Film Review: Lav Diaz Crafts His Most Important Film with ‘Magellan’

Many critics have expressed how Magellan is slow cinema master Lav Diaz’s most accessible film. It may only be “accessible” because of its short 163-minute runtime (“short” by Diaz’s standards, who usually makes four to ten-hour pictures) and the appeal of having Gael Garcia Bernal – a broad, and recognizable movie star – play the film’s titular character, Portuguese explorer Fernão de Magalhães. Don’t be fooled, though; this is still very much a Lav Diaz film, where minimalism and juxtapositions are preferred over a traditional narrative, and long takes alienate the viewers, making them feel its lengthy runtime as much as humanly possible and bear the heaviness of the violence being committed in the name of Jesus Christ. 

There were several walkouts during the film’s Montreal premiere at the second annual Semaine de la Critique, where Diaz was in attendance and gave the most lucid and engaging Q&A I’ve ever had the pleasure of witnessing. But those who stayed – and committed – with the Filipino filmmaker’s vision probably saw the same thing I witnessed: a horrifying motion picture that demands we bear witness to the cycle of violence consistently being repeated throughout history, as it examines Magellan’s last years, on the road to Spain, but never arriving at his planned destination after landing in Cebu.

The film’s alienation (and slowness) is par for the course in Diaz’s corpus. Still, unlike his most well-known works, Batang West Side or Norte, The End of History, there’s something far more urgent about the way he stages (and shoots) Magellan’s journey to Spain – and the Battle of Mactan – that we can’t look away, even if its punishingly slow pacing can often create a discordant sense of impatience within the viewer. It didn’t take long for me, however, to be entirely absorbed by Diaz’s painterly image-making, crafting staggering museum-like tapestries with a LUMIX GH7 camera, which is insane if you think about the way the movie was shot for just a second, with minimal artificial lighting and a preference for natural colors.

In those images, Diaz paints Magellan as an insignificant simpleton – he never has the benefit of a close-up. He is always depicted as small within the symmetrical frames of his final exploration. But this is how the story is reframed. We’re taught that key figures, such as Christopher Columbus and Ferdinand Magellan, were explorers, early on, in elementary school, when they, in turn, were violent colonizers whose barbaric actions caused centuries of suffering. Diaz immediately recognizes that Magellan wasn’t an explorer, and the colonizers shouldn’t be glorified in history and cinema. We shouldn’t even feel a modicum of sympathy for the man, who is consistently ridiculed – and even punished – in the filmmaker’s eyes. The journey to Spain, for example, sees the protagonist lose everything he built in his personal life before he even sees land, without ever reaching his final destination.

He then dares to attempt to convert the locals in Cebu to Christianity, even though he himself is rejected by the very ideals of Jesus Christ (this is illustrated through a revealing conversation Magellan has with a priest, whom he accuses of mutiny after the Catholic figure does not tell him what he wants to hear). His insignificant life will eventually lead to an insignificant demise after Lapu-Lapu refused to convert his tribe to Christianity and declared war against Magellan and his forces. Diaz never directly shows us the violence committed against the Indigenous, or the colonizers themselves being victims of their own bloodshed (he’ll frequently allude to it, yet will rapidly cut away as soon as a moderately violent gesture is made clear), but will instead make the audience feel its burden throughout the film’s dense runtime.

From the moment Magellan begins, with a drawn-out introductory sequence that sees the inhabitants of Malacca observing the “white man” arriving closer to their Island and enacting a brutal massacre against its people, Diaz makes the audience aware of the violence without ever showing it. Instead, the agonizing screams, distant gunshots, explosions, or piercing sword slashes linger in our minds even when time passes, and the bloodshed we heard is over. Violence lingers in Magellan’s mind. Violence lingers in our minds. It repeats itself because Magellan believes his quest is supported by “the hand of God,” and this is where the movie makes its thesis clear to the audience. 

It is, of course, a confronting experience for the people who were taught a Western (read: colonizing) viewpoint of history and see the prevailing narrative being dismantled through Diaz’s decolonial lens. That said, the movie elicited many emotional responses from Filipino audience members who did not even want to ask Diaz a question during the Q&A, but wanted to personally thank him for showing audiences who Magellan was and for finally having their stories reclaimed within cinema. You could feel the palpable emotion in the room, and Diaz’s gratitude as he explained why he wanted to make such a film and why it was important to release it now. And if you didn’t grasp what Magellan’s quest (and any recent despotic figure revered through mythmaking – Ferdinand Marcos, Rodrigo Duterte, Jair Bolsonaro, or Donald Trump) was actually about, Diaz’s words during the Q&A make it quite clear: 

“It’s all about greed.”

The horrors brought upon by Magellan’s greedy conquest, in Diaz’s film, are vivid and cogently expressed. Gael Garcia Bernal might also give the most layered performance of his career, even if he is (almost) never the primary subject of the frames being shown in this long, but shocking picture. It might not be a movie for everyone, and certainly not for anyone who already knows a Lav Diaz film isn’t for them. But as someone who has great difficulty with slow cinema – and Diaz’s work as a whole – Magellan might just be the most essential film he’s ever made, and a timely release that asks the audience to not only bear witness to past atrocities, but to recognize that the cycle of violence is consistently repeated, and has never fully changed shape…

SCORE: ★★★1/2