With Essential Truths of the Lake, Lav Diaz continues his Sisyphus-like j’accuse against the long litany of tyrants who have poisoned the contemporary Philippine body politic with their rabble-rousing speeches and paramilitary hit squads. Boasting a powerful performance from John Lloyd Cruz as a cop who loses his mind as he struggles to unearth the truth behind the disappearance of a social activist (Shaina Magdayao), the film mixes its soul-destroying narrative with DP Larry Manda’s beautiful imagery – including, perhaps for the first time for the famously austere Diaz, a slow-motion shot of a discharging gun.
At the beginning of Essential Truths of the Lake, two high-ranking police officers meet clandestinely on the rooftop of a suburban villa to ponder the problems in their line of work, in a society where state-sanctioned extra-judicial murders have become the rhythm of everyday life. One asks: “What ails the Philippine National Police?” The other pauses and says: “Political. Cultural. Sociological. Ideological, or even spiritual.”
That’s exactly how Diaz seeks to unpack the violent state of the Philippine nation in his latest, three-hour opus. Armed with the seemingly generic devices of a disheveled cop and a very cold case, Diaz reveals – through a mix of talky expositions, static landscapes and delirious nightmares – the many ways in which a society buckles as corruption, cynicism and outright violence is tolerated and eventually integrated into the social fabric.
Admittedly, that’s what Diaz has been doing the past ten years, as he left behind the mythical and allegorical nature of his earlier work to condemn the specific autocrats who have cast his country asunder. Starting with his ceaseless censure of dictator Ferdinand Marcos and the terrible legacy he left behind – first with Norte, the End of History (2013), and then the Locarno winner From What Is Before (2015) – Diaz moved on to condemn the populist Rodrigo Duterte with the political musical Season of the Devil and last year’s revenge drama When the Waves Are Gone.
Bowing in competition at the Locarno Film Festival, where Diaz triumphed in 2014 with From What Is Before, Essential Truths serves as proof of the gradual transformation of Diaz’s aesthetics from stark (and admittedly slow-moving) minimalism to a template mixing visual experimentalism with the trappings of genre cinema. With his latest, Diaz has – again, like he did on The Woman Who Left – turned to film noir for artistic inspiration, as he uses the unravelling of a hard-boiled cop to outline the evil ways of the world we live in.
Bearing the strains of both fatalist fare like Carol Reed’s The Third Man and Pedro Costa’s Colossal Youth, or politically-charged Philippine melodramas like Ishmael Bernal’s Himala, Essential Truths is a gripping, slow-burning and film that matches the emotional intensity and political fire of Diaz’s magnificently lensed and choreographed work of the past decade.
While it’s not exactly as epic as the Venice-bowing Waves, Essential Truths makes up for that with intimate depictions of an individual’s psychological disintegration. In the place of the windswept seascapes of his previous film, Diaz peppers his latest with fantastical imagery reflecting the mental breakdown of his protagonist, his nightmares wrought large in the shape of writhing bodies, explosions in dank cellars, the expressionless faces of avenging assassins and – perhaps the most disturbing of all – a man crawling around naked and leashed like a dog, as his toddler son looks on.
The man in question is Hermes Papauran (Cruz), a detective who has returned to a small lakeside town to continue his investigation into the disappearance of Esmeralda Stuart (Magdayao), a model-turned-environmentalist who vanished from view 15 years ago. Backed by his equally conscientious superior (Agot Isidro), Hermes touches base with the missing woman’s many friends and associates for clues. Filmmaker Jane Liway (Hazel Orencio) remembers Esmeralda as a conflicted activist who fretted that her eco-advocacy was “undervalued” because of her looks; fashion designer Sur (Ivan Rabolar) recalls his disappeared friend’s embrace of the masked costume of the Philippine Eagle, an endangered animal she’s trying to save and also hide behind.
More ominous is Hermes’ tense exchange with Jack Barquero (Bart Guingona), the local tycoon with whom Esmeralda – as seen in flashbacks – confided her innermost fears over dinner. After a brief chat about the woman’s possible whereabouts in a waterside restaurant, Jack begins to berate Hermes for his dogged pursuit of the case – and the detective’s suspicions of him as a main suspect. At one point, Jack channels The Third Man’s Harry Lime as he tells Hermes people are numerous and indispensable, as insignificant as the objects which might have sunk to the depths of the lake without anyone knowing.
It’s a thinly veiled threat about the watery death which may await Hermes if he continues his investigation, but it could also be taken as a metaphor about the many, many cases of social injustice that have been obscured and buried deep within the collective psyche of Philippine society. Thus the film’s title, and note the plural: with Essential Truths, Diaz has gone well beyond the condemnation of Duterte’s violent “war on drugs” to look at the climate of criminal impunity the right-wing populist ex-president ushered in during his rule as the president of the Philippines.
Duterte’s announcement of the Philippines’ withdrawal from the International Criminal Court in 2019 provides the backdrop to Hermes’ futile attempts to bring some closure to the case and himself. Inevitably, as he goes to extremes in making sense of Esmeralda’s disappearance, he finally breaks down, and his descent into madness concludes Essential Truths’ first part.
The second part of the film begins with a real-life volcanic catastrophe as its backdrop. It is January 2020, when the Taal Volcano – the second biggest of its kind in the Philippines, and the one towering over the town where Esmeralda disappeared – exploded and spewed fire and fury across miles. Amid the ash-covered landscape, Hermes reappears: now bearing flowing locks and armed with a camera – something “which never lies”, he says. He settles down in the area and begins to ask the people around him about Esmeralda again.
Just like in his previous visit, nobody remembers or admits to knowing anything substantial about her. But Hermes can see new grievances unfolding in front of him, as he watches an old man (Romeo Vasquez) using a single stick to unearth the remains of his family from a field of volcanic ash as large as a football field. His growing friendship with a young urchin called Achilles (Reynan Alocede), to whom he explains the Greek mythology behind his name, is quickly dampened by a seemingly random, tragic death.
While considerably shorter in length and much more understated in tone than the first section, this second part proves to be just as engaging and heartbreaking, if not more. Shunting the genre-infused narrative of the first two hours aside, Diaz returns to what he does best: simple, unvarnished takes of ordinary people (the “peasants”, as the filmmaker has described himself and his parents) struggling to contend with the inexplicable tragedy unleashed on them by both nature and humankind. Essential Truths of the Lake does provides the viewer with everything Diaz could and would do, as he continues his quest to reveal the political, cultural and spiritual crises tearing his country apart.
Director, screenwriter, editor: Lav Diaz
Cast: John Lloyd Cruz, Hazel Orencio, Shaina Magdayao, Bart Guigona, Agot Isidro
Producers: Bianca Balbuena, Jean-Christophe Simon with Joaquim Saphinho, Marta Alves
Executive producers: Jeremiah R. Oh, Xin Ying Kang, Stefano Centini, Dan Wechsler, Andreas Roald, Jamal Zeinal-Zade
Directors of photography: Lav Diaz, Larry Manda
Sound designer: Corinne De San Jose
Art director: Allen Alzola
Costume designer: Ivan Raborar
Production companies: Epicmedia Productions, Films Boutique, Rosa Filmes with Tier Pictures, Volo Films Italia, Bord Cadre Films, Sovereign Films
World sales: Films Boutique
Venue: Locarno Film Festival (Competition)
In Tagalog and English
213 minutes