Martin Scorsese’s three-and-a-half hour epic The Irishman is out in UK cinemas on Fri 8 November, ahead of it dropping on Netflix (for whom it was made), and it got me thinking about other very long films. I have a tag for such films, which I define as more than three hours, but it’s impossible to think of durational filmmaking without also thinking of Filipino auteur Lav Diaz, who has made his name making intensely long films, where something the length of Scorsese’s latest, something like Norte, the End of History, would be considered a fairly short work. In any case, I’m doing a themed week around excessively long films, so if you’re trying to watch what I’m writing about, you may well run out of time.
I don’t tend to do plot summaries in my write-ups (I hesitate to call them “reviews”) because that kind of thing can be discovered elsewhere, or by watching the film. For example, Melancholia‘s Wikipedia page has a pretty thorough summary that’s mostly quite accurate and yet I noticed at least one stretch of about an hour that took place between successive sentences of that summary, and that’s hardly an anomaly. Because that, after all, is Lav Diaz’s filmmaking, a man not unreasonably known as an avatar of the modern “slow cinema”. Melancholia does have more ‘plot’ than some of his other works (I’m thinking of Heremias or even Norte or A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery): the setup of two people and their zvengali-like ‘therapist'(?) who are enacting real-world role-playing scenarios suggests the theatre group in Out 1 gradually breaking up, ripping apart not just their interpersonal relations but the narrative of the film itself. There is, of course, a lot of wandering about in the jungle (particularly in the film’s last act), with Diaz’s beautiful fixed long shots of mountainous roads a familiar sight from anyone who’s seen any of his films. And within the film’s psychodrama, there’s a story of what I suppose is the Philippines itself, colonised and cast aside, featuring an elaborate end game that makes no sense except in the mind of the power-mad manipulator. I can’t really describe it better than that, I’m afraid; if you don’t like durational cinema, you may not find much that will sway you, but there are interesting games being played here.
CREDITS
Director/Writer/Cinematographer Lav Diaz; Starring Angeli Bayani, Perry Dizon; Length 450 minutes.
Seen at home (DVD), London, Saturday 31 March 2018.