No festival season rests complete without at least one recent opus by Filipino director Lav Diaz receiving due consideration, and Venice 2024 ensured this duty — nay, challenge — remained firmly in place. Premiering out of competition, Phantosmia, the filmmaker’s latest four-hour study of his home nation’s history of political violence and its aftermath, will immediately register as familiar to those viewers of the quasi-duology When the Waves Are Gone (another Venice premiere out of competition in 2022) and Essential Truths of the Lake (Locarno 2023). It’s a familiarity at once thematic — law enforcement figures wrestling with guilt and potential, or real, madness — as well as artistic — actors imbuing the mise-en-scène with externalizations of the psychological journey — which in its turn allows for the divergences to be registered all the more palpably as Diaz here expounds a reversed tale, wherein both redemption is found and sanity recomposed beyond the bounds of the law.
If a term were to be used to describe the mode of operation in which Diaz has been functioning in this recent series of works, “film-novel” would no doubt fit best. Few working artists are as attentive to the ways in which the quotidian and marginalia of life can be rendered epic in scope and effuse with meaning, and in this the director’s plays with duration is wholly essential to the viewer fully experiencing the dynamics of a scene and the work as a whole. And while Phantosmia, according to its closing credits, draws from the real-life journals of its protagonist, Master Sergeant Hilarion Zabala (Ronnie Lazaro), the overall strategy at play is one and the same with the recent fictive efforts: the prolonged laying bare of injustices that pervade the deepest reaches of the Philippines and the souls of its inhabitants, in their minutia, is an intrinsic component, not just in viewers simply coming to comprehend how both society and the individual manifest these wrongs in their own bodies, but feeling the dynamics and nature of this very manifestation.
What injustices, then, are to be comprehended and felt in Phantosmia? In the first place, with regard to the protagonist Zabala, is the nature of the judicial and extra-judicial violence he has perpetrated. In a state of subconscious fracture and unprocessed disgust as a result of these actions, the character is beset by the titular olfactory hallucination and, on the advice of his therapist, begins to retrace the footsteps of his life and inhabit former roles in order to awaken and heal the site of these wounds. As Zabala works through these discoveries subsidiary injustices become plain, as his journeys see him revisit with new eyes the institutions he pledged allegiance to in the form of police precincts and penal colonies, revealing the foundational violence of and barren self-justifying mythology behind these bodies in making society what it is (not least due to their role in putting down or locking up revolutionary movements), as well as the abusiveness this encourages in the people who form para-economies at the edges of these institutions and its violence reflected in the people’s own actions.
Over the course of these explorations, Lazaro’s Zabala affixes a handkerchief to his face for increasingly greater stretches as proximity to and time spent in these spaces magnifies his unconscious perception of a rot that he cannot only see but smell. Drawing to mind the sense of smell in cinema is always a risk, as an element of experience it has no direct correlation with; and yet the risk here is effective — not simply in admiring Lazaro’s dedication to and facility in performing perpetually obscured, but as a symbol of the character’s own change as he eventually begins to process and take redemptive action with regard to the injustices surrounding him, which for Zabala concentrate on the figure of a young woman named Reyna (Janine Gutierrez) whose forced prostitution to the leader of the penal colony by her adoptive family has left her deeply mentally debilitated and physically ravaged. Where the sign of unconscious distress in the protagonist of When the Waves Are Gone and Essential Truths of the Lake (i.e. a worsening skin condition) marked cognitive and somatic deterioration, here Diaz effectively tracks a direct re-engagement and sensorial attunement that allows for honest action regardless of scale.
If one were of the persuasion to do so, the viewer could no doubt identify in Phantosmia a philosophical film discourse on Walter Benjamin’s essay the “Critique of Violence” and a survey of its law-making, law-preserving, mythic (power-making), and divine (law-destroying) aspects. As mentioned, it is the dedication of time to the characters and subjects explored, even in their minuteness, that allows for the fullest of resonances. It’s this, no doubt, that allows for Diaz’s works to ring with the full force of the novelistic, for worlds to open up in the myriad slight details that suffuse his projects. In this way, after the gradual accumulation of horror at banal evil and slowly accrued irritation at the mundanity of hypocritical ignorance, the final scenes of Phantosmia play out with a near-ecstatic, fully understood sense of relief — a right decision inevitably and finally made, a Benjaminian divine violence that allowed for a human life to break out of the coercive orbit of the law, remove the shackles of subconscious hallucination, and find a modicum of justice and freedom it could not otherwise give itself or another. If there is one subject to agonizingly study, survey, and attempt to find in the slightest actions and minutia over the course four hours, it might most fittingly be justice. Call him a film-philosopher, film-novelist, film director — there is no one else bringing life to film quite like Lav Diaz, and we should all hope he doesn’t stop making “fucking cinema, man.”
