November 10, 2024
On the remote island of Pulo, there was a penal colony overseen by Major Ramon Lukas (Paul Jake Paule). Not even 500 meters outside its rear gate, Narda (Hazel Orencio) had set up a store and restaurant which she ran together with her simpleton son Setong (Arjay Babon). She had a daughter Reyna (Janine Gutierrez) whom she adopted from a friend impregnated by an American. Soon, the unscrupulous Narda also sold Reyna as well.
Master Sergeant Hilarion Zabala (Ronnie Lazaro) had been a scout ranger and champion marksman all his life. One day, after witnessing a massacred village, he began to smell a very bad odor in his nose, even without anything causing it. This offensive odor soon also negatively affected his appetite. Dr. Valle (Lhorvie Nuevo), the patient counselor at the Army Hospital, diagnosed his condition as an olfactory hallucination, or phantosmia.
This latest film by slow-cinema auteur Lav Diaz is 246 minutes long, rather compact for his standard. His signature style is all there -- shot in black and white to avoid the distractions of color, very prolonged tracking shots of people walking in or out of a scene, scenes of fires burning in pitch darkness. The connection between the two disparate stories of Reyna and Zabala was clear and logical, even as their first scene together was only in the last hour.
Like his previous films, there was also a touch of the mystical in this one. In this case, it was the Haring Musang, the elusive king of the civet cats for which hunters gather yearly to hunt down. One of his devotees was the quirky poet Marlo (Dong Abay). He went to Pulo during hunting season, not to hunt, but to gain inspiration for his epic poem to the Haring Musang. Abay stole his every scene with his out-of-place outfits and passionate poetry recitations.
Ronnie Lazaro is very much at home in the Lav Diaz milieu, effortlessly portraying this man who never realized he was traumatized by his past until he smelled its stench within himself. Not sure that hanky covering the nose was any help, but it was effective as a visual symbol. Hazel Orencio went strong to play heartless businesswoman Narda. Major Lukas is Paul Jake Paule's longest role in a Lav Diaz film, and he went all out perverse, corrupt and violent.
Seeing a glamorous mainstream movie star Janine Gutierrez playing an abused character is jarring, and made her Reyna lot more pitiful. Toni Go played Zabala's daughter Aling who help her father despite being abandoned in the past. Her jump rope scene was cute and funny. Lhorvie Nuevo played the doctor (MD and PhD!) who came up with a radical management approach to put the traumatized man back into potentially traumatic situations.
Lav Diaz tells about the insidious effects of violence when this was done in the line of duty -- in Zabala's case, as a scout ranger against rebels, or as a policeman against activists. Zabala was old-school, a stickler for rules, and he believed what he was doing was the right thing. It was his own mind who made him recognize how damaged a man he was. Unfortunately, he also realized that violence may only rely on more violence to achieve liberation. 8/10
