The Berlinale throws a curveball: "A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery", by Lav Diaz

This stunning film from Filipino auteur Lav Diaz has been the most unforgettable event of this 66^th Berlinale for me.  Not because it lasted 482 minutes  (yes, eight hours of screening time, plus a one-hour break) and required unusual physical and spiritual stamina to watch, riveted to the seat in the darkness of the Berlinale Palast last Thursday, February 18.

 It was that intense esthetic experience – seeing what the film medium can do that no other art form can in the same way – that made me grasp once more that cinema is a form of revelation, an act of literally piercing the veil of physical reality to push it into a non-material dimension. This filmmaker belongs in the same company as Bresson, Tarkovsky, Kieslowski, Bela Tarr, Apitchatpong Weerasethakul, Terrence Malick, and sometimes Lars von Trier, who practice what Paul Schrader described as the transcendental style in cinema.  I came out of that screening thinking, “I have seen a modern day version of the Divine Comedy ”. It’s an intuition that may be wrong but helped me understand what this black-and-white work made up of very long takes, meant when it made explicit its theme in the last line: “I’m searching for the soul of the Philippines”.

A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery describes a seminal period in the history of the Philippines, the beginnings of the rebellion against Spain in the 1890s after three hundred years of colonial presence.  It does so by linking a series of sequences – some exquisite tableaux shot in a studio; others, leisurely paced action scenes set in the jungle or by the sea – centered on the question “What is the Philippines?”.  The plot responds to it by proposing the answers from differing perspectives: the indigenous Tagalog, the Spaniards, the Catholic Church in her beauty and failings. Weaving through them runs a mythological demon, an ancient evil monster, half horse half man, which is also seen split in three characters.  (In a scene showing the first cinématographe arriving in the Philippines, the demon takes over the machine, looking like the monsters of German Expressionism.)

As I understood it, the film functions as a myth of origin. To those familiar with the history of the Philippines, the real characters, the literary works and folk songs interwoven in the story will be easy to recognize, like the national hero José Rizal (with whom the film begins), and his book El filibusterismo.  As the director explained in the lively press conference after the screening, “I wanted to show the minds, the pains and the questions of the thinking Filipino”. In that sense, the experience of colonialism – and how to assess the culture, the language and the religion of the occupier - can be transposed from the Philippines to elsewhere where a similar situation has unfolded.  It occurred to me that a good analogy would be an eight-hour film about the meaning and direction of the US, combining in the same storyline a rational and pragmatic British perspective with an indigenous and mythical mindset, in the coastal Virginia of the 1600s - a mythological variation of Terrence Malick’s New World.

During those eight hours of screen time, we see parallel and intersecting stories of journeys undertaken by suffering men and women, immersed in turmoil.  The jungle where they trample is a place of danger but also enchantment, and the sea they reach at the end is perhaps the only locus left for a new beginning to happen. These journeys are geographical but become metaphorical, and ultimately, open ended. They culminate with the final shot of the survivors: a resilient woman, a writer and a priest.

“The film is not eight hours. It’s just cinema”, answered Lav Diaz to a question about the viability of the picture in the real world of movie-going. He also spoke fondly of the influence of Italian Neorealism on this film and his other work, especially the moral perspective the Italians brought to the style.  Asked about other references, Diaz talked about German Expressionism and comic books, and, overall, the chiaroscuro of classic cinema.  The director warmly recalled André Bazin and his celebration of the long take. (Loved it).

A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery was the Berlinale’s special gift to moviegoers this year. I would love to see how the international jury will assess its unusual qualities, in a few hours, when the prizes are awarded.  Meryl Streep is the president this year, and I saw her several times, carefully guarded by polite minders.  I snapped this photo right before a film, since I was sitting behind her.