A pre-destined tragedy?

Between those times when "Norte, Hangganan ng Kasaysayan" made its premiere in last year's Cannes International Film Festival and "Mula sa Kung Ano ang Noon" premiered in this month's World Premieres Film Festival, the former film by Lav Diaz has already heaped numerous accolades, won numerous awards and made rounds of different film festivals abroad. With the latter film having been just shown to the filmmaker's own kababayans in the just-concluded WPFF, we could only surmise for now how the film would sit well with the international audience and critics once it gets shown abroad, which is highly likely to happen. Now, if justice does really exist in the world, "Noon" should get the recognition in the same manner as "Norte"'s, if not more so. For "Noon", while not without flaws (like the tendency to "speechify" everything that has transpired before or to "extend" beyond what is necessary), is a masterwork in its own right. I'm not a fervent devotee of Lav Diaz. In fact, while I have seen all of his "short" films during the time of the Monteverde family's pito-pito system, I have yet to see the majority of his long works - just "Batang West Side", "Siglo ng Pagluluwal" and the aforementioned two, with the second one being hard for me to stomach. That's why it really comes to me as a pleasant surprise if I get to like his film, as is the case with "Norte" and "Noon". 

The director reportedly said that the film's title was derived from the Kantian philosophical phrase a priori, which translates as prior or innate knowledge, or knowledge that is formed out of abstract thought-processes, independent of empirical observation. Such knowledge constitutes the basis of such branches of philosophy as logic, metaphysics and ontology. Truth is, Immanuel Kant's philosophy is more complex than it seems;his book about such type of knowledge is a truly difficult read. But just to have a sense of its essence, that's how a priori knowledge is basically defined. Now, placing such knowledge within the film's context, it's hard not to see the philosophical backbone within. In the film, we are presented with the life in a provincial town (unnamed) a couple of years before military dictatorship took over the entire country. Whether the villagers are totally unaware of or having vague and infantile thoughts about it, the "curse" (as one of the characters refers to it later) seems to be looming in the horizon or in the process of being worked out. 

In a manner that evokes Michael Haneke's Cannes-winning "The White Ribbon" (also shot in black-and-white), strange things start to happen in the barrio which cause alarm among the villagers, things which defy complete logical or sensible reasoning:houses get burned down, cows are hacked to death, eerie wails are heard in the forest, ominous winds and melancholy rainfall are a daily force of nature, and certain persons are dying of a mysterious violent death. It's as if these things are being designed as "omens" for something more awful and sinister that is about to take place. Just the same, life still goes on a daily grind for a number of the villagers, though one can't help feeling a sense of dread and hopelessness slowly and insidiously creeping into their rhythm and rituals. We have two sisters, the one taking care of the other who is severely handicapped but who appears to have healing powers, for which they make a regular offering to what they believe to be the face of the Virgin by the seashore;a farmer and his orphaned nephew, whose orphanhood is being kept as a secret from him by his uncle;a liquor-maker who is having a secret affair with the handicapped sister, but who knows if he might be actually molesting her;a priest who struggles to salvage whatever spiritual depth that his troubled brethren may still have;a village female shaman mourning the loss of her child;and a subversive poet who returns to his hometown presumably after many years of absence. In a kind of tableaux or mosaic, each of these villagers' daily rhythm and rituals is shown in a deliberate and unbroken fashion, a Zen-like longueur, majority of which are even in the absence of a spoken word. Each of these life-portraits runs the gamut of being comical, surreal, poignant, eerie, transcendent, horrific, moving and irrational - a haunted monochrome that's likewise close to Shohei Imamura's "Black Rain". In other words, however one may reason out to the contrary, it gets as close to being humane as possible. In this respect, notwithstanding the film's epic length of nearly six hours, "Noon" is pretty accessible (though this is not to say that it can't be a test of one's attention span, which it surely is). Which brings me to what I admire most about the film:here, there's an earnest effort to avoid all those fuzzy abstractions or high-end philosophizing (unlike in "Siglo"), but instead to imbue it with a perceptive humanism and a down-to-earth sensibility (like in "Norte") - though this is still not to say that symbols and motifs don't abound. 

The above-mentioned films of Diaz stand as a litmus test through which he subjects the nation's soul. And "Noon" is not an exception. While it may deal with a particular dark chapter in the country's past, it doesn't necessarily follow that the filmmaker doesn't intend to illustrate the repercussions that it may have on our present state of things. Thus, the question of "What has become of us since then?" or "Where have we gone thence?" becomes a critical focal point. Much like the characters in the film, have we become nothing more than docile, resigned and passive beings to our cruel fate, quietly consenting to the machinations and manipulations of the powerful and influential, even if deep within we are burning with rage against such? Lamentably, the only probable form of resistance that we could muster against it is through sacrificing oneself or one's loved ones (as what the sisters tellingly did). Otherwise, we might just as well adapt the perpetrators' mode of behavior, using violence as a means for both persecution and absolution (as what the farmer meted out against the liquor-maker). Or, as another form of conformance, we might just push everyone off the cliff for the gratification of the men on top (as what the loquacious "street peddler" has been really doing all along). 

There could have been no more apt summation of this state of things than what was described during a long and telling conversation - or, should we say, exchange of thoughts - between the farmer and the poet on a rice field near the end of the film:that since the declaration of the martial rule (or probably, even shortly before that), the town has become the "village of the dead" and its villagers, the "dead of the village". To my mind, this conversation forms the crux of the film, as it provides a philosophical after-thought - an ethical and epistemological substance - to everything that has transpired before onscreen or, in effect, to everything that happened in the country during the dark years of Martial Law and, perhaps, to everything that has been happening still since then. Similar to the long dialogue between the prisoner and the priest in Steve McQueen's "Hunger", that particular conversation carries such weight and power. 

Furthermore, as before, we can see in "Noon" how time and space become germinal to the film itself. In this particular universe, time appears to move slowly or perhaps to stand still and every movement and action are confined or tied to a clearly defined space or location. Characters come in on the screen from afar and then leave the same scene as the camera stays in it for a couple more minutes;or whether in long or medium shot, characters engage in a kind of ritualistic behavior within the same limited spot. It's as if to suggest being trapped or detained within a rigid and stifling system of rules and laws. Seems like an aspect of the Kantian a priori knowledge is at work here, in that one's pattern of behavior is innately connected with the imposed order of things. From this, it doesn't appear to be far-fetched now to give the logical reasoning that at the very core of "Noon" is a pre-destination, that everything is bound to happen and that we are really powerless in the face of our dim fate. Isn't it that each of the villagers mentioned succumbed to the weight of the looming tragedy - either through violence, resignation, flight or death? Another recent Filipino film, Jet Leyco's equally superb "Bukas na Lang Sapagka't Gabi na" (shown in last year's Cinema One Originals), likewise made an argument for the inevitability of a nation's downfall within the context of a military dictatorship. Diaz, however, brings things several notches higher through a painstakingly- and lugubriously-observed tableaux of souls on the brink of wretchedness. 

We are yet to find out how "Noon" would be assessed by the international film community, whether for good or bad. For now, we are glad that we Filipinos are the very first ones to appreciate it, as it concerns no less than us ourselves. Needless to say, it is a film by us, for us. 

(Lav Diaz' "Mula sa Kung Ano ang Noon":Powerless in the face of a tragedy.)