Killing fields

Movie Review
Magellan
Directed by Lav Diaz

(Earlier this week the Film Academy of the Philippines and the Film Development Council of the Philippines officially announced that Lav Diaz’�� Magellan is the country’s submission to the 98^th Academy Awards, better known as the Oscars, for the Best International Feature Film category. — Ed.)

Looked down at my notes after just having finished Lav Diaz’s latest I see — circled and underlined, on top of the page — the words: “so much killing!”

That was the most lasting impression the film made: so much death, almost all of it deliberately inflicted. Not actual violence — Diaz has declared again and again he doesn’t enjoy being explicit onscreen — but the consequence of such violence, either sprawled on a beach or draped over rocks or curled tight like an injured worm, often with an exhausted or resigned expression on the face, at times elaborately drizzled with a thick peri-peri sauce. Corpse after corpse after corpse and you think maybe Diaz is trying to say something: that it’s everywhere, in every country; that it comes in all forms, from all kinds of causes; that it gives rise to every consequence, from vengeance quests to military reprisals to international conflicts to — and this strangest of all — a unique and private peace. Some of the bodies show a serenity and lack of suffering they never had when alive; one wonders what Diaz himself thinks of death, if he seems to obsess with its depiction on the big screen.

This film is actually a first for Diaz: previously he’s devoted himself to telling the Filipino experience, at most (in Batang West Side [West Side Avenue]) the Filipino-American experience. With this feature, Diaz focuses on Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan (in his native language “Fernao de Magalhaes”) – an important figure in Filipino history, not so much for “discovering” the existence of the Philippine Islands (at this point a loose collection of kingdoms living in uneasy truce) as for directing King Carlos I’s attention to the islands’ potential riches, ripe for exploitation.

In short, Magellan (played by Gael García Bernal) is a calamity waiting to happen.

He wreaks havoc in the Malaccas (where the local defense consisted mainly of near-naked men and women with their hands raised, begging the gods for help while he cuts them down); watches his boss Governor Afonso de Albuquerque (Roger Alan Koza) deliver a rambling megalomanic rant before collapsing, sips wine over the Governor’s prone body. He loses half his men across Portugal’s conquered territory and has to fend off their widows as they stand on a beach, demanding to know what became of their men; he acquires an indentured servant named Enrique (Amado Arjay Babon), a beautiful wife heavy with child named Beatriz (Angela Azevedo), a new patron in King Carlos (Victor Chesnais), and five ships to find a new path to the Spice Islands — west as opposed to east, circumventing Africa, India, China, and his former patron King Manuel of Portugal (Daniel Viana).

And if you think Magellan was a brutal sonofabitch commanding troops on land, you should see him in a boat.

He metes out swift punishment to a pair of sodomites, enforces discipline with a heavy hand, suppresses mutinies, overall gives you the impression that a ship — especially one making a crossing expected to last only a few days, which turned out to be three endless months — is basically a vast bowl of concentrated misery, all sores, simmering anger, sicknesses physical and mental. Headed, mind you, slowly but inexorably west, towards what we now call Southeast Asia.

Magellan’s eventual arrival (Warning: skip the rest of this paragraph if you haven’t seen the film!) comes as something of a surprise, as fate — or God if you will — arranges a little twist: the children of Cebu suffer from scurvy, which Magellan handily treats with a spoonful of quince. It’s the rare touch of humanity that complicates an otherwise grim portrait, and for the first time you see Bernal’s charismatic smile as he lifts an afflicted child to his arms, and you’re reminded that he already has a son, and knows — somehow — that his son has passed. You think “maybe this man isn’t so bad after all” and might even start rooting for him to succeed (you shouldn’t, but you might).

Visually the film — the rare recent Diaz in color — is a striking example of heightened verite. Locked-down camera setups capture corners and intersections of alleyways or huts, and the action (or if you like, the charnel house) scatters accordingly; figures are lit sideways, edged with a warm sunset glow. The footage aboard the Trinidad is particularly extraordinary — Diaz managed to snag himself a full-sized galleon, and you hear the creak of the planks, the wind whistling off the lines, the snap of filling sails; even the locked-down camera can’t help but shudder a bit, as the ship goes into an especially hard roll.

The film is such a ravishing experience it seems churlish to complain it’s a mere 160 minutes — a blink compared to Diaz’s more marathon features. But I’d love to learn more of Enrique’s story, especially his thoughts and feelings about his latest master, and the thoughts and feelings of Raja Humabon (Ronnie Lazaro) as he listens to this sickly pale example of a European go on and on and on about Christ and morality.

Diaz did mention planning a sequel, focusing not on that military bore Ferdinand but on his mysterious wife Beatriz — as Azevedo plays her she has this still presence that commands your attention, and her few scenes with Bernal have a palpable warmth. Diaz also mentions the sequel should run about nine hours — nine hours! What does Beatriz have to say to us that Magellan can’t, or won’t? What tea might she offer, or fling in our faces? I, for one, would like to know.