Lav Diaz
Naked Under the Moon

The film begins. Something already seems wrong. Knowing the gargantuan cinema of Lav Diaz, from the very first millisecond, one notices an enormous difference between this "Naked Under the Moon" and the films that have inscribed the Filipino director's name in the Olympus of slow cinema (a label the master doesn’t quite favor) and cinema in general (there, that's much better). In "From What Is Before," "Florentina Hubaldo, CTE," and all his other monumental films, there are no real opening credits; at the beginning, one only sees a black screen with small white letters: "Sine Olivia Pilipinas," followed by "Sine ni Lav Diaz," and finally the film's title. No music, no sound. In "Naked Under the Moon," however, we hear notes accompanying the names of those who participated in the creation of the film, which are, among other things, written in color.

The film begins. It is in color. Another radical difference that distances this work from those that, from "Ebolusyon ng Isang Pamilyang Pilipino" ("Evolution of a Filipino Family") onward, would have followed, with the exception of "Norte, the End of History," which marks a slight return, possibly nostalgic, to Lav Diaz's origins and his cinema. In its duration, less than 2 hours, the viewer's mind keeps reconsidering the evolution that the Filipino director will have, also noticing the minimal differences between "Naked Under the Moon" and his subsequent films, like, to give a silly example, the presence of a car at the beginning of the film, a means of transport that will disappear in Diaz's later production. A trifle, true, but still important, as it brings the film closer to a commercial dimension (a term not to be understood at all pejoratively) and distances it from that "slow" style that Diaz will make his own.

Anyway, many of the elements that will characterize Diaz's future films are already present in this one in an embryonic form. Attention to the lower strata of society, violence, poverty, etc. All topics that the director will develop in his river-like films that will elevate him to maître of cinema. However, in "Naked Under the Moon," they appear much less effective due to the superficiality that a duration of about an hour and fifty minutes imposes on the film and the excessive presence (and desired by the production to make the work more appealing to the general public) of banal and artificial sex scenes, clearly not part of Diaz's original idea. If, in fact, in subsequent films, sex will be present but minimally and, above all, presented in a raw and realistic way, as in "From What Is Before," for example, here it becomes merely an object to titillate the spectator's erotic imagination, who, otherwise, according to the production, would have been bored. It is no coincidence that, starting from his next film, "Batang West Side," Lav Diaz will begin to ignore commercial needs, creating a five-hour film that was still not entirely free from them until he reached the anti-commercial austerity of the aforementioned "Evolution of a Filipino Family" (about 11 hours) that would then become an unmistakable artistic trademark of Diaz's cinema.

I haven't talked about the plot. I know. But I don’t want to, I want you to discover it for yourselves, because despite having several flaws, "Naked Under the Moon" is an essential film for any lover of Diaz's cinema, to discover the changes that occurred during his career, and for anyone curious to approach his filmography. It is not the "classic Diaz film," it is not dominated by static long shots, silence, black and white, nor is it any of that. But it remains a fundamental film for understanding the cinema of the Filipino director.