From Leopard to Lion: the literary Lav
Soon after Lav Diaz won the 2014 Locarno Golden Leopard award, it was established that he had entered moviemaking as a scriptwriter for Fernando Poe Jr.
This will be a problematic piece. I’m torn between friendship and objectivity, between contextual knowledge that involves comparisons and the task at hand which is to zero in on a film that just made our country proud by winning the Venice Golden Lion award.
First off, I must confess to aligning myself with those who, even as cineastes, have expressed reluctance against having to watch films that stretch on for more than the standard length of theatrical screenings. Well, three hours max would be all right, we say, and only when the material keeps one engrossed.
On my part, it’s already a bit of a personal sacrifice in being cloistered in a public theater from where it would still take at least five minutes to escape with finality so as to light a cigarette. It’s different with marathon screenings of a film series or NetFlix serial offerings conducted in one’s bedroom, where a No Smoking sign is absent and toilet breaks come easy.
Thus, uncharacteristically joining the SM Megamall throng on a Saturday with full resolve to tie myself up to a theater seat for Lav Diaz’s Ang Babaeng Humayo bore a badge of courage — at least as an acknowledgment of the level of admiration I’ve held for the director, besides good old friendship.
Given all these, it was still natural that
only half an hour into the film, I began to have misgivings over the questionable need to stretch out establishing shots to the point of straining any personal resolve on the part of this viewer. Suffice it to say that after completing the entire exercise, I still came away with the view that any other selfrespecting editor could and would have cut it down to at most three hours, that is, shaved off a good 45 meandering minutes of the allotted screening time.
But that’s not the same as saying that I regreted having watched the full film, nor should this takeaway reaction be read as a dismissal for any deficient creativity.
After all, one goes to watch a Lav Diaz film with an open mind, initially in acceptance of the director’s aesthetic intent. We have been given fair warning of his predilection for stretching out his works, this while abiding by what today’s critical parlance appears to have identified as the “contemplative film.”
Well and good. While of late I have not been so immersed in film watching, the recall remains of a much earlier era when a Kurosawa or Bergman engaged me rapturously with a contemplative film or two. The characteristics of the genre are still familiar: long periods of silence, the stark shot whose composition may hold one’s interest beyond the required span of deepening recognition of metaphor or allusion, the slow scenes where no dramatic physical action engages the characters, the “pregnant” moments that invite full embrace of appreciation — before, that is, the exercise lapses into boredom or incredulousness over such possibly self-indulgent features.
So I’ll give Lav or any other film director that privilege — of attempting to draw us in into worlds of questioning and deep discernment. Usually there is some moral, intellectual or philosophical reckoning supposed to be arrived at, if we had the properly motivated search tools. The demand or challenge is made: to give up any arguments in favor of shorter attention span such as that engendered by MTVs or Mad Max-type cinematic circuses
No, we can’t forever express affection for default-type coverage of every scene, with fast cuts effectively interlinking close-ups, long shots, dollies, pans, crane or drone overviews. For the most part, we will be fed still scenes or a snailpaced procession of long, lingering shots that induce sonorous engagement. Such succeed only when the envelope-pushing with regard viewers’ acceptance opens up to a truly remarkable insight or irony reflective of life or its irregular edges.
In Lav Diaz’s case, he comes armed with a heavily literary cast of mind. In an MTRCB
Uncut television show interview with him late last year, soon after he won the 2014 Locarno Golden Leopard award, it was established that he had entered moviemaking as a scriptwriter for Fernando Poe Jr.
His recent films have been indebted to Dostoevsky and Tolstoy — transplanted as these authors’ extrapolations on existential questions have been to a tropical environment. Ang Babaeng
Humayo is bookmarked by repeat reading/ recitations of a short story that is the scriptwriter-director’s own, supposedly bylined by one Bahagharing Timog, an early nom de plume.
Initially, it is read by a fellow inmate in a women’s correctional to a learning group organized by the protagonist Horacia who has been a teacher. In the end, this protagonist, exceptionally played by Charo Santos, recites it from memory, to a different set of listeners, mostly children, in a free if yet bedraggled environment. The characters are curtseys to Fellini. The
balut vendor (played excellently by Nonie Buencamino, and who alone is privy to humor with his lines) has to be a hunchback. He isn’t shown wandering the streets, but rather unrealistically plants himself on corners of empty neighborhoods, which he then assails with his verbal selftouting. A demented woman, quintessentially
taong grasa, strikes me as having no other function in the narrative but to show that instinctive charity from a stranger isn’t a monopoly of the main character, Horacia/Renata. A brood of waifs alternatively become recipients of Renata’s balut largesse and victims of abuse perpetrated by a large woman on her frail partner. Then there’s the hunky transvestite (John Lloyd Cruz) who among all these characters becomes the suitable foil for the protagonist’s dilemma — on whether to remain the lady of mercy she essentially is, or the avenging angel of darkness.
No doubt the ensemble proves themselves as acting adepts. Charo Santos’ (as Horacia/Renata) extended mise en scene series with John Lloyd Cruz as the trans are remarkable not only because both are left to acquit themselves as improvisational actors, but that they succeed in fleshing up their literary stereotypes on their own.
The singing and drinking scenes turn into a veritable pas de deux of existential rapport beteween the two. Memorable as well is the dialogue in shadow between balut vendor and Renata as tomboy in baseball cap, when she proposes that indeed she could be a creature from the dark. Just as arresting is the non-confessional dialogue between the parish priest and Michael de Mesa as the fat cat-prey, on the Russian/universal question of God’s existence.
Fundamentally, sitting through such a contemplative film separates cineastes into binary sets: those who may be able to stand film or its extended parts as other than entertainment, and those who accept that those of such a genre, quietly if relentlessly addressing weighty conundrums, are what win out in European film fests — whether for the poverty-porn ingredient of exotica as offered by Third-World settings and characters, or simply as an in-your-face statement against much of what’s in vogue as fast-paced commercial movies.
Okay, my age may exempt me from any derogation for being part of a hung jury. Not only have I already gone much and often through gravitas’ rainbow questions, without gaining definitive answers. Something in my psyche dictates that my fave movies to date are Mars Attacks and From
Dusk till Dawn. There, I’m with the entertainment animalia, with a partiality to humor — whether from hunchbacks, aliens, yodelers or zombies.
Still and all, I tentatively cast my vote with the Pinoy pride that Lav continues to swell. And it’s good to know that MUBI will soon present “the first-ever online retrospective of … (his) sprawling sagas of the Philippines’ tumultuous recent history and beleaguered but strong-willed and passionate peoples (which) are epic in scope but bracingly intimate and direct in style.” Access is at https://mubi.com/specials/lavdiaz.
One of 10 Lav Diaz films will debut each month, from Batang West Side to his 2016 13-minute short Ang Araw Bago ang Wakas. This last may swing me away from the hung jury. And I won’t even have to take a pee break while appreciating possible literary finessing on Lav’s part.