Norte, The End of History (2013)

For a long time, I've been interested in seeing some of Lav Diaz' movies. Sadly, the distribution of his films have not been wide. For this reason, I was more than happy when there was a screening of Norte, The End of History in the midnight sun film festival in Sodankylä. After having seen the film, I am even more of the opinion that the films of Lav Diaz should be more accessible.

This film is loosely based on Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. In the beginning of the film, we follow a group of law students and their "intellectual" idle chatter about postmodernism and politics. Diaz seems to make a point of their use of English. They lead a comfortable life. One of these disaffected law students fall out from the group. His financial situation is not good and he tries to scramble together the rent money. Another protagonist is the father of a family. He has plans but they are shattered as he is injured. The fates of these men are crossed when the former law student kills a heartless moneylender. The other man is arrested and put in prison, unable to prove he didn't do it. His wife tries her best to eake out a living by selling vegetables from a cart. The film takes its time to observe, survey and listen to its characters. It follows the misery of the murderer, the hostile environment of the prison and the day-to-day life in a poor neighboorhood. Dostoyevsky's story looms in the background, and as the film progresses, we are thrown into the darkness of isolation and remorse.

The cinematography of Lauro Rene Mands brilliantly creates a space for both the drudgery of everyday life and moments of despair and even moments that take us away from the basic perspectives of the film. The films thus blends the mundane with an immense sense of strangeness. The latter moments may not appear often, but they are very important for the film as a whole: moments of disorientation, perhaps.

Instead of feeling that the 4 hours spent with this film are the mark of a pretentious film maker who tries to prove his own auteur-dom, I consider the strength of the film to be that this stretch of cinematic world enables Diaz to lead the viewer deeper into his world. He has time both for the characters and their environment. This is not to say that the film contains no excesses. I found some problems towards the end where I felt that Diaz is trying to shock to viewer. These were scenes in which "darkness" turned into a technique, an attempt to elicit strong reactions.

What makes the film special is how it moves on many levels. One can read it as a story about morality and despair, but one can also see it as commentary on the history of the Philippines. This aspect is strongly present in the beginning of the film, where the group of cosmopolitan law students are given plenty of time to express their cynicism (one gets a sense for their belonging to a small group severly separated from the goings on of other people in the country).