Two years onwards from the Venice premiere of his epic When the Waves Are Gone, Lav Diaz returns to the Lido with Phantosmia, in which a former military marksman confronts the karmic payback for the time he spent working as a government-sanctioned “killing machine”. While of a more modest scale and featuring less of the sweeping imagery and fantastical elements that propelled When the Waves Are Gone and its follow-up/prequel, Essential Truths of the Lake, through the festival circuit, Phantosmia should linger for quite some time among festival audiences with its actors’ solid performances, Diaz’s intense yet unhurried storytelling, and a beautiful mise-en-scene brought to life in crisply filmed monochrome.
When Philippine indie-cinema icon Ronnie Lazaro last worked with Diaz on When the Waves Are Gone, he delivered a staggering turn as a hate-spewing, sex-crazed demagogue going to physical and emotional extremes to settle accounts with his past. In Phantosmia, however, the actor has an understated presence throughout. Playing a retired soldier seeking redemption for the deadly deeds he committed in service, Lazaro is melancholic at best and gruff at worst, as he channels a down-and-out pensioner trying and failing to reconcile his inner demons while despairing of the injustice and vice around him.
This shift in tone in Lazaro’s performance is as much a sign of the veteran actor’s versatility as it is an indication of Diaz’s change of tack. Having spent the past two years producing films which are epic in either visual style (Waves), political messaging (Essential Truths of the Lake) or historical scope (the seven-hour A Tale of Filipino Violence), the director has returned to the slower, more grounded work with which he made his name. This four-hour film seems more like Diaz picking up where he left off before the internationally co-produced Waves, with films such as Genus, Pan (2020) or History of Ha (2021).
Much less a furious state-of-the-nation diatribe than his previous few films – the historical setting is decidedly vague, with scant mention of the Philippine despots who Diaz would usually mention by name or in thinly-veiled allegories – Phantosmia comes across more as a humane and universal study of how human beings confront their guilt. Atmospheric and affecting in equal measure, Diaz’s latest outing should continue his successful run through the festival circuit after its out-of-competition bow at Venice.
The film’s title alludes to the psychological disorder in which an individual is afflicted with a “phantom smell”. This is what plagues Hilarion (Lazaro), whose life is transformed into a misery by a hallucinatory rotten odour. He wraps a bandana around his face to mask the stench, but it’s all in vain: the stink only exists in his head, a consequence of the trauma he is burdened with for the horrors he witnessed in the distant past. During the flashback which is the film’s captivating opening sequence, Hilarion recalls his dejection at not being able to save a Muslim settlement from the deadly nocturnal attack of a Christian militia; all he and his underlings could do was to give the dead a respectful burial the morning after.
As someone who’s shown doing good in a military uniform, Hilarion is indeed a very different creature from the uniformly cruel military men and women populating Diaz’s cinematic universe. Indeed, Hilarion is a more rounded character than some of the cipher-like protagonists in the director’s more explicitly political work. Sure, Hilarion’s olfactory disorder might stem from self-reproach for having taken part in a string of extra-judicial murders in 1972 – the year when dictator Ferdinand Marcos began to rule the Philippines by martial-law decree. The character also reveals his remorse for having abandoned his family for another woman. Hilarion’s fluffed attempts to make peace with his children – his empathetic daughter Aling (Tony Go), and his hostile son Nelson (Edrick Alcontrado) – mirror his efforts to reconcile with his own ghosts.
On the advice of a therapist, Hilarion tries to cleanse himself by “re-immersing” in the past – which for him means re-enlisting in the army and signing up for a posting as sentry at a far-flung penal colony. Rather than flagellating himself with the loneliness of exile, Hilarion soon finds himself agonising over the new transgressions unfolding around him.
The camp commandant, Major Lukas (Paul Jake Paule) is a Jekyll-and-Hyde monster whose benign public broadcasts – “Thanks for working for a fine day!” – belie the abuse he metes out to his charges. His “tolerance” of a liquor store outside the camp, meanwhile, has less to do with him being a liberal than about his business transactions with its owner Narda (Hazel Orencio) – specifically his requests for sex with her step-daughter Reyna (Janine Gutierrez).
Filmed in high-contrast black-and-white, Diaz teases fear and anxiety out of the most static of shots – whether it’s merely a protracted conversation between Hilarion and his counsellor (Lhorvie Nuevo) in her well-appointed office, or a nearly conversation-free scene showing the looming watchtowers and barbed-wire fencing of the penal colony as seen from afar. Meanwhile, Diaz’s screenplay and splicing provides nearly all his characters sufficient space to elucidate or, in the case of Paule and Gutierrez, emote. But Phantosmia is certainly no waffling melodrama. There’s hardly any fat left on its long running time, as Diaz again delivers a harrowing cinematic journey through the destruction and eventual deliverance of the human soul.
Director, screenwriter, cinematographer, editor, production designer: Lav Diaz
Cast: Ronnie Lazaro, Janine Gutierrez, Paul Jake Paule, Hazel Orencio
Producers: Paul Soriano, Mark Victor, Lav Diaz
Costume designer: Eouia Aum Duenas
Production companies: Black Cap Pictures, TEN17P, Sine Olivia Pilipinas
World sales: Diversion
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Out of Competition)
In Tagalog
246 minutes