By the standards of Filipino formalist and running-time maximalist Lav Diaz, his latest opus “Magellan” qualifies as a veritable blockbuster. A grand-scale historical biopic on a universally known figure, headlined by an international star in Gael García Bernal, it’s Diaz’s first feature since his 2013 breakout “Norte, the End of History” to be shot in color, and one of his shortest to boot: just 160 minutes, no sweat for faithful Lav-ers who sat through the 10-hour-plus “Evolution of a Filipino Family” and other Diaz megamovies. “Accessible” is a relative term when it comes to this most simultaneously expansive and ascetic of filmmakers, but this is as close as it gets.
Which is to say that while “Magellan” reps Diaz’s best shot at general arthouse distribution in some time, it’s no artistic compromise. The spirit of slow cinema is alive and languid in this stunningly mounted, politically rigorous work, which confronts any viewers hoping for a sweeping biographical romp with a frank post-colonial perspective, thoroughly and violently dismantling any romanticized legacy trailing the eponymous Portuguese navigator. As a panorama of the damage wrought by the Age of Discovery, where one culture’s conquest was another’s catastrophe, it’s sobering and subtly transfixing — though it played in the non-competitive Cannes Premiere sidebar, a Competition berth would have been appropriate for a work this transporting and substantial.
The film’s cultural vantage point and anti-colonial sympathies are established in an opening scene set on the historic state of Malacca in 1504, some years ahead of the Portuguese capture thereof — a mission on which the young Ferdinand Magellan was a crew member. In an unspoilt landscape of silty earth and dense, wind-rustled tropical vegetation (presented onscreen with a rapt, Malickian serenity), a nude Indigenous woman forages in a river before freezing at the unfamiliar sight of a white man, and screaming a warning to her tribespeople. Eden has been invaded. We soon cut to eerily still tableaux of bleeding indigenous bodies strewn across the once-pristine landscape, viewed either from a respectful distance or the detachment of those who slayed them.
That “Magellan” tends to show the mournful aftermath of battles rather than their grisly enactment may be a budgetary restriction, but it’s one that serves the film’s resistance to any dynamic or grandiose presentation of colonizers. As Magellan, a reserved, well-cast Bernal gets notably few close-ups, mostly held in wide shot by Diaz and his co-cinematographer Artur Tort — a regular collaborator with Albert Serra, whose fevered, revisionist austerity as a filmmaker does feel like an influence here — in meticulous compositions that rarely prioritize humanity over its natural or built surroundings.
From that ugly introductory victory, the film goes on to portray the remaining 15-odd years in Magellan’s ever-loftier, ever-hungrier career, though Diaz isn’t massively hung up on historical dates and particulars. The arc of the subject’s life is evoked through steadily darkening, tightening mood, with certain scenes and setups replicated to variously despairing effect, from tacitly shifting points of view. Diaz’s script maps Magellan’s narrative against the equally integral story of Enrique (Amado Arjay Babon), a Malaysian slave bought by the explorer, and transformed into his westernized right-hand man — his identity ruptured and his soul left adrift even after he secures his freedom.
Back in Lisbon, Magellan meets and marries Beatriz (Angela Azevedo), though she’s largely left to wait and wilt as her husband remains faithful above all to the waves. Diaz poetically envisions her and other widows of colonialism as stricken, black-clad totems on the home shore, victims in their own way of their husbands’ yen for discovery and appropriation. The film’s extended centerpiece portrays a three-year, disease-blighted sea voyage to the Malayan Archipelago, during which Magellan hardens into a sadistic, obsessive commander — cuing a particularly ruthless campaign of conquest and Christian conversion in the Philippines, where Raja Humabon (Ronnie Lazaro), a defiant tribe leader on the island of Cebu, stages a cunning counter-attack.
The stately beauty of “Magellan’s” image-making — with Diaz and Tort working in deep, oil-paint hues of hunter green, storm blue and wet clay — doesn’t mollify the visceral horror of what often unfolds in the film’s patiently sustained takes, with jarring acts of brutality working subversively against an otherwise pictorial sensibility. There’s no music, either, to soften or ennoble proceedings, only the indifferent murmur of weather over the startling debris of human conflict, or the slow creak of a galleon on lapping waters as sailors are sent cruelly to their deaths. In this gradually hynotic, calmly pitiless takedown of the swashbucking Magellan myth, land and sea endure more mightily than man’s attempts to claim them.
