Lav Diaz
From What Is Before

The cinema of Lav Diaz, a monolith with which the cinephile eventually tries to engage, is inextricably tied to the history of his country, the Philippines: a melting pot of cultures, scarred by colonialism, corruption, and natural disasters. The author always sides with the wretched, but his gaze is distant, unflappable, even when the camera captures rapes, murders, diseases, and assorted misfortunes. Because what he seeks is not compassion, but the answer to a question that he already posed in Florentina Hubaldo CTE, still his greatest masterpiece: Where do evil and suffering come from?

From What Is Before (Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival 2014) is set in the early '70s, when Ferdinand Marcos is in power and martial law is about to throw the country into turmoil. In a small barrio on the fringes of society, mysterious events occur: an epidemic decimates the cows; a man is found murdered, his body scarred with bites and scratches; terrifying cries are heard from the forest; some huts are burned down at night. Something is threatening the (apparently) peaceful and primitive life of the inhabitants, and it seems to have little to do with Marcos' dictatorship...

Parallels with Haneke's The White Ribbon are inevitable both for the story itself and for the context: both stories set in the past, on the brink of radical social changes, represented through a cold direction and cinematography. But above all, both stories harbor an omen, a malevolent message that seems to go beyond the political implications of the period. This is not a historic film tout court, and it's no coincidence that the military occupation plays a secondary role, a narrative instance that still shouldn't be ignored, especially in the final scenes.

Once again, the figure of the sick woman emerges, a body that becomes an effigy of the land: Florentina Hubaldo was suffering from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) which erased her memory, thus compromising the reconstruction and the signification of her own story; here instead, we have Joselina, afflicted by a severe handicap that makes her resemble a monster, the possessed, and at the same time a creature with healing powers. Moreover, nature itself, an omnipresent element in Lav Diaz's filmography, is portrayed on one hand as a terrible mother, on the other as an object of worship and veneration, a hybrid between indigenous folklore and Christian iconography: Joselina's sister, Itang, often goes to pray before a large rock by the stormy sea, where she believes a sort of "Virgin" resides capable of healing Joselina. Throughout the film, nature and man interpenetrate even at a purely visual level, thanks to long, very long, broad panoramic shots, and a soft black and white. Many are the men we see on screen, just as many are the solitudes.

One particular event casts a shadow over the barrio: the rape of Joselina, after which everyone will bear some guilt, leading us to wonder to what extent the arrival of Marcos' troops actually caused the dispersal of the inhabitants and the abandonment of the much-revered land. It is a question left hanging and will take shape right in the bifurcation of the finale: the last funeral ritual celebrated according to an ancient local custom, a definitive farewell not only to an old friend but also to one's roots; and the nascent violence of the dictatorship, which from that moment will write a chapter in the history of the Philippines that is nothing short of controversial.

Always faithful to his own pachydermic syntax worthy of the reputation of "contemplative cinema" (various Béla Tarr and Tsai Ming-liang in comparison seem like entertainment films), but without abandoning a more linear narrative structure, Lav Diaz creates what is perhaps his most personal and nostalgic film, based on his childhood and the characters that populated it; and certainly, as far as I am concerned, gives his followers another masterpiece of enormous scope.