MAGELLAN

Filipino director Lav Diaz has made some of the longest-ever narrative films. In the world of slow cinema aficionados, he’s a god—a master minimalist-maximalist storyteller who uses extreme length to unravel complex social issues tracing back to his archipelago homeland. Between this year’s restoration of his first epic, the excellent Y2K Jersey City crime drama Batang West Side, and the Cannes premiere of this sumptuous, instant classic historical drama, Diaz’s crossover moment is finally here. Magellan is certainly the most accessible film he’s made, but Diaz’s artistry is undiminished. He has crafted an epic anti-epic for the ages. Gael García Bernal plays the doomed explorer and gives a brilliant performance in a film that refuses to showcase its marquee star. He is often silent and reactive, obscured by shadows or shot at a distance, but his descent is as crystal clear as the Pacific waters. Diaz conjures a profoundly sensorial experience akin to Terrence Malick, eschewing a score in favor of the hypnotic rhythms of jungle canopies, lapping waves, and creaking galleons. This is a corrective, yes—a Filipino artist taking stock of this epoch of brutal colonialism—but it’s also the work of a supremely confident filmmaker equally capable of conjuring breathtaking beauty and ugliness. Magellan takes its place in the lineage of psychedelic conquests from Aguirre to Zama. ~OO