Masterful Magellan forces a long, hard look at violence and conquest

Gael García Bernal stars as explorer Ferdinand Magellan in Lav Diaz’s historical epic Magellan. Photo / Janus Films

Whatever seafaring saga your imagination may conjure upon hearing the name Magellan, it’s nothing like Magellan.

“Magalhães”, in the original Portuguese, the most recent offering from Filipino director Lav Diaz (who also wrote, co-edited and served as its cinematographer) is at once a sprawling historical epic; a quietly subversive indictment of global politics; and a visually breathtaking meditation on violence, grief and power.

Since the 2004 release (and impact) of the 10½-hour Evolution of a Filipino Family, Diaz has been celebrated by the hardiest of cinephiles for his enduring (in both senses) dedication to “slow cinema”: Think long, unbothered shots, a near-allergic resistance to cuts, a posture of observation, a penchant for immersion.

Lav Diaz’s Magellan continues his exploration of “slow cinema”. Photo / Janus Films

At 160 minutes, Magellan is one of the shortest and most accessible of Diaz’s films, which for the past decade have tended to fall between four and eight hours. (This is also the first of his films to digress from the Tagalog language.) But the scale of the film remains resolutely epic, in part because Diaz is patient and in part because he’s insistent on telling this story of conquest and domination on his terms.

The film follows the consequential 10-year period between 1511 and 1521, when Ferdinand Magellan (Gael García Bernal), spurned by Portugal’s mercurial King Manuel, embarked on behalf of Spain to discover and secure a route “under the end of the world” to the Spice Islands.

Magellan is warned early on by his fellow explorer Francisco Serrão (Tomás Alves) about the dangers of service to an “intellectually void” ruler – one obsessed with “conquest, power, riches”. But he is helpless against his own ambition, and Diaz frames the advance of imperialism as something more like the fulfilment of a curse than the accomplishment of a conqueror. At one point, a priest marooned on Patagonia laments that they are all “at the mercy of a madman’s dream”.

García Bernal brings an arresting opacity to his portrayal of Magellan, one you can’t help but constantly scan for cracks. There’s really only one: at sea, he is visited by an apparition of his wife, Beatriz (Ângela Azevedo), at home in Spain and presumably raising their newborn. Apart from this one glance granted behind Magellan’s faraway stare, he operates at the slowly closing distance of a predator.

Sometimes the prolonged stillness Diaz prefers feels painterly – an effect enhanced by the film’s 4:3 aspect ratio. But the picturesque has a sinister subtext here – the landscapes feel framed, represented, captured. (One shot poetically views the horizon of the sea through crosshairs of rope.) Each tranquil stretch of Magellan seems to await its own disturbance.

And yet, Diaz never lets us see the violence, which remains obscured by distance, obstruction or outright omission. He’ll let you see others observing the carnage that runs through the film – the executions, the mutinies, the massacres, all of which there are many – but the brutality itself he reserves for your imagination.

Amado Arjay Babon plays the enslaved Enrique de Malaca in Magellan. Photo / Janus Films

At all times, Diaz plays with beauty’s uncanny carriage of horror – a moonlit beach strewn with corpses; the peaceful drift of a log raft down a long river, carrying Enrique (Amado Arjay Babon) into his enslavement; a group of wailing women feeding their dead into the swallowing sea.

This balance of powers is Diaz’s strongest strategy as a storyteller, allowing us to experience not just the disturbance, but what was disturbed. Diaz seems to suggest that for all the years that have passed, we’re still stuck on the same boat with the same dread – drifting into the unknown, waiting for something to happen.

Unrated. Contains nudity and intense mature themes of war and violence. In Portuguese, Spanish, Cebuano and French with subtitles. 160 minutes.

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