Lav Diaz has developed a reputation that precedes him. If you tell someone in the film world you’re going to see a new Diaz project you’ll get some raised eyebrows or wide eyes – all gestures heavy with unspoken surprise. Slow cinema requires the flexing of underused mental muscles and Diaz’s work demands a limber mind. Like reading poetry, it is a format designed to make you focus on your positionality as a participating viewer. What words are you skipping over? Where did your mind wander in the middle of that scene? You will never be able to get your arms around the fullness of this form, so what are you grasping and what are you surrendering? Despite its elitist reputation, slow cinema is a genre steeped in empathy, as concerned with what the viewer might miss as what they see.
As with all his work, Phantosmia is a homage to the Philippines, the director’s homeland, and a place rendered cinematic through its conflicting construction: tin roofs over cement houses packed tightly side by side; rolling hills of endless undergrowth, so thick it appears cross-stitched together. Phantosmia is based on letters from a regional ranger, and channels such correspondence into Sergeant Hilarion Zabala, a man gripped by PTSD and desperate to evade the obsolescence of retirement. In his plea for meaning, he becomes a ranger for the residents of Pulo Island, encountering charismatic Major Lukas Ramon and the crooked sari-sari shop (convenience store) owner Narda. A host of secondary figures float around Hilarion, including Setong and Reyna, Narda’s foster children.
Reyna acts as the impetus for the story, with everything unassumingly coiling around her until she seizes upon freedom. In the beginning, she is wracked with nerves, shaking and crying every time she is forced to sleep with local men to provide money. It is almost three hours into the film before we see Reyna smile, excitedly greeting childhood friends. If Diaz is always combing through the Philippines’ gruesome colonial history in service of a liberated future, then Phantosmia and Reyna are elegant expressions of such hope. As she floats away from Narda, Setong and Pulo Island in the end, Hilarion calls out: “Your freedom is just the start…one day your eyesight will come back!” It is a character-specific farewell and a powerfully articulate promise for a country once shrouded in colonialism.
Every shot is similarly attuned to such expressions of hope, with Diaz exclusively favouring steady, wide shots of painterly precision. Hilarion’s face sandwiched between the barbed wire of the ranger gate, listening to Mayor Lukas’ ramblings; Hilarion stood amongst the discarded shards of his son’s guitar; Reyna straining to touch the weathered bark of a tree as she floats away towards her future: all of it holds people and their habitats in perfect focus. No one ever strays out of the frame, but no one is frozen or held against their will; somehow Diaz balances both instincts in such composition.
Nothing ever goes unearned in Diaz’ filmmaking, and with Phantosmia he hacks through the undergrowth of bureaucracy to define “home”. By the end of the four hours, you have been walking with him, with Hilarion, with Reyna, and even with the conniving Mayor Lukas, and you may look back to survey such vast terrain and realise that you’ve walked further than you thought.
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