In his director’s statement on the Venice Film Festival website, Lav Diaz is candid about whom he regards as his bêtes-noires du jour: “Putin, Duterte, Assad, Trump… they’ve been with us forever, the Grim Reapers of the world”. More remarkable, however, is the way the Philippine auteur has chosen to tackle their legacies head-on with his latest film. Eschewing the allegories and analogies he has long deployed to make his point in most of his previous films, When the Waves Are Gone offers a highly-charged commentary about the here and now.
Rather than going back in time to trace the point where things began to go wrong, as he recently did with A Tale of Filipino Violence, the seven-hour family saga about the downfall of a rural clan at the onset of Ferdinand Marcos’s dictatorship in the 1970s, Diaz has set his latest film in the present day. Revolving around an ex-cop whose life unravels as he confronts the consequences of the crimes he committed in uniform, When the Waves Are Gone comes complete with conversational and photographic references to the state-sanctioned, extra-judiciary murders which have propelled the Philippines and its now ex-president Rodrigo Duterte to international notoriety.
A pared-down re-interpretation of the revenge-drama genre, When the Waves Are Gone is driven by the intense turns delivered by its two leads, with John Lloyd Cruz as the guilt-wracked protagonist, and Ronnie Lazaro as the double-faced, demented harbinger of his doom. But it’s what came in between (or behind) their performances that makes the pristinely produced black-and-white film powerful: the chiaroscuro-lit mise-en-scene in which characters mull their problems or bristle in silence, or the vast vistas of the Philippine hinterlands reducing people into mere dots, as in the scenes in which the masochistic protagonist throw himself at the merciless waves to attain pain or salvation.
Clocking in at just over three hours, When the Waves Are Gone is playing out of competition in Venice. But Diaz’s latest definitely merits much more than this, as the film is arguably on a par with his Golden Lion-winning The Woman Who Left from 2016. Nevertheless, being more succinct in its premise and its running time, this Philippine-French-Portuguese-Danish co-production should easily sweep and swell across festivals in the autumn and beyond.
Waves begins with a quote wrought large in the classroom of a police academy: “One must seek the truth from within, not without.” Drawn from Agatha Christie’s Poirot novels, it’s supposed to proclaim the importance for detectives or human beings in general in trusting their brains – or to be exact, logical thinking – to resolve problems. Here, however, Diaz meant otherwise: there’s nothing logical about the human condition, as traumas of this doomed world simply leave people alienated or out of control of their feelings and actions.
And that’s what Lieutenant Hermes (Cruz) is: one moment he’s a seemingly effective and respected police officer mentoring rookie cops about cracking cases through persistence and good memory, and the next we see him unleash violent mayhem as he barges into a house to bust his wife’s tryst with another man. Faced with humiliation at work, he resigns without blinking an eye; he then goes to brutally beat up a colleague who badmouths him – and then returns to the scene seconds later, flashing his police credentials and calling the ambulance for his victim.
As it turns out, this was just a minor transgression compared to what Hermes did in the past. As he returns to his rural hometown, he tells his sister (Shamaine Centenera-Buencamino) the “assignments” he once had to carry out: point blank murders of innocent people dressed up as part of a “war on drugs”. He also recalls how his body began to react and rebel against his disgusting line of work: rashes, hair loss and then the onset of full-scale psoriasis.
His sister, whose schoolteacher-husband was among those “disappeared” by the killing squads, is having none of this, as he sees the dead skin covering his brother’s body is symbolic of the rot in his soul. “The culture of killing is becoming your system,” she hollers, as she tries to get rid of the sand threatening to submerge their abandoned ancestral home by the sea. The way the elements erodes her and Hermes’ cherished memories of a more innocent past is akin to the way fear and panic eat at their souls. To fight back is Sisyphean.
But hot on Hermes’ heels is another much more disturbed individual. A recently paroled convict, Primo (Lazaro) is seen travelling upriver to Hermes’ hometown, playing preacher and devil in alternate turns: with a strange mix of dastardly charm and deadly coercion, he brings all the unfortunate people falling into his path – labourers, hawkers, prostitutes – under his sway. He’s always ready to talk about and demonstrate the “most effective way of imposing torture on people”, while also willing to treat street sleepers with free meals and “Cokes” (the soft-drink kind, of course). The parallels with certain populist tyrants are very obvious.
Hermes and Primo will eventually meet for a final showdown, but what emerges from that subverts the simple good-against-evil understanding of what viewers might have about these two characters. Then again, this is probably what Diaz has wanted to say all along: in a society in which death and destruction are met with indifference or sometimes even celebration – Duterte’s undimmed popularity, say, or the return of Ferdinand Marcos’ son as democratically elected president – everyone is guilty to an extent. Even conscientious journalists: Hermes’ photographer friend Raffy (DMs Boongaling) admits how, when at the scene of yet another case of murderous police brutality, his reflex is to “shoot and shoot, ask questions later” – the same, perhaps, as that of the cops who loaded people with bullets without thinking.
Perhaps Diaz is also talking about himself, an artist struggling to defy social odds and his home country’s backward lurch towards tyranny to seemingly no avail. It’s perhaps like what Hermes’ sister said: “Where is God? Is God alive?” Just as the reflections about crimes and punishment of Dostoyevsky – one of Diaz’s main sources of inspiration – did little to drastically change what beckoned later for Russia, Diaz might not be able to curtail the rise of tyrants.
With Waves, however, he has provided a window into the darkness of the soul – that of his characters, their countries, and the world in general – in mesmerising power and visual poetry. Having perfected the use of digital for his representation of the shadows and light in his universe – and Waves is a morality play which calls for the use of that, especially in that final face-off between its two leads – Diaz has offered a masterful reinvention of a genre flick into something much more transcendant.
Director, screenwriter, editor, production designer: Lav Diaz
Cast: John Lloyd Cruz, Ronnie Lazaro, Shamaine Centenera-Buencamino, DMs Boongaling
Producers: Bianca Balbuena, Bradley Liew, Jean-Christophe Simon, Joaquim Sapinho, Marta Alves
Executive producers: Jeremiah Oh, Kang Xin Ying
Director of photography: Larry Manda
Sound designer: Hugo Leitao
Production companies: Epicmedia (Philippines), Snowglobe (Denmark), Films Boutique (France), Rosa Filmes (Portugal)
World sales: Films Boutique
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Out of competition)
In Tagalog, English
187 minutes
