melodramatic. The sight of a discombobulated Florentina, reeling from CTE, repeating and repeating her name and her narration of her sob story is sufficiently effective. Yes, she will not be forgotten. Repetition ad infinitum can do that. Diaz's obsession with Dostoevsky's idea of evil shows itself again with the Karamazov patriarch, all vices and all hatefulness, finding expression in Florentina’s evil, incomprehensibly, inexplicably evil father. An exaggerated  reminder to all of us that such evil lurks in the world, that such unlucky, improbable creatures like Florentina Hubaldo and her daughter exist and can fall victim to it. All in all, Florentina Hubaldo, CTE is in any other auteur’s filmography a worthy addition, but coming at the heels of all of Diaz’s masterworks in the last 10 years or so, it is something of a letdown.