Life and Times of Lav Diaz: Existentialist Dilemmas of a Filipino Director

The distinguished Philippines director, Lav Diaz turns sixty this year. Diaz was born on December 30, 1958 and raised in Cotabato, Mindanao which has seen an armed movement for a separate Muslim State for the past several decades. In this overwhelmingly Catholic country, Mindanao sticks out like a sore thumb to some people. Diaz is nothing less than a phenomenon in that not only does he direct his interminably long films, but also writes the screenplay, does the camera, and the editing as well. He studied at the reputed Mowelfund Film Institute in Quezon City and worked in the studio system for a few years in the beginning of his career before abandoning it altogether and “starting out on his own”, in all senses of the expression.

In the past twenty years of so, Diaz has directed some twelve films, some of them running to four, six or ten hours. Understandably here is a maverick who couldn’t care less for the market, all the more remarkable for the working at a time when practically everything is market-conceived and market-driven.  His films are the way they are because, as he has repeatedly pointed out, they are governed not by the time factor but by consideration of space and the interventions of Nature. If his films tell any stories, these are about the social and political upheavals his country has known in the past half a century or so, notably the Marcos dictatorship (1971-87), propped up by US arms and money and, to an extent, the Vatican. (It needs to be pointed out, though that a section of the local catholic hierarchy headed by Cardinal Sin of Manila, was opposed to the tyrannical rule of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos.)

Diaz is always focussed on the culture and history of the Philippines, employing his unique sombre aesthetics and a trademark minimalist style to narrate the struggles of the marginalised, the so-called “extra to the standard force”. It is worth noticing that his protagonists often start out as pure, naïve, innocent believers in the settled order of things in this life and the life hereafter, only to experience disillusionment and a darkening of the soul by personal experience of individual and collective evil. His films mesmerize the viewer even as they fall into a pattern of exploration of issues close to the director’s life’s philosophy, such as the evil practised by the political / moneyed elite, pauperization of society.

Diaz’s The Woman Who Left (2016, b/w 227 minutes) was, unfortunately, not seen by too many people when screened at the 22^nd edition of International Film Festival of Kerala in December, 2017, but at least some of those who did, could not have failed to appreciate the fact that they had witnessed a masterpiece; a piece of brilliance about alienation, existentialist angst, a thirst for revenge, and a conclusion as sad as it is startling. Winner of the Golden Lion for best film in Venice 2016, The Woman Who Left is a deeply-felt and grimly-realised philosophical exercise about the many faces of love in a violent, exploitative and largely loveless society – love’s betrayal, love’s revenge, but also about love’s embrace and sacrifice.

At the centre of the narrative /discourse is Horacina, a peace-abiding, helpful, middle-aged woman accused of murder. Horacina discovered that she is in fact innocent. On her release, the woman goes searching for her missing son, causing her to find more than what she had wanted to – the terror, lawlessness, corruption, hypocrisies and of the earlier decades of popular misery at the hands of conmen and carpetbaggers.  Horacina’s search for family results in the coming to view of a nation and society in object surrender to evil. In his, by now familiar, intriguingly slow and revelatory style, Diaz shows us the conversion of an otherwise loving and lovable person to a victim convinced of the dire necessity of settling scores with a rich and powerful aggressor. In an ending that reminds us of the scorpion that carries its poison in its tail, the woman looking for justice is helped in her mission by the introduction of a cross-dressing male “foreign element” who has known pain no less himself.

Lav Diaz reads like a profound philosopher as he observes: “The inspiration of the story is Tolstoy’s God sees the Truth, but waits. I had read the story a long, long time ago.  I only remember the promise now. I already forgot the story and the names of the characters. I remember that what really struck me when I read it was that no one really understands life. We don’t really know. This is one of the essential truths of existence. Or, some of us can at least feel a continuum, that things we do can be consequential. And more often, we abide and succumb to life’s randomness”.

And yet, judging by the visual and aesthetic meanings of the film, we can perhaps say that however philosophical, in the sense of being other-worldly, Diaz  may claim to be, he makes it a point not to seem to be carried away from the here and now. The constant hard realities governing the liver of the undeservedly penalised, whether in individual or collective terms, are never lost sight of by the director.  But, then again, it is difficult not to be moved by the almost magical, some would even say mystical, qualities that gradually come to attend the loving relationship between Horacina and the brutally mauled young man she has taken under her motherly wings. It is this incredibly-wrought fusion of the need to recognise horrid ground realities with a call for compassion, if not love, that marks out Lav Diaz for the gentle poet and the angry provocateur that he is. Every long take in the film – and there are ever so many – is a structured space crammed with details; often half-lit, at best, with the sighs of the fallen and the struggling; each held in place for an eternity, and more. On view is a poet of pain and a politician of principles at his most refined and, arguably, his most rebellious.

Vidyarthy Chatterjee is a film critic