‘Magellan’ review: Lav Diaz directs Gael Garcia Bernal as the titular Portuguese explorer

Dir. Lav Diaz. Portugal/Spain/France/Philippines/Taiwan 2025. 160mins

The illusions and indignities of European colonial historical past have been amply mapped in cinema from Aguirre to Zama. Magellan, by Flilipino star auteur Lav Diaz, has a lot in widespread with each these movies, in its bold merging of costume drama tropes and contemplative art-cinema stylistics. Diaz depicts the profession of the Portuguese navigator and explorer Fernão de Magalhães (c. 1480-1521), a.okay.a Ferdinand Magellan – and does so very a lot from a Filipino perspective.

A sardonic, indifferent however compelling examine

The Cannes Premiere title is a departure for Diaz in a number of respects: by his normally super-spare requirements, Magellan is handsomely mounted; it’s one in every of his uncommon color movies; and it’s his first collaboration with a global star, on this case Mexico’s Gael Garcia Bernal. Extra uncommon but, this devoted specialist in prolonged length delivers a satisfyingly complicated drama in simply over two and a half hours (though hardcore Lavistas can be happy to know {that a} 9-hour lower additionally exists). This concision makes the haunting, visually imposing Magellan one in every of Diaz’s most viably exportable movie thus far, with Garcia Bernal’s presence very a lot including to the enchantment. 

Shot in Portugal, Spain and the Philippines, the movie covers some 16 years in Magellan’s profession. Early episodes embody a keep in Malacca, Malaysia in 1504, with an expedition meant to advance Portugal’s colonising challenge. It’s on this journey that Magellan buys a younger man (Amado Arjay Babon) as a slave; renamed Enrique, and talking in Tagalog, he’ll change into a key voice all through. 

Returning to Lisbon, Magellan meets Beatriz (Angela Azevedo), the younger lady he’ll marry; he later wins royal patronage in Spain and sails to find a brand new path to the Spice Islands of Indonesia. Over an extended voyage, we see the impressed visionary change into an obsessive, pitiless commander, not in contrast to the deranged conquistador of Aguirre Wrath of God – though Diaz’s model and Garcia Bernal’s muted efficiency produce a really totally different impact from Werner Herzog’s hallucinatory movie. 

Diaz even maintains his coolly indifferent strategy on the finish, when Magellan meets his match in Cebu, within the Philippines, working up towards chieftain Raja Humabon (Diaz common Ronnie Lazaro). It’s notable that Diaz exhibits us the catastrophic aftermath of battles, not the fight itself. That is partly, little doubt, for finances causes, however can also be in line with the downbeat register of his film-making, through which sustained calm sometimes permits for outbursts of melodramatic depth. 

Each photographed and edited by Diaz and Albert Serra collaborator Artur Tort, Magellan is paced very otherwise from many of the director’s work: the well-known lengthy takes are changed by a comparatively brisk succession of photographs, with the narrative masking quite a lot of incident. However an impression of slowness is created partly by means of resonant silences in what, by the customary requirements of historic drama, is a really taciturn piece. A lot of the dialogue is given to the peoples of the varied communities that Magellan comes into contact with, and Enrique turns into a type of refrain determine, with solo scenes lamenting his state of exile and servitude. 

Diaz largely eschews the standard spectacle of historic drama, however the imposing use of a galleon within the ocean sequences. It may appear perverse for him to shoot his star in extensive shot for a lot of the time, putting Garcia Bernal into the figures-in-a-landscape schema that could be a Diaz fixed. Nevertheless he’s framed, although, the actor exudes a way of visionary willpower and more and more troubled authority, and – sporting a grizzled beard – vividly evokes the bodily and psychological put on and tear on a voyager’s being. He additionally performs convincingly in Portuguese, the movie’s foremost language together with Tagalog. 

A number of the narrative and the allusions, nevertheless, aren’t straightforward to comply with; viewers schooled within the historic background can be . However what comes throughout is a sardonic, indifferent however compelling examine, moderately echoing the stately intelligence of a a lot later Portuguese pioneer, Manoel de Oliveira.