Ballad of the fallen colonial idols
The conceit of a missing Lapulapu is one of the bravest thus far in the filmography of Lav Diaz, whose Magellan is the unanimous choice as country representative to the Oscar foreign film derby.
So deeply ingrained in the psyche of the colonized are the tropes of former colonizers, such that it takes more than a literal sea change to exorcise all past ghosts, short of rewriting history itself at the risk of perpetuating a cancelled culture.
The conceit of a missing Lapulapu is one of the bravest thus far in the filmography of Lav Diaz, whose Magellan is the unanimous choice as country representative to the Oscar foreign film derby.
Going beyond praxis, too, is our first exposure to the Battle of Mactan through the children’s book by Gemma Cruz, Makisig, the little hero of Mactan, which as the storybook goes was first to warn the sleeping natives of an army of white men about to wade ashore.
Of course, it wasn’t until much later that we found out there was no such Makisig, except in the writer’s imagination that referenced a similar Dutch folk tale about a boy that saved a village from being overwhelmed by the sea by reporting a hole in the dike.
Magellan, a lyric foray into the life and times of the 16th century conquistador, who happens to discover this archipelago in a roundabout way, is different from the director’s more than a dozen other works. First, it is in color, although subdued and markedly diffuse, not since “Norte” around 10 years ago had Diaz chosen to depart from his trademark black and white. Then it’s wildly edited version runs short of three hours, comparatively manageable when placed alongside the majority of his films that can easily average more than double that in a kind of endurance aesthetics. Lastly, Diaz this time eschews key events in recent history that previously formed the grist of his work, notably Martial Law, the drug war, and the age-old resistance to oppressors be they dictators or other misguided authorities, perhaps even the antihero himself caught in a quagmire of self-doubt and circumstance.
Gael Garcia Bernal wonderfully underplays the titular role, largely opaque except for flashes of wisdom or discernment as he commands his fleet of ships to circumnavigate the world, including an interlude with his ladylove Beatrice in Portugal thru a short-lived romance in the time of gangrene, never has a festering wound inspired a subdued fission.
As has been stated by other reviewers, it is not Diaz’s style to show overly graphic violence, though “Magellan” has its fair share of beheadings against a backdrop of sky with an almost magical glow, the sea and waves omnipresent as the creaking of the floorboards and related vertigo about to be glimpsed through a porthole, either starboard or portside, with remarkable composition.
Bloodied bodies strewn on a beach are never sensationalist nor rhapsodic, merely the camera stating a fact of the matter, while the natives run around in near panic in what could be Malacca before the invention of underwear.
Sure enough the film as readied for commercial viewing is a marvel of editing, indeed mustering all the director’s discipline to keep proceedings on even keel without sacrificing pertinent details, though one can’t help but suspect that there’s another film or two waiting to digress from or improvise on this particular “Magellan,” which Diaz admits is unique in itself and the director’s cut still in the works could run around nine hours with its plethora of backstories, a totally different product likely under the Sine Oliva imprint.
Discourse is what is important, the director says, and here lays bare the importance of Rajah Humabon as played by Ronnie Lazaro, the real nemesis of the conquering westerner. There’s a scene in the Cebu sequence (shot in Sampaloc, Quezon, redolent with natural sounds and coconut trees) where the armies of faith gather the idols of the heathen natives and stack them up as if for a bonfire, at the same time castigating the heretics.
What price the cure for scurvy and the first Santo Nino procession in the islands, if the wooden anitos will just be set aflame along with tradition and superstition, the entire animist spectrum that sustained our ancestors.
A phantasm, Lapulapu is, the film dares to suggest, and if Magellan was slain by one who in fact never existed, then maybe the Portuguese explorer might himself be a fiction, wiping out centuries of our colonial past as we knew it like so many fallen idols, the history books mere figment of a writer’s imagination. The story turns out to be the slave Enrique’s after all, and that he was a party to the conspiracy so he could be free, or at least move closer to freedom.
Magellan himself was a shadow of his former self by the time he reached Cebu, so that what the natives did to him was merely ministerial, going through the motions of a virtual coup de grace. Never has a shell of a man hold so many stories, an unravelling that contains an accidental birth of a nation or semblance of self-awareness, and a lurch back into the void is a step or two forward into the future of cinema — Philippine cinema, the irony of Oscars campaign notwithstanding.
(This review is in memory of director Mike de Leon and film critic Digna Santiago.)
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