The austere poetry of Lav Diaz’s ‘Magellan’

Diaz claims a nine-hour alternate cut may come to fruition, told from the point of view of Magellan’s wife Beatriz (Ângela Ramos), who has only a handful of scenes in the two-and-a-half-hour feature. In the meantime, this shorter version—which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival—is highly focused and deeply affecting, not despite its languid unfurling, but rather, because of it.

In his typical style, the director takes a measured approach—this time, replacing his usual black and white with thoughtfully gilded frames, co-photographed by Diaz and Artur Tort—but seldom (if ever) moving his camera. In tandem with the overpowering ambient sounds of the natural environment, this deliberate, austere artistry lets the weight of time and history press gradually downward upon the viewer. The result is an unnervingly meditative movie, whose drama—although it unfolds at a distance—is never obfuscated, and whose gentle poetry becomes a trojan horse for a suffocating-yet-cathartic final act.

The story spans an entire decade, between 1511 and 1521. It follows the renowned seafarer from his initial years in the Malay archipelago, to his return to Portugal, to his subsequent, rebellious attempts to reach the “East Indies” once more, this time traveling westward—a perilous journey that culminates in his arrival in the Philippines. While Diaz’s visual language is one of objective observation, Magellan remains at constant war with itself, composing lengthy vignettes born from dueling myths and narratives about its central figure.

He is, on one hand, an adventurer who seeks to navigate to new corners of the world, even if it means circumventing the crown. But on the other hand, he’s also a missionary, and a key instrument in Europe’s lengthy colonial project. The intriguing question Magellan seems to pose—especially during his years-long westward voyage, which requires harrowing, Old Testament-style leadership—is whether these dueling perspectives on the historical figure were born of gradual transformation, or were perhaps in some way fated, owing to who Magellan always was. García Bernal, for his part, balances the human and the mythic with an expert hand. He creates an understated character burdened by abstract purpose, but driven by recognizable modes of emotional compartmentalization, en route to completing his mission (and in some ways, deciding in-the-moment what that mission even entails).

History is written by the victors, and eventually corrected as its long arc bends towards justice. But in Diaz’s view, the past isn’t quite as simple as black-and-white views posed by the colonizers and the colonized. The truth is, in some ways, a mystery—perhaps one of many, as the film goes on to confront not only the dueling altruism and racism driving Magellan’s Catholic conquest. So, rather than chasing a factual truth, Diaz’s inquiry takes on more spiritual forms, beginning with his opening scenes, told from the point of view of native Southeast Asian tribes partaking in religious rituals, whose euphoric outlook turns slowly to fear and suspicion the moment colonizers land on their shores.

The religious metamorphosis Diaz depicts across Magellan—of affirming, indigenous pantheistic beliefs curdling through despair—is a not-so-subtle mirror to what the imposition of Catholic guilt and shame can do to one’s sense of self. The Philippines is currently home to the world’s third largest Catholic population, and the film is, in a way, a look backward at an imagined 16th Century origin of the country’s modern, post-colonial society. However, Diaz isn’t merely content with mining historical narratives to extract some contemporary, didactic value. Instead, his dramatic inquiry takes on more complicated and self-reflexive forms.

In Diaz’s view, the story of Magellan is equally one of violence wrought upon native populations as it is one of hubris, and the way history’s “great men” become consumed by ambition. Accounts of the explorer’s last days are said to have involved not only his Christian convert allies on the island of Cebu—led by the chieftain Rajah Humabon (Ronnie Lazaro)—but resistance from the nearby leader Lapulapu, about whom little is known. Diaz, therefore, uses these gaps in the western historical record to elevate the tale of Magellan by imbuing it with a mythic quality, and steeping it in dramatic irony.

What remains, by the end of the movie’s final act, is akin to a subversive religious epic about war, born from a multitude of sources. Its scope resembles the texts of Hinduism, practiced in the region until Magellan’s arrival, while fleeting moments and images mirror famous works from the then-contemporary European renaissance (including, in a particularly tragic moment, Michaelangelo’s Pietà). The world as Diaz sees it is a product of complex history, and discerning any one objective reality from the past may as well involve transforming it into myth. This results in perhaps the first film since James Gray’s Amazon-set The Lost City of Z to create thematic and narrative harmony between the adventure genre—an inspiring, imaginative form—and the colonial ugliness from which it was born. In Magellan, what we’re gifted through Diaz’s still, unbroken takes is not just enrapturing imagery painted with golden light, but the opportunity to ruminate on their meaning at length, affording us the chance to consider our own history, and what darkness may lie hidden away in our own hearts as well.