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Hesus, Rebolusyunaryo
Alternate Title: Hesus, Rebolusyonaryo
English Translation: Hesus, the Revolutionary
English Title: Jesus the Revolutionary
Year of Release: 2002
Director & Screenwriter: Lav Diaz
Producer: Regal Films
Cast: Mark Anthony Fernandez, Donita Rose, Joel Lamangan, Ronnie Lazaro, Pinky Amador, Ricardo Cepeda, Bart Guingona, Richard Joson, Orestes Ojeda, Marianne de la Riva, Lawrence Espinosa, Arvin “Tado” Jimenez, Dido de la Paz
It is the year 2011 and a military junta has taken over the Philippines. Underground resistance forces are present but paranoia has infested their ranks. Caught in the middle is freedom fighter Hesus, a rebel from within the ranks. But as he advocates his ideologies, the words of his mysterious superior Miguel and those of manipulative junta member Colonel Simon make him question what he should really fight for.
The so-far last regular-length film made by long-form master Lav Diaz is an overlooked achievement in at least two respects: it was the last canon-worthy action entry during the celluloid era, and it remains the best science-fiction (in the qualified futuristic sense) local movie. A third distinction—an up-front skills display—was fortunately only temporarily abandoned by Diaz, who appears, with 2013’s Norte, Hangganan ng Kasaysayan, to have reconciled recently with the commercial preferences of Filipino spectators. Set almost a decade in a future (2011) that again fortunately never came to pass, the movie envisions a junta-led dictatorship of such vicious efficiency that only the best-trained military officers can be capable of providing revolutionary resistance.[1] The notion that Philippine society as we know it can turn dystopic even before it has reached a decent level of developmental comfort raises a few questions, such as “What are we fighting over then?” and “What happened to our strong women?” Hesus, Rebolusyunaryo operates as a cautionary text that raises the question of whether any form of dictatorship by Armed Forces reformists can be better than the one that the country experienced under Ferdinand E. Marcos, and does not hesitate to give out one resounding answer: “Never.”
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Florentina Hubaldo, CTE
Year of Release: 2012 / B&W
Director & Screenwriter: Lav Diaz
Producer: Sine Olivia
Cast: Hazel Orencio, Kristine Kintana, Noel Sto. Domingo, Willy Fernandez, Joel Ferrer, Dante Perez, Brigido Tapales, Ana Arrienda, Cesar Arrienda, Martina and Julia, Edelyn Nava, Erica Nava, Jeffrey Sigua, Christopher Tapales
Florentina Hubaldo keeps running away from her home in a rural town in Southern Luzon, but her father always manages to track her down and punish her while exploiting her for his drinking and gambling expenses. One of the effects of his severe physical abuse is chronic traumatic encephalopathy or CTE, a condition where she suffers from migraine and other signs of brain trauma; for example, she keeps repeating a short spiel she had prepared about herself but has difficulty completing it. Her grandfather is concerned about her plight but is too old and weak to help. In a parallel narrative, a group of friends search for some treasure supposedly buried in one of the friends’ yard. The friend who owns the place takes care of a sickly girl whom he calls his daughter, whose health keeps worsening. These two stories eventually intertwine in an unexpected manner.
Waves of admiration greeted Lav Diaz’s venture into a self-styled version of long-form filmmaking—called “slow cinema” by most observers, a term that Diaz abhors. His first attempt, Batang West Side (West Side Kid, a.k.a. West Side Avenue, 2001), broke the four-hour maximum running time for commercial releases. His next long-form entry, Ebolusyon ng Isang Pamilyang Pilipino (Evolution of a Filipino Family, 2004), ran for about double BWS’s five-hour length, at 9 to nearly 11 hours, depending on which version is being screened. Ebolusyon bore the qualities that would mark the rest of Diaz’s long-form films: done in digital video, utilizing black-and-white cinematography, filled with long takes and long shots, completed with a small crew whose members double as the movie’s actors, with material drawn from harrowing historical memory. To further challenge audience expectations, he announced a trilogy based on the theme of trauma.[2] Florentina Hubaldo, CTE is the trilogy’s last entry, and the shortest at six hours. It stands out from Diaz’s other early work in that it was the first and, until recently, the only one to focus on a woman. The title character’s suffering is so distressful and heartrending that only a mean-spirited viewer would attempt to look away and ponder the movie’s allegorical issues. Unlike its long-form predecessors, it also foregrounds the tranquil beauty of the countryside, with the majestic presence of the Bicol region’s Mayon Volcano overlooking the proceedings. The movie’s stately and formal perfection provides the anchor by which Florentina’s experience becomes bearable enough to witness; in fact, it is the mercifully few moments when she cannot be seen, when only her cries can be heard, that the movie comes closest to visceral horror. Diaz’s storytelling strength is in his handling of time and duration, and Florentina Hubaldo provides further evidence in its interweaving of seemingly distinct strands that, by the movie’s sad-yet-hopeful close, fully reward the patient viewer.
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Norte, Hangganan ng Kasaysayan
English Title: Norte, The End of History
Additional Language: English
Year of Release: 2013
Director: Lav Diaz
Screenwriters: Rody Vera & Lav Diaz
Producer: Wacky O Productions
Cast: Sid Lucero, Archie Alemania, Angeli Bayani, Hazel Orencio, Mae Paner, Soliman Cruz, Angelina Kanapi, Ian Lomongo, Kristian Chua, Noel Sto. Domingo, Perry Dizon, Moira, Sheenly Gener
Fabian is a smart albeit radically oriented student who puts off finishing his last year in law school, while Joaquin is a simple man who struggles to provide for his family amid various financial setbacks. Their lives intersect when one of them commits a crime but it’s the other who gets arrested for it. The varying degrees of punishment they endure lead to a path of either moral degeneration or personal enlightenment.
The movie that strains at the four-hour mark replicates what Eddie Romero’s Aguila (1980) managed to prove in an earlier film generation: that the Filipino spectator is capable of attending extra-lengthy presentations, given the proper motivations—major stars then, widespread acclaim this time. The fact that Norte, more than any previous three-hour-plus local commercial release, delivers on its promise has certainly helped its case and, more important, its often-reviled audience’s. Its success in indigenizing Russian source materials, notably Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 19th-century novel Crime and Punishment, may be ultimately impossible to resolve. Nevertheless Lav Diaz ensures that we won’t be deprived of the cinematic equivalents of literary wonderment, generously providing ravishing scenery, arresting performances, and twists of fate that swerve, often without warning, from the ethical to the corrupt, the sublime to the horrific, the quotidian to the phenomenal.
Notes
[1] A provocative reading was ventured via confidential message by RCO, an independent researcher from the Department of European Languages at the University of the Philippines’s College of Arts and Letters. Drawing from the context of the film’s year of production, he stated that its period setting and use of military stragglers may have been a way of allegorizing the then-ongoing internal conflicts among various factions in the Communist Party of the Philippines and their armed operators, specifically the Alex Boncayao Brigade; see Alecks P. Pabico’s “Reaffirmist–Rejectionist Schism: The Great Left Divide,” The Investigative Reporting Magazine 5.2 (April–June 1999) at http://www.marxists.org/history/philippines/ra-rj/pabico/great-left-divide.htm. Circumstantial corroboration may be found in the critical remarks Lav Diaz expressed regarding a 1988 film, Cesar S.B. Abella’s Patrolman, where the lead character is targeted for assassination by the ABB despite his having been an upright citizen; see Diaz’s “Propaganda ng Pulis (Police Propaganda),” Manila Standard (January 4, 1989), page 15.
[2] The materials as well as the narratives in the trilogy are unrelated, and may therefore be viewed individually. For those curious about the other titles, these are the nine-hour Kagadanan sa Banwaan ning mga Engkanto (Death in the Land of Encantos, 2007) and the 7.5-hour Melancholia (2008).
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