By Juaniyo Arcellana
IN THE dichotomy of anti-reviews, there must be at least one Lav Diaz film that doesn’t turn out the way you expect it, the plot full of pitfalls and booby traps, twists and turns unpredictable as the weather, a narrative that can only come from the director’s fertile imagination.
Whenever he has a new film, slated for premiere at a festival in Europe, he sends an advance screener for review, comment or appreciation, even icy silence, but “only if you have the time.” It is no easy task to watch a Lav Diaz film in the age of attention deficit disorder, to sit still for four hours in a world restless as a pop-up advertorial or click bait. There is no rushing cinema, surely not Phantosmia, Diaz’s exploration of a retired master sergeant’s olfactory phantoms now part of the director’s almost 20-strong filmography.
For all the stock in trade scenes in black and white: burning huts and crackling flames that may remind the viewer of a line from Moby Dick, do not stare too long into the fire young man, or the steady thrumming of rain on makeshift roofs or sodden ground such that you can smell the crush of grass on mud, indeed like a phantosmia, there can be no cinema as pure as this.
Though it is getting dark soon we will have to cope with the travails of master sergeant Hilarion Zabala, played by Ronnie Lazaro, walking straight out of the set of Diaz’s work of not too long ago, Kapag Wala Nang mga Alon. Lazaro it seems has made a career out of playing flawed, nearly demented, anti-heroic characters who somehow carry the narrative to cathartic conclusion, in the best tradition of Dostoevsky protagonists, or even the director’s own last holdout of vaudeville essayed by John Lloyd Cruz in Historia ni Ha, Sid Lucero reprising Raskolnikov in Norte, End of History, even Charo Santos as the woman who faded into the ranks of the disappeared in Ang Babaeng Humayo.
Part of the stock in trade are the memorable characters, personas that seem to have been built up from the dregs of waking, troubled dreams, and the location itself in some far-flung God forsaken barrio that serves as a backdrop for tableaux almost like a separate actor.
Make no mistake but Lazaro cuts a tragicomic figure as Zabala, who has to deal with his nasal ailment while coming to terms with his past as military operative who had engineered bloody dispersals and rubouts, on top of having left his family, but now finds himself alone but not abandoned — he still has his daughter, played by Toni Go, but is however still alienated from his musician son.
The image of the sergeant with a hankie on his nose may in fact be a throwback to the actor’s performance art in the now shuttered Pinaglabanan Galleries more than 30 years ago, wherein he adopted a persona of cowboy style holdupper much to the consternation of gallery goers deep in their happy hour cocktails.
It was, after all, Lav Diaz who gave us Dolly de Leon when first we saw her in Historia ni Ha, with their motley band heading for an island of illusory promises, complete with plodding carabao in flash flood and mud which may be familiar enough for monsoon drenched citizens. This time Hazel Orencio has yet again mastered the art of the contrabida, who pimps her adopted daughter Reyna as played by late blooming ingenue Janine Gutierrez, who has barely a page of spoken dialogue save for a few stutters here and there, but how she draws subtle attention like an innocent Erendira by providing the preternaturally damned sergeant a foothold on redemption in a penal colony called Pulo.
We are however not in the business of spoilers, much less spoiler alerts, because this may be reserved for a separate character, Dong Abay, late of Yano and Damo, as a poet that serves as a one-man Greek chorus, particularly in his ruminations on death and how it can be a door to what must not be said or known for the nonce, that’s how occult death is though not altogether forbidden as can be heard in Abay’s phrasing and enunciation, not everything is in need of a guitar. Paul Jake Paule meanwhile is the penal colony administrator and the sergeant’s bete noire, slowly ripening to his just deserts.
Have to hand it to Diaz and the Lavteam, the way they regularly come up with these quiet gems that have surely made a mark in the senses of cinema, and with the prices of movie tickets these days will surely give you more than your money’s worth.
In Venice, where floods are a way of life, we can almost see the reviews coming out, in Variety or some avant-garde magazine on Phantosmia and its gallery of forsaken characters in black and white, like a perpetual magic hour, nonchalantly slouching toward a Bethlehem of the mind and some form of deliverance.
