Magellan (Magalhães)

 

Director Lav Diaz

director on the set

director with Sanny Joaquin and cinematographer Artur Tort

Diaz with assistant director Sanny Joaquin

Diaz with cast at Cannes

Gael García Bernal and Lav Diaz

Ferdinand Magellan at Naval Museum in Madrid

MAGELLAN (Magalhães)                 B                                                                         Philippines  Spain  Portugal  France  Taiwan  (163 mi)  2025  d: Lav Diaz

The promise of the Gods of the ancestors is upon us.                                                                   —Indigenous natives first reaction to seeing a white man

Lav Diaz is a pioneering Filipino auteur who re-examines history through his films which challenge conventional narratives, known for his long films and contemplative style, making films of moral complexity, often delving into the themes of history, suffering, and the human condition, whose earlier four-hour film Norte: The End of History (Norte, hangganan ng kasaysayan) (2014) was an intimate character study loosely based upon Raskolnikov from Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, while also covertly paralleling the political influence of former Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos.  Writing and directing his own films, also sharing the cinematography and editing duties, while responsible for his own production design, most of his films are over five-hours in length, some of them pushing the nine and ten-hour mark, where six of his films are in the top 20 of the longest films of all time (List of longest films), offering an extensive exploration of the Filipino socio-political landscape through cinema, with Diaz indicating he is planning a nine-hour extended version of this film focusing more on the wife from about fifteen hours of footage shot but not used, releasing this more accessible shorter version under three hours for film festivals.  By retelling the tale of 16th century Age of Discovery explorer Ferdinand Magellan from a minimalist and modernist perspective, where he’s no swashbuckling hero of the seas, instead Diaz portrays him as radically antiheroic, depicting his voyage as a brutal, revisionist critique of colonialism, mythmaking, and religious zealotry driven by obsession, rejecting the typical “Great Man of History” narrative, conveying a stark vision of the brutality at the heart of European conquest and a haunting elegy for a lost precolonial past.  A meditation on the excesses of ambition and avarice, where we are forced to witness what colonialism looks like, with splashes of Native nudity, it’s a bit like John Huston’s THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING (1975), with men developing a God-complex, versed in their own moral superiority, viewing themselves above the teeming throngs, continually downplaying the needs and interests of the Indigenous tribes who are simply not like them, and therefore don’t matter as much.  It’s a somber case study of colonialist expansion, where the rest of the world is seen only by how it can benefit the country of origin that financed the expedition, in this case Spain, as Portugal, the country of Magellan’s birth, turned down his original request, as Portugal already had a highly profitable eastern seaward trade route to the Spice Islands via Africa, making a costly, highly speculative new western route unnecessary.  

Working in color for the first time in a decade, making his first film not in the Tagalog language, primarily using Spanish and Portuguese, with the director sharing cinematography and editing duties with Artur Tort, the regular cameraman for Spanish filmmaker Albert Serra, who is a producer on this film, screening in the Cannes Premiere section, yet in some ways it resembles Lisandro Alonso’s period film Jauja (2014) or Lucrecia Martel’s Zama (2017) in its historical reach, while also treading on the same expansive territory as Terrence Malick’s The New World (2005).  The difference is there’s absolutely no interiority of Magellan, or anyone else for that matter, though this is more restrained and nuanced from his other films, as Magellan’s quest turns into an obsession with power, leading to men questioning his leadership, where there’s a lot of inflicted cruelty both towards his own men, some of whom openly mutiny and are left behind in some God forsaken place in Argentina’s Patagonia, yet also towards the natives he meets in this “new world” of the Philippines.  Despite his meticulous planning, Magellan is unprepared for the difficulties he encounters attempting to pass the Strait of Magellan in the southernmost tip of South America, taking over a month, much longer than expected, with one mutinied ship returning to Spain, while another was lost at sea on an exploring expedition, yet even afterwards, setting sail into the open expanse of the Pacific Ocean, he is shocked that it takes months, not days, without encountering food, leaving many men dying of malnourishment or sick with scurvy en route, where his fleet of five ships is whittled down to just a single ship.  Like most Europeans at the time, however, Magellan thought Asia was much closer to South America than it actually is.  Far from the courageous explorer depicted in the history books, according to Diaz, who spoke at the Cannes screening, “Magellan is no hero—he is a man facing his own oblivion.”  There’s a lot of screaming to the high heavens, and praying to the spirits for divine intervene, yet also an autocratic ruthlessness rarely seen in depictions of epic explorations, where brutal punishment and death go hand in hand with hunger and starvation.  Yet most of all, it’s a depiction of supreme arrogance that leads to a massive sea of deaths, which mirrors the rampant corruption and presumptive superiority of the current Trump administration, but also authoritarian Filipino leaders Ferdinand Marcos and Rodrigo Duterte (currently on trial for war crimes), belittling others and downplaying the influence of anyone who does not comply with their directives or disagrees with their actions of enriching themselves, reviving the imperialist spirit of colonialism in the modern era.

The story is told in three sections, with the dates imprinted on the lower left side of the screen, the first is set in Malacca, Malaysia in 1511, commonly known as the Spice Islands, where Magellan (Mexican actor Gael García Bernal, the first international star Diaz has ever worked with), under someone else’s command, Afonso de Albuquerque (Argentinean film critic and programmer Roger Alan Koza), participates in the capture of Malacca, leaving him wounded and injured in the leg, eventually limping from the onset of gangrene, yet they are victorious, with bloodied bodies seen strewn across the landscape, acquiring a Malay slave named Enrique (Amado Arjay Babon), who is initially seen caged but becomes his own personal interpreter.  Little more than a footnote in history, Enrique is often omitted entirely, but in some ways he is the true protagonist of the film, patiently getting his revenge in obtaining his freedom, a near silent observer who has the last and final words of the film.  The second follows his recovery in Portugal where he has a controversial falling out with King Manuel I of Portugal, who rejected his plans for exploration and grew furious when he aligned himself with King Charles V of Spain, taking an oath of allegiance, which was paramount to treason in Portugal, as the two countries were arch rivals who were not only competing for dominance in the spice industry, but also for influence in colonies around the world.  It’s here that he takes a wife, Beatriz (Ângela Azevedo), who grows pregnant before his departure in 1519, and is seen as an angelic counterpart to his ruthless ambition, Magellan new clip official from Cannes Film Festival 2025 (1/3) YouTube (1:45), surrealistically appearing in his dreams during the long voyage.  The proposed longer version supposedly revolves around Beatriz, where virtually nothing is known about her.  Once he sets sail, his 265 men all-Portuguese crew is mostly comprised of criminals, because many experienced sailors refused to support Magellan, unraveling in a long, slow section where time appears to stop, 'Magellan' Lav DIAZ Official Clip starring Gael Garcia Bernal ... YouTube (50 seconds), losing all that initial eager anticipation of what they may encounter, where the prolonged voyage severely weakens the crew, becoming a test of hunger and allegiance, exposing questions of loyalty, where Magellan’s behavior is markedly different than when they began, as he started treating his officers in a cruel way, growing very angry and indignant that some of them mutinied, forcing one to behead the other, subjecting men to lashes while executing crew members who engaged in homosexuality, according to a journal kept by Antonio Pigafetta, an Italian navigator whom Magellan hired to keep detailed documents of the voyage.  Diaz apparently spent seven years researching Magellan, aided by Filipino historian Ambeth Ocampo, using a replicated reconstruction of the actual ship Victoria, historically accurate costumes, with no battle scenes, only the devastating aftermath is shown, and no actual violence other than what he forces his own sailors to endure on the ship, ultimately shifting the focus from the European perspective to that of the Indigenous tribes, becoming a revisionist work that goes against the grain of conventional historical accounts, much of which is little more than victorious mythmaking.

The third section shows Magellan arriving in the Philippines in 1521, a loose collection of kingdoms living in uneasy truce, comprised of more than 7000 islands, though fewer than 2000 are inhabited, 'Magellan' Lav DIAZ Official Clip starring Gael Garcia Bernal ... YouTube (1:32), which they thought to be the Spice Islands, but they didn’t find any spices, discovering instead a developed society, one not at all isolated from the outside world, possessing a written language, and already having some knowledge of Europeans through traders.  They are met by local leader Rajah Humabon (Ronnie Lazaro), with Magellan offering sweet jam to his sick son, who may have been suffering from scurvy, while also presenting him with a statuette of Santo Niño to watch over him.  When the boy recovers, many attribute his miraculous recovery to God, quickly converting the island to Catholicism and baptizing the inhabitants, but in their zealous rush for complete domination, they destroy all remnants of the local anitos, viewing them as sacrilegious idolatry figures, an act that emboldens resistance, as their island way of life is being destroyed.  With obsessive delusions of grandeur and undisputed power, most of the tribes capitulate, but there are holdouts, with Humabon leading Magellan into the wrath of one of his foes, another chief named Lapu-Lapu who refuses to convert, instead mobilizing his forces against the foreign leader, with Magellan profoundly underestimating the strength of the natives, believing superior European weaponry would scare off the “barbarian” forces, but due to shallow waters, his ships remained at too great a distance to inflict harm, so he takes a small landing party of only about 60 half-armed men, burning the grass homes, which only helps mobilize the resistance, where the overwhelming counterattack by 2000 natives wipes out the European forces in what amounts to a massacre, killing Magellan on the spot, like Custer’s last stand at the Battle of Little Bighorn, leaving no survivors, turning tragically dark and morbid, a fate surprisingly narrated by Enrique, conveyed through an ultra-realistic approach to colonial violence.  The dead bodies on the beach paint a dire picture of human slaughter, with the remaining 18 men on the ship, one of whom is Enrique, quickly making a hasty exit and returning to Spain, becoming the only ship to completely circumnavigate the globe.  In the Philippines, Lapu-Lapu is a celebrated national hero for having withstood the initial European invasion, remaining a mythic cultural figure that remains embedded in the national consciousness, even warranting a national holiday, but Diaz subverts this image with provocative suggestions that Humabon, in an attempt to overcome his rival, may have invented Lapu-Lapu, who is never seen, and may not have ever existed in human form, cleverly planted in the mind’s eye as a myth to deceive Magellan and his men, which then leads to their downfall in an ambush, using the power of mythmaking as a political weapon.  Questioning whose version of history gets remembered, Diaz suggests history is not always used for truth, but for manipulation.   

Norte: The End of History (Norte, hangganan ng kasaysayan)

NORTE:  THE END OF HISTORY (Norte, hangganan ng kasaysayan)       B+                                  

Philippines  (250 mi)  2014  ‘Scope  d:  Lav Diaz 

The title and 4-hour length of the film makes one presume this will be a long, drawn-out historical drama, but instead it closely follows the lives of a few people in a  meticulously detailed, novelesque approach, becoming an intimate character study loosely based upon Raskolnikov from Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, while also covertly paralleling the political influence of former Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos.  This director has a history of making films with extended length, where seven of his earlier films since 2001 are over five-hours in length, with three of them pushing the nine-hour mark.  Suffice it to say, the director is also his own film editor, which may explain his apparent unwillingness to part with anything he’s shot, but length creates a more relaxed, slower-paced cinematic approach where the director has the freedom to play with the material, to tinker or experiment with his storytelling techniques.  What might be surprising is how few characters are featured throughout, spending the majority of the film on just three of them, the most prominent of which is Fabian (Sid Lucero), a disillusioned young law student that drops out, despite being at the head of his class, disenchanted with the nation and its failings, considering himself above the law and any existing morality, where we see him in discussions with two former classmates who remain in awe of his views, particularly his criticism of the establishment, where his results-oriented idea of decisive action is killing the perpetrators responsible for all social ills, simply eliminating them from society, thus cleansing the entire nation of its dead weight.  In Fabian’s eyes, Marcos got it right under a brutal dictatorship (1965 – 1986), but failed because eventually he got too soft, caving in to various special interests.  While it’s easy to theorize and develop a nihilist view, spouting Nietzschean philosophy to justify why one prefers anarchism to the prevailing order, in the Philippines the current system has produced little else but widescale governmental corruption and greed.  While Fabian may pontificate at length on “the destruction of anything that is inimical to morality,” he’s seen more as a loud-mouthed provocateur who enjoys being at the center of attention, especially after having a few beers, while later seen agonizing over his alleged moral conflict by sleeping with his best friend’s girlfriend.  True to form, as if feeding his own vanity, he gets this off his chest in the most obnoxious means possible, revealing the affair in a drunken outburst embarrassing both the girl and her boyfriend, making him something of a detestable lout. 

While the initial discussions are between the young urban elite, there is a parallel story providing a view of the dispossessed, featuring an impoverished family where the husband Joaquin (Archie Alemania) breaks his leg in an accident, preventing he and his wife Eliza, Angeli Bayani from Ron Morales’s Graceland (2012) and Anthony Chen’s Ilo Ilo (Ba Ma Bu Zai Jia) (2013), from being able to start up a food cantina, where instead they are drowning in debt just trying to get the business started.  He’s forced to peddle bootleg DVD’s on the street while supporting two young kids and Eliza’s sister.  The class distinction couldn’t be more pronounced between their near destitute status, where they’re forced to pawn everything they own, and the supreme arrogance and haughty contempt on display by the wealthy pawnbroker, Magda (Mae Paner, a theater actress and political advocate), who acts like she’s doing them a favor taking these worthless items off their hands, including Eliza’s most prized piece of jewelry.  Shortly afterwards, Joaquin revisits Magda demanding she give the jewelry back, realizing it’s value to his wife, going so far as to start choking her when she refuses, but stops himself once he realizes what he’s doing.  As the police are called, he’s forced to flee, working a construction job pouring cement in a neighboring town, hiding out in the partially constructed home, seen alone on the second floor looking out over the vastness of the empty fields nearby, where the viewer can all but see him falling into his own moral abyss.  Fabian has also accumulated considerable debt with Magda, as she is keeping one of his credit cards.  He witnesses the distraught Eliza weeping uncontrollably on the street, not knowing how her family will survive, where out of the blue he generously gives her what money he has.  Some time later, he’s seen paying a visit to Magda one evening in her massive home, claiming he’s there to pay off his debt, but instead he brutally stabs her to death, along with the only witness to the crime, her teenage daughter, quickly burying the money, packing his bags and moving into the heart of Manila where he is essentially an exile, living in a self-imposed existential prison, shown with iron bars on the windows, eventually blotting out all light in the apartment in a gesture reminiscent of the final scene of Béla Tarr’s SÁTÁNTANGÓ (1994).    

The Norte of the title refers to the Philippines’ rich northern province of Ilocos Norte made famous by capitalist clans and political dynasties that perpetuate a culture of social stagnation in the region, making a point of filming the movie in Ferdinand Marcos’s hometown of Paoay, where despite his downfall is still treated like a national hero.  Like Fabian, Marcos was a brilliant law student who also committed murder when he was younger.  Marcos was tried and convicted in 1938 before successfully arguing his own appeal, winning his acquittal in 1940 while studying for his Philippine Bar Exams, where he achieved the highest score.  Fabian acknowledges a certain admiration for Marcos, claiming he was on the right track when trying to eradicate communism, but eventually got distracted later in his career.  While Fabian is nowhere as smart or as brutally ruthless as Marcos, who like Stalin before him maintained his rule by silencing and eliminating his opposition, but may be a by-product of his legacy, where this film focuses upon the Raskolnikov-style murder and its effects, where Fabian finally acts upon his own beliefs, murdering a malignant element of society as if it was his moral imperative.  His actions, however, change nothing in the “new” social order, where instead he is besieged by grief.  Diaz interestingly does not follow the guilty mindset of the criminal, but leaves the predicament of Fabian behind and concentrates instead on the real victims of his crime, Joaquin, who is unjustly charged with the murders and sentenced to life in prison in a seemingly open and shut case, as he was earlier seen making threats to the pawnbroker, where he is imprisoned too far away for Eliza to visit, creating a broken family torn apart by the crime that must fend for itself, as Eliza gets up at the crack of dawn to sell vegetables on the street, barely eking out a living.  Returning to color for the first time since BATANG WEST SIDE (2001), a director who traditionally shoots in black and white, the pace of the film is established using long, langorous, often wordless shots by cinematographer Lauro Rene Manda, allowing the audience to familiarize themselves with the emotional interior of each character, where the director eschews the use of music throughout.  There is plentiful use of aerial shots contrasting the pastoral elegance and beauty of large plantations with the more squalid beach shanties that are little more than a series of huts strewn together, much like the multitude of fishing boats hugging the shore.  Still, there are moments of rapturous beauty, such as a scene of dawn rising over the seaside village.  

It’s interesting that the film sustains its momentum throughout, becoming a more ponderous experience, where there are heartbreaking moments, especially expressed by the unusual grace and transcendence of actress Angeli Bayani, who Taiwanese director Ang Lee called a “national treasure” (Ang Lee calls 'Ilo Ilo' star Angeli Bayani a 'national treasure ...) while awarding her the Filipino Gawad Urian Best Actress award, who is seen on the verge of suicide at one point, bringing her children to the edge of a perilous cliff, while utilizing an effective change of pace through a continuing stream of black and white dream images coming from Joaquin’s cell, as he continually retains a subconscious connection to his hometown roots despite his displacement.  While he is forced to suffer the inevitable indignities foisted upon him in prison, he fends off evil with benevolence, where both Joaquin and Eliza are depicted as saints, which couldn’t be a greater contrast than Fabian, the man who gets away with murder.  By separately exploring the lives of Joaquin and Fabian, Diaz exposes a glaring gap that separates the economic classes, where the poor are often forced to suffer for the crimes of the wealthy, which serves as a metaphor for Philippine society, which is ruled by a wealthy aristocracy, where power is retained in the hands of a few, that all but ignores the plight of the majority working class.  While the film is an impressive achievement, it is not without faults, where the long, sustained build-up is better than the eventual climax.  The film sputters with the introduction of a new character late in the film, Fabian’s sister Hoda (Miles Canapi), who embodies an upper class emotional distance and detachment from the real world, living in a self-induced bubble of cheerful religious cliché, protected by the enormity of her inherited estate, including an immense plantation mansion where she lives alone, inviting Fabian to stay and help her farm the tobacco fields.  It’s here we learn that Fabian is the product of extreme wealth and upper class arrogance, who often believe they are morally superior, yet staring him in the face is the misery he has inflicted on undeserving souls, leading to a breakdown of moral order.  The film is highly rewarding until it resorts to the kind of needless Bruno Dumont brutality and faux spiritualism that we saw in HUMANITÉ (1999), where exaggerated distortions, including levitation sequences, replace hard-earned notions of intellect and social realism.  Perhaps the most uniquely impressive visual cue is an unexplained catastrophe late in the film leaving dozens of people lying dead sprawled out over an extended region, shown in black and white where the camera pans over the massive space.  While this mysteriously takes the life of one of the major characters, the source of the tragedy, whether it be a hurricane, an explosion, or toxic fumes in the air, is never revealed, left lingering in one’s imagination.