But let’s not get carried away, because as Diaz himself reminds us during a recent screening of the movie at the National Commission for Culture and the Arts that had the stones and ghosts of Intramuros reeling, there is more than one way to watch a film, particularly if it is as long as his is–he is not averse to viewers catching snatches of it at one film festival, then pick up the thread of narrative at the next filmfest, or even of busybodies walking in and out of the darkened theater screening the digital evolution of the Gallardo family through the martial law years and then some, give or take a few historical sidetrips, digressions and asides.
The screening has actually a 30-minute break after some five hours, or after the first six discs, but if Lav would have his way there would be no breaks, as already happened at one festival abroad, and where we can only imagine the hardy moviegoers sprouting sprigs of wisdom and enlightenment out of their ears, eyes and other musty orifices after the epic experience. Don’t ask him to apologize, though –as he says, "ayaw ko ng de-kahon", he shuns the formulas of Hollywood and the paint-by-numbers mentality of our own local industry, choosing to thrive in the rare close-knit school of independent cinema which anyway is a class in itself, sui generis, cinema as purgatorio.
Lav Diaz, remember him? Doesn’t his name somehow ring a bell? Like Roxlee, Khavn dela Cruz, Ditsi Carolino, a very Inday and the Brockas? We will be the first to admit that we lasted only the first five hours of Ebolusyon, but anyway caught up with the elusive director after the full-length screening at NCCA after choosing to vegetate at another level in a nearby newsroom, nagmistulang gulay, and with a party of film buffs from purgatory walked through cobblestone streets following the scent of beer and other sundry smells of Manila by night, engaging in small talk as the film was large, larger than life, Lav on his way to San Francisco the next day for yet another filmfest where another audience was waiting to be pummeled into submission.
"It can’t be, ‘di puede ‘yon," direk says to my suggestion whether it was possible for him to consider marketing the film in halves, as in parts 1 and 2 of five hours each, length of his movie before Ebolusyon, Batang West Side, which three years ago cooked up a storm. The length of his movies, come to think of it now, is born not of a Guinness mentality but a mindset nurtured by the Russian novel and the equally sweeping Russian cinema–he swears by Dostoevsky, whose Crime and Punishment he credits as main influence for his first movie, Kriminal ng Barrio Concepcion, and the director Tarkovksy. Ebolusyon then, could be his Brothers Karamazov. An early Diaz work, Hubad sa Ilalim ng Buwan, classified as a Regal pito-pito or quickie made on a seven-day budget, starred sexpot Klaudia Koronel who sleepwalked naked and maybe dreaming of a degree in computer science.
He’s retrieved the master which now sits in a basement in an apartment in New York. His last mainstream outing, Hesus, Rebolusyonario, bombed at the box office, was pulled out after a couple of days or so and received mixed reviews, and could partly explain Diaz’s aversion to the local industry. His face changes when the topic is mentioned, full of bad memories it apparently is.
Key to understanding Ebolusyon, or at least the first half of it, is the concept of the tagabulag. Lav explains it after we inquire whatever happened to the character Huling (played by Banaue Miclat), whose fleeting images are seen just before the halftime break by members of her family, as if something ominous had happened to her: "It’s like a folk belief or custom in the provinces, where out of severe boredom people sometimes see brief likenesses of those close to them, ghost-like actually, although the visage may not necessarily have passed away." When we mention this phenomenon to someone who grew up in the province, she says that the tagabulag to them is known as tagulilong, more precisely a person’s power of bi-location or to be in separate places at one time.
Aside from Miclat, others in the cast seem to be familiar fixtures in Pinoy indie cinema, such as Pen Medina, Ronnie Lazaro, Joel Torre, indeed favorite actors of the Red brothers, and features cameos as well by fellow directors Roxlee and Quark Henares.
What hits us about the movie long before our eyes freeze over and the sound of our own impatient, impertinent yawns rings in our ears as several minutes are spent focused on a single, otherwise immovable scene, is that the characters of Ebolusyon, the whole Gallardo family and those surrounding their life’s history, are in surreality something of a tagabulag or tagulilong themselves, don’t they somehow look familiar way before approaching the threshold of contempt?
Yes they do, and by no grand design does Lav interweave their story with the radio drama they so like to listen to, about hope always being there and ever present, Laging May Pagasa lying in ambush as it were with appropriate cameos to lighten up the proceedings a bit, the voices given face by the director in more ways than one, or is it faces given voice because no longer disembodied in a humdrum existence.
Excuse us but we are reminded of a line by Bruce Springsteen, "sometimes I feel so weak that I want to explode." Which is what a viewer might feel while watching Ebolusyon, explode out of oblivion, as unending frames of idyll and romance flit before you in black and white or unintended duo-tone, the texture alternately shimmering like shadows on the omnipresent screen, or is that the effect of the air-conditioning.
Diaz, who has admitted to be heavily influenced by surrealism, says that what he was unable to incorporate in his epic was the Tagalog comics like Liwayway. We get the unadulterated run of radio drama and scenes in a highway cabaret with Pen Medina’s hand flush on the rear of a dancer while "Together Again" plays in the background, dream sequences galore and a boy taking revenge on the rapists of his broken down mother, Bagyo sa Cuaresma!, an extended tour of the Pinoy in purgatory ever after.
"Malakas sa Pinoy ang guilt dahil sa Catholic upbringing," direk says, and here we recall Bunuel who made it his mission to attack the established conventions, the great father of surrealism who once said that "it is no longer possible to scandalize people, we can only do so by sweet subversion". Unlike Bunuel’s films, there were no riots that accompanied the screening of Ebolusyon, none that we know of anyway.
But the man’s not finished–no, far from it. He’s already started work on his next project Heremias, about one of those ambulant vendors in ox carts usually coming all the way from Pangasinan, but they had to hold shooting because the cost of hiring those carts complete with ox was prohibitive.
He wants to do some side project meanwhile, maybe about the rugby-sniffing streetkids on Avenida, about which he wrote a short story shortlisted for the Midweek prize early in the last decade. He apparently knows Sta. Cruz well, knows the secrets of its blind minstrels and a-go-go alleys, although he has quit drinking and smoking since a benign cyst was removed from his lungs last December.
He lives in Cubao these days, laments a bit how the old Cubao is no more, Alibangbang is now Bang-bang-ali, though Ali Mall is still there, likewise the trio of theaters all in a row on Aurora near corner EDSA–Diamond, Remar, Coronet–which, according to him, now screen seedy films for faithful patrons not yet lost to the malls. He once dreamed of turning Cinema 21 into an art house, but a religious congregation beat him to the spot.
When he has the time and funds or on a sidetrip to some filmfest he visits his children in Queens, where they live with his estranged wife, his marriage a celluloid casualty, but don’t talk to him much about it, a load of Catholic guilt, because when the camera starts dancing we can always walk away, just as Bunuel did long ago on the other side of the world, hope in ambush, our lives a 10-hour radio drama and great Filipino novel.