Lav Diaz 2013 Philippines
Starring: Sid Lucero, Angeli Bayani, Archie Alemania, Angelina Kanapi, Soliman Cruz, Hazel Orencio, Mae Paner, Charlotte Cabacungan, Joel Cabacungan, Dea Formacil, Sheen Gener, Perry Dizon
Despite receiving considerable critical acclaim over the past few years the films of Filipino director Lav Diaz haven't really got past the festival circuit in the West so getting the opportunity to see his latest, the tragic Dostoevsky inspired Norte, The End Of History, is a real treat. That's not to say the film is frothy or even fun, in fact it's a four and a quarter hour long, deeply cynical and horribly violent exploration of the ills of Diaz's home country and by extension the viewer's own. The main villain of the piece is Fabian, an apparently brilliant law school dropout whose raging disenchantment with the world as he sees it has led him to beer, borrowing money and beating his chest to anyone who will listen. And oddly people do listen (even if he won't afford them the same favour) and many scenes have a core in intellectual discussion of politics, society and culture with the darker points of the story only creeping in almost unnoticed. After one such debate the group he's with find a young woman stabbed in the neck and, while they rush to her appalled and concerned, he simply stands to the side deep in thought and bathed in ironically angelic sunlight. The next moment he's playing with a flick-knife in his apartment, a building overlooked by a makeshift cross. In spite of all this (or perhaps because of nature's ostensible regard) his friends and family adore him, he's even having an affair with the girlfriend of a former classmate and it's only in an early night alone with her that he drops his conceited façade, rejecting her adulation because he can't force himself to believe that he deserves it. It's this frustration that acts as the main catalyst of the narrative pushing him to murder an understandably mean-spirited moneylender although whether the killing is borne of a sudden desperation for justice or just severe boredom is disputable. It may even be an attempt to test his own theory that "a revolutionist should be able to kill someone", the irony being that he fails, capable to commit the crime but not deal with it. Immediately afterwards he doesn't run but simply crumples on a staircase terrified at his actions and stays there for several minutes before leaving, crumbling into unconquerable grief and spiralling into further felonies against his own family in a seemingly frantic attempt to convince them that he's a monster and that their immovable love for him is a mistake. After his final brutal deed the camera stays with the actor playing him, an exceptional Sid Lucero, for an almost unbearably long time as he eschews speech altogether in favour of sheer anguish, his shirt drenched in blood and clinging. Somewhat strangely this last crime was seen as the most disturbing by members of the small audience I saw the film with mainly because it was against an animal. One spectator even admitted that they could sympathise with Fabian until then (although personally I thought he was an utter shit throughout) suggesting the slightly troubling truth that people often prefer animals to other humans. Diaz appears to share that sentiment making the dog in question the only being that Fabian is pleased to see when he visits his family. There has to be a fall-guy of course and this is where the worlds of the film and the novel split with the second main character Joaquin (an excellent Archie Alemania) being punished and tricked into a confession, too poor and uneducated to understand the legal system controlling him. The first time he arrives on screen he's hampered by financial worries and a large cast on his leg, an out-of-work family man trying to walk upright on a broken limb and rather easily tipped over. His time behind bars breaks from the source material and the generally realist atmosphere, one sequence showing his sleeping body levitating in a possible indication of how he deals with his incarceration. Here Diaz not only empathises with but also respects his resolve not to fall into despair even as every sighting is marked by a new bruise. Joaquin's wife Eliza (a near faultless Angeli Bayani) meanwhile is the most sympathetic and likeable character, fighting for the existence of her family and providing a link to Indian cinema's tradition of strong discarded women. Early on a disturbing scene shows her sending away her younger sister and taking her two children on a trip to the top of a cliff, struggling not to push them off before growing into a saintly example of coping skills, helping Diaz take what at heart is a pretty basic tale of undeserved punishment and moral rot and turn it into a contemplative and artistic study of current life both abroad and at home. For all its greatness however the film isn't perfect. In the first half I couldn't think of a single shot that could be excised but what follows is less compelling, bogged down in excessive miserablism and, in truth, could have been cut by a fair few minutes. Similarly a couple of dreamlike interludes following an unseen presence gliding through the various settings are interesting and call to mind a silent but malevolent beast surveying a world that's descended into a jungle but are basically out of place experiments in form. Regardless Diaz's next project, From What Is Before, clocks in at a colossal five and three-quarter hours and from a brief synopsis appears to have an even larger basis in the surreal and the uncanny. If it gets the full release it undoubtedly deserves I'll be at once keen, cautious and mildly afraid.
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