With A Tale of Filipino Violence, presented at FID Marseille 2022, Filipino master Lav Diaz returns with another moral epic of the rise and fall through redemption caused by the roots of evil.
“The arrogance of knowledge, and the arrogance of ignorance”. Our main character and next of kin, Bandong Monzon VI hears from the wise philosopher from the slums of the streets. One of the many quotes of enlightenment that Bandong Monzon hears along the way in Lav Diaz’s latest epic, A Tale of Filipino Violence. Clocking in at a little under 7 hours, Diaz uses his time with his signature style: static long takes of monologues, musical numbers, and discussion around the struggles of the Filipino working class. Adapted from a short story and screenplay from renowned Filipino screenwriter, Ricardo Lee, who provided over dozens of writing credits for many Filipino directors (most notably Lino Brocka), was also Diaz and Lee’s first collaboration. Continuing on critiquing the Filipino dictatorship from the Marcos regime, and its cascading effect on the working class, Diaz, this time, concentrates on the bourgeoisie, to discover their family history, traumatic events, and social rebellion for an introspective journey of disorder, greed, and violence.
For many Diaz films, the structural storytelling is told through back-and-forth plot lines of multiple characters, providing enough information to feed into the next. In Filipino Violence, Diaz focuses on the Monzon family, specifically, Bandong Monzon VI and a loose serial killer, Hector Maniquis. As for Hector, he is briefly shown in the beginning with a bomb threat attempt to rob a clothing store and torturing his father for abusing his mother and him. He reappears in scenes periodically as the film focuses on Bandong’s challenge of nurturing his eventual father’s death on his deathbed, taking care of the family farm business, preparing to become a father with his pregnant partner, Belinda, all while, most importantly, under Ferdinand Marcos’ martial law. With Bandong traversing and handling of this soon to be transition of power of the family estate, he is at crossroads with the secrecy of the military and greed of the government against the rising take over from the New People Movement (NPA), a communist group teaching their ideology across the nation. With Lee and Diaz’s text, the film’s novelist story of revenge and monologues fit right into Diaz’s filmmaking. These texts support Bandong’s sympathetic nature bringing him to a complicated matter; he is a business man raised on nepotism, while forming opposite ideas against the current regime, to meet an equal agreement between the owners and workers leaving his ambivalence at a breaking point.
With the groundwork laid out, Diaz constructs another moralist tale into introspection stemming from family and Filipino history. Historic revelations are told through the journal of Bandong’s ancestor, Servando Monzon III, a Spanish colonizer who arrived in the Filipinos in 1574. The Liberation of the Philippines from the Japanese soldiers shortly after WWII was on the land where Bandong’s family owned. Diaz uses these devices to further examine Filipino’s contradictory obsession between religion and greed. On the contrary, Diaz brings in progressive and modern beliefs to challenge the outdated thinking. An old wise man, who volunteers at a blind community home teaches Bandong to see, while a poor man on the streets, teaches Bandong how to live. These little poetic moments are what Diaz brings in this messed up world.
Furthermore, Diaz’s latest epic, both in duration and scale, is another sight to behold, but very well is a Diaz film. From his specific framing and blocking, Diaz is interested in his use of space. Diaz continues to build on his forest background imagery that portrays Philippines’ land as first of all, nature. But in Filipino Violence, Diaz experimented with new blocking techniques to enhance his storytelling. For instance, usage of symmetry focusing on the center point became apparent in an early scene of brick building, and a confession monologue between Bandong and his elders felt arresting in Diaz’s black and white photography. With Diaz’s vision for storytelling, both the text and image, A Tale of Filipino Vision breaks down the Filipino family as a result of its history.
