Cross Currents
by Jeff Reichert
New York Film Festival 2025:
Magellan
Dir. Lav Diaz, Philippines, Janus Films
The “slow cinema” designation has always felt a bit misapplied to the work of Lav Diaz. Though there are certainly movements in his ever-expanding catalogue of supersized films that sidle up against that famous Ebert description of a durational cinema in which "grim middle-aged men with mustaches sit and look and think and smoke and think and look and sit and smoke and shout and drive around and smoke until finally there is a closing shot that lasts forever and has no point,” Diaz’s movies are packed with events—murder, rape, madness, plots, criminality of all types, apropos for his ongoing excavation of Filippino national identity. But there’s also kindness, community, warmth, family, love. Diaz’s films, with their multiple character strands and intricate plotting, have always struck me as Dickensian—even if he may at times pause his narratives to let us watch a protagonist wander a landscape for an extended length, it usually isn’t long before something, most often a lot of things, start to happen.
Magellan, Diaz’s retelling of the story of the world’s first circumnavigation by European colonialists, runs a fleet 2 hours and 40 minutes, a far cry from the epics that earned him renown in the early aughts (we might be tempted to call it a Diaz “mid-length,” though allegedly there is an eight hour version of this film waiting in the wings). It features Gael GarcĂa Bernal as Ferdinand Magellan, which represents the first appearance in Diaz’s films of a bona fide international movie star, and it’s refreshing that this new element has changed his approach not a whit. Magellan’s story, which ended ignominiously in what is now Cebu City, the sixth most populous city in the Philippines, is perfect fodder for Diaz—his films treat history with seriousness and weight, but without undue reverence, and are always looking for other ways to navigate the dominant narrative. Magellan is one of the few films to cover this episode of the “Age of Discovery” (perhaps Columbus dying of heart failure at the ripe old age of 55 back in Europe offers a closing chapter more reconcilable for the cinema), and Diaz uses this stab at a grand seafaring spectacular to reject the idea that white colonialists “discovered” anything at all.
The film opens in the early 1500s in Malacca with the intrusion of a Portuguese exploratory mission that Magellan signed up for at age 25. Diaz makes us wait for his ostensible hero: his bracing opening image is of a naked indigenous woman calmly bathing in a stream who suddenly apprehends that she’s being watched by white men, who remain out of frame, her eyeline somewhere around where the viewer might be seated. Panicked, she runs off to inform her fellow villagers. We don’t first see Magellan until a few scenes later—an armored figure, tiny in one of Diaz’s signature wide shots, picks himself up from a heap of bodies on the beach and hobbles off with a comrade. This opening movement of the film sees small groups of men chasing each other through the forest, speeches that intimate treachery, an ongoing conflict between various powers. None of it feels heroic at all, and it’s often hard to make out who is fighting whom and to what ends—a refreshing lack of clarity that is of a piece with Diaz’s approach to excavating and complicating history.
In a flash the film moves back to Europe—we see keening female figures on a beach, waiting for their husbands to return. Suddenly, Magellan limps among them and is peppered with questions about who survived the journey and who didn’t. But his mind is already fixed on the next voyage—he believes there to be a pathway to the Spice Islands heading in a westerly direction as opposed to the common eastern route around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope. He’s rebuffed in his request for financing by Portugal’s King Manoel I—with the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas, which divided the world between the Crown of Castile and the Kingdom of Portugal, the latter already had control over the familiar route to the “Indies,” though the film also suggests Magellan, from a family of minor nobles, was far from the King’s good graces. So, ambitious and driven Magellan takes his proposal to the similarly ambitious and driven Spanish King Charles I, who greenlights the expedition. In 1519, his group is on its way.
If Diaz’s disinterest in the heroic narrative of this epoch of oceanic navigation wasn’t clear, consider the first image we see of Magellan’s carrack flagship, the Trinidad. Unlike so many seafaring adventures that allow the camera to caress the wooden sides of these tall ships with an almost erotic awe, Diaz’s Trinidad, like his human figures, is tiny in the frame. It seems easily buffeted by winds and looks altogether unimpressive, as if the seas could swallow it at any moment (standing in for the Trinidad here is the Victoria, the ship from Magellan’s actual armada that did return home and is now used as a floating museum). Diaz presents Magellan’s leadership as similarly small and fragile: recorded events like two men engaging in intercourse below decks (the historical records reports a rape, but Diaz envisions consent); the Mutiny of St. Julien, which almost scuttled the whole expedition; and the mass baptism of native in Cebu, suggest a Magellan obsessed with his goal, but with little in the way of charisma or smarts to complete it. His only and regular recourse is to violence.
This depiction creates a productive frisson for the actor tasked with enacting it. Gael GarcĂa Bernal would never be accused of lacking in charm—since his emergence, roughly contemporaneously to Diaz, in films like Amores Perros, Y tu mamá tambiĂ©n, and El crimen de padre Amaro, he’s been amongst our most handsome and reliably likable international actors. Yet in Magellan, Diaz forces you to squint, lest you miss him. The filmmaker rarely offers Bernal anything closer than a medium shot, and more often hews to his standard-issue wide shots in which figures are dwarfed in the composition. Bernal seems unconcerned by this, and deeply along for the ride—he makes the most of those few images in which we can make out facial features, and seems bodily committed in the many shots that ask him to do little more than stride from one side of a shot another. When actors lose weight or layer on prostheses, we’ll hear much about “disappearing acts," even though such tricks only draw more attention to the performer, make them more conspicuous to the eye. At Magellan’s close, when the inhabitants of Cebu celebrate their victory by parading around a fire, with Bernal/Magellan’s head on a stick rendered barely a speck, I had the thought that I couldn’t recall a star turn that was so aggressively self-effacing.
Length is perhaps the most regularly remarked-upon aspect of Diaz’s films, yet this obsession with size has obscured more pertinent conversations about the filmmaker, most especially his shot-making. The quality and density of his static camera tableaux in Magellan rank against similar painters of still motion like Manoel de Oliveira and Jim Jarmusch. His intuitive understanding of foreground and background, how to activate all portions of the image, left and right, close and far, top and bottom, is unparalleled and on full display in Magellan. Scenes set in early 16th-century Europe have the layered sense of paintings from that era, in which any corner could contain a detail that unlocks significant new meanings. And the long voyage sequence allows Diaz a freedom to play with geometries—we often see figures in low angle with crisscrossing riggings marking the sky behind them or disconnected parts of the boat overcrowded with sailors, with the vast sea surrounding them menacingly.
To date, Diaz’s historical reclamation project has included his reimagining of the origin story of Ferdinand Marcos (Norte, The End of History), an allegory for the violence of the Marcos regime (From What Is Before), a documentary that probes conditions that led to the brutal murder of two film critics in 2009 (An Investigation on the Night That Won’t Forget), his nonfiction recording of the aftermath of the Yolanda typhoon (Storm Children: Book One), and films that attempt to wrestle with the dimwitted thuggery of Duterte (Season of the Devil, The Halt). He’s been a rebellious figure, often publicly thumbing his nose at his nation’s political class. Is there, then, irony, triumph, or a mix of both in the selection of Magellan to represent the Philippines at the 98th Academy Awards?
I’m sure Diaz himself enjoys this knotty complication—his films seek them out. In Norte, the filmmaker offers his murderous Ferdinand grace notes and complexity. And I’m seduced by Magellan’s scenes with the explorer’s wife Beatriz, who bore her husband two children that died young, and then died herself in the same year as her husband. Once the voyage separates them, Diaz allows Beatriz to visit Magellan in a kind of spectral form—he’s cruel and stupid, but he also seems in awe of and connected to this woman (or at least an idea of her) thousands of miles away. It’s another aspect of the film that made me think of Oliveira—especially his ghostly late-career triumph The Strange Case of Angelica. In a film that depicts an unhealthy and violent exchange between Portugal and the Philippines, the idea of the greatest cinema artist of the latter waving towards the spirit of the greatest of the former is the kind of cross-cultural interaction that’s altogether fleeting and ephemeral, but worth reaching towards.