Dir. Lav Diaz | Cast: Ronnie Lazaro, Janine Gutierrez, Hazel Orencio, Paul Jake Paule | Drama 250′
There is possibly no other contemporary filmmaker like Lav Diaz in the fact that his life’s work is the history of the Philippines, and how that history has created what could be looked on as the cursed earth of post imperialism taken over by warring religious factions, social values and their deterioration, and issues about distorted history and its psychological effects on the nation and its people. The Chilean documentarian Patricio Guzmán is another, of course, but his work is documentary form and not drama.
With his latest, Phantosmia premiering Out Of Competition at this year’s Venice Film Festival (which has become his preferred location to unfurl new work), he sees the completion of a loose trilogy that follows When the Waves are Gone and Essential Truths of the Lake which examines the cyclical trauma and endless violence of Filipino history.
The film centres on Hilarion Zabala (played by Diaz regular Ronnie Lazaro), whose mysterious olfactory problem has recurred. A psychiatrist suspects it to be a lingering case of phantosmia, a phantom smell, and possibly caused by trauma, a deep psychological fracture. One recommended radical process to cure the ailment was that Hilarion must go back and deal with the darkest currents of his past life in the military service. Re-assigned to the very remote Pulo Penal Colony, he must also confront the horrific realities of his present situation.
As has been his wont in the majority of his films Diaz opts to film in a beautiful monochrome which he describes as assuming the role gunita (memory) for him and transports him back to the primal seasons of his youth.
Diaz is mistakenly referred to by that pejorative term “Slow Cinema”, which is the simplistic reasoning to do with the length of his films rather than a narrative description. He is most definitely a cinematic formalist but he takes and plays with genres and their construction to alight on something of his own making. A singular vision that is if anything a “Rhythmical local cinema”. The rhythm of the countryside, but definitely not ‘slow cinema’.
An audience coming afresh to a Diaz film will perhaps think his scenes seem banal taken on their own, but the power of his National cinema is the culmination of them, their juxtaposition that couldn’t be anything less than what they are.
There are quite a few tropes from classic American cinema in Phantosmia, from the late Westerns of the 70s that show the dying of a particular warrior culture with a man both out of place and time who endeavours to do what he feels is the morally correct decision while also searching for a redemption that he won’t be given. With the decision to rescue a young woman forced into prostitution we of think of Taxi Driver, which is of course a loose remake of The Searchers. There the inevitable violence is mundane and banal, and certainly not cathartic. Hilarion, if anything, resembles Paul Scrader’s God’s angry man, dictating his thoughts and confessions into a journal.
In totality we have a society rotting from the inside. Filled with corruption and rewards for the strong and wrongheaded exploitation against the bad men and the price they paid to secretly define their time and their fight overcome their regret and come to self acception. ©D W Mault. @D_W_MAULT
VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2024 | OUT OF COMPETITION 2024