No, this ain't a critique of "Hele sa Hiwagang Hapis"

A vengeful agent provocateur, a weak-willed intellectual and poet, a desperate and lost revolutionary's wife, a guilt-stricken collaborator, a guitarist whose feelings are slowly being flared up by the revolution, a trio of creepy and tricky tikbalangs - these and more. One can't get enough of these characters even in a film running for eight hours such as "Hele sa Hiwagang Hapis" (2016, Philippines), written and directed by Lav Diaz. These are rich and interesting characters;there's nothing so vague or oblique about them as to confuse or exasperate the viewers. These characters help us in finding our foothold in the film, which is in itself rich and interesting. It shouldn't be otherwise, for "Hele sa Hiwagang Hapis" is all about us Filipinos, our nation, identity and soul. 

In fact, there's nothing so vague or oblique about the film as to confuse or exasperate us. It directly confronts and probes everything. Everything is there for us to see. It shouldn't be otherwise, for "Hele sa Hiwagang Hapis" is all about us, our race and our country. 

The foreign audience may have still grasped what the film is all about (after all, it won the Alfred Bauer prize in this year's Berlinale, an award given to films that "open new perspectives"), but we undoubtedly have the edge over them, by way of familiarity, even among those of us who are just casual onlookers of our own history. Jose Rizal and Andres Bonifacio, the Revolution against Spain, Noli and Fili, tikbalangs, Bernardo Carpio, a cultish religious sect: we can immediately recognize these as they are our own, forming a part of our culture and consciousness. Add to these are plot elements incorporated into the narrative to which we can attach ourselves, in one way or another: a man leaving his woman for the revolution;a scheming ilustrado using the people around him for a carefully-plotted cause;an idealistic and intelligent student who, in turn, is hatching a secret plan against the ilustrado for his alleged manipulation of him;a wife's anguish-filled search for her missing husband;a religious sect's belief in the second coming of a savior of humankind. 

The narrative itself is pretty straightforward. Despite following different, but not entirely unrelated, storylines and the multitude of characters (historical, fictional and mythological), we can see that each of the threads is moving or progressing towards something and the characters' motivations or agendas are discernible enough. And more often than not, the characters are specific and exact with the names of persons and places and the dates, so somehow we get a grip of what they're talking about or we are able to picture in our minds the scenario they are referring to. Some may label this as spoonfeeding, a term abhorred by the critical cineaste in us. That's rather misplaced. For I only associate spoonfeeding with mindless entertainment, which "Hele sa Hiwagang Hapis" isn't. 

Diaz is a director who's not known to rush the pace of a scene or to employ hyperkinetic editing style. His ears may be desensitized to the term already to the point that he may already resist such a label, but for the sake of argument his oeuvre is generally regarded to fall under Slow Cinema, which always seeks to engage the audience in an experiential and organic way of viewing films, like a painter spending hours and days to capture his subject on canvas. His latest work is no exception. It has its fair share of longueurs and still life, most especially the thread involving Gregoria de Jesus' search for the body of her husband, the Katipunan supremo Andres Bonifacio, in Mount Buntis. But however ironic it may seem, the "slowness" of the film isn't the kind that will really stretch the limits of the viewers' patience. The temperature simmers, but not so much as to reach a boiling point, so to speak. The fact is, "Hele sa Hiwagang Hapis" is eventful, magical and even trippy. (Every now and then, there are "bits" of scenes in the film.) We may even go so far as to re-title the film as "1897: A Historical Odyssey", in reference to Stanley Kubrick's trippy science-fiction classic. 

When I say trippy, what I mean is the film's liberal treatment of history, fiction, myth and folklore, in such a way that turns things on their heads. Fictional characters of Rizal's El Filibusterismo, the ilustrado Simon (Piolo Pascual) and the intellectual Isagani (John Lloyd Cruz), are fully aware of the fates of Rizal and Bonifacio and give their impassioned thoughts about the Revolution. At one point, in a stunning scene, the two men recite Rizal's poem written on the eve of his execution at Bagumbayan, Mi Ultimo Adios, with Simon reciting it in Spanish and then Isagani in Filipino. Then, Gregoria (Hazel Orencio) and her company (Cesaria, Huli, Karyo) get to encounter three tricky tikbalangs (Bernardo Bernardo, Cherie Gil, Angel Aquino) while searching for the missing Supremo in the mountain-jungle, as if they were the three witches teasing Macbeth. And then, in a really strange segment, a journalist, Ben Zayb, and a friar, Padre Camorra (again, characters from Fili) discuss with fervor the Lumière brothers' then-newest innovation, the Cinématographe, followed by the journalist showing to the amazed Spanish mestizos and mestizas, including the ruling Captain-General (Bart Guingona), the very first film recordings, as if to parallel the birth of cinema with the death of the two prominent figures of a national uprising. It's a touch both imaginative and subversive. And stranger still, a religious cult's (the Colorum) belief in the "second coming", not just of Christ, but of Rizal and of Bernardo Carpio, with a Mount Banahaw "Virgin Mary" as their enchantress. And we know fully well that Bernardo Carpio is a stuff of folk legend! 

"Batang West Side", "Norte, Hangganan ng Kasaysayan" and "Mula sa Kung Ano ang Noon" manage to dwell on a contemporary political history - Martial Law and a dictatorial regime. "Hele sa Hiwagang Hapis" goes even as far as our colonial history - the Filipinos' revolt against centuries of Spanish rule - to probe into the progress, fate and destiny of our nation and into our collective soul, how far have we gone since and where we are going still. The fight for freedom and independence doesn't stop in actually winning them back and the search for and the making of heroes, the stalwarts of nationalism and patriotism, aren't ends in themselves. These are and will always be works-in-progress, not so much to finally achieve the elusive utopian state as to bring to the great many something utilitarian and unifying one step at a time. 

Otherwise, we should just better give in to Simon's belief that freedom is nothing but a mere ideal or to Isagani's doubt as to the curse that haunts the country. History will just probably keep on repeating itself - a distortion of the Marxian dialectical view of history - if we don't ever learn to set aside for once personal jealousies, grievances, hatreds and agendas (from which the characters in the film are not exempt) in the service of the greater good. It's not simply a Dostoevskian artistic conceit when we see in the film how Simon and the Captain-General are actually inebriated or high on opium when deliberating on the state of the nation;or how the Captain-General might really be dreaming when the tikbalang tells him that cowardice is a trait common not just to one race, but to all humanity;or how Simon is on the throes of death due to a fatal wound and Isagani might be half-mad for being consumed with hatred for the former, when they debate on the place of Art in the struggle for Freedom;or how Gregoria has finally lost her last grip on sanity (and perhaps, Cesaria and Huli as well) at the tail-end of her search for her beloved Andres. It's a probe into the dark night of our nation's soul. 

It perfectly fits into the film's haunting black-and-white frames (courtesy of "Norte" cinematographer Larry Manda), where shadows half-cover the characters' faces and white forest smokes hover over and then recede from them, as if they were lost phantoms finding their footing in the corporal world of strife, agony and struggle. Eight hours is really a short time to explore our nation's history and to probe into the Filipino soul. But the total output itself is a film-viewing experience like no other. 

John Lloyd Cruz and Piolo Pascual, the box-office and rom-com kings of a major studio, in the roles of their lives as Isagani and Simon, respectively, in Lav Diaz's "Hele sa Hiwagang Hapis"