Click here to read the full article.
Set almost a century after Magellan first landed on the Philippine Archipelago, and coming just a year after “Magellan,” director Lav Diaz’s last film, landed in Cannes, “Let Us Through, Dear Ancestors” is a description
of bruised history rendered in the sharp, precise, scarring lines of a newly inked tattoo. In many ways a companion piece to “Magellan”‘s epic, full-color demythologization of the Portuguese explorer’s legacy, but in others a convex-mirror inversion that unfolds in crisp monochrome and embeds itself within the experiences of the everyday oppressed, “Ancestors” weaponizes the beauty of its setting in the seething, untameable jungles of Luzon island, against the ugliness of the newly unleashed colonial spirit of acquisition, exploitation and subjugation. Diaz lets the story uncoil slowly; disasters of this magnitude rarely happen in a hurry.
It is 1617 and Padre Enciso (Bart Guingona) has been deputized to “civilize” this part of the island by his Spanish masters who, many years since, have claimed the territory for King and Catholicism. Nominally a holy man but fond of his deeply impious extracurriculars, the Padre is admired by some locals, feared by many more and challenged by none. He desires to build a church in a small clearing in the jungle, and to that end has sent out several expeditions to retrieve supplies. Many of the men thus sent have perished on these arduous indentured-servitude errand-runs, from illness or exhaustion or at the tip of a poisoned arrow in one of the frequent raids by bandit Bari Bari (Yul Servo). The village women speak of Bari Bari in superstitious terms as they gossip at their gathering place by the river — despite the formalist rigor of Diaz’s approach, the dialogue here is fluid and natural and full of lived-in banter.
Having essentially killed many of these women’s husbands, the Padre has been quick to bed the widows, often impregnating them. Drinking coconut alcohol with Alejo Smith (Daniel Palisa), the architect sent from Manila to design the church, Enciso waxes loquacious about how he’s surprised none of the children he has fathered with these “monkeys” has been born with a tail, and about the probability that Spain will go to war with England. “I like the English,” he says offhandedly, “I like the way they make their pottage,” which is possibly the first time, and almost certainly the last, that any Spaniard ever complimented English cuisine.
Dungwen (Christian Bables) is the adult offspring of one of Padre Enciso’s couplings — the women call it visiting, the men call it fucking, we would call it rape. But Dungwen refuses to acknowledge his mestizo (mixed-race) heritage despite the advantages that Spanish parentage might bring. Whether out of injured pride at this rejection of his paternity, or just plain old spite, Padre Enciso is insistent that Dungwen lead the next expedition, this time to pick up marble for the church altar. Dungwen has no choice but to go, yet really just wants to be left alone to provide for his wife and daughters — two young girls who are clearly being raised to respect the old ways. “Let us through, dear ancestors,” they call out to the treetops each time they enter the forest.
Also part of the old world and resisting Christian conversion, Babayeng Indimatadog (Isabel Sandoval) is a traveling healer. A grave, stately woman who traverses the region with her brother Himamat (Ronnie Lazaro) ringing a bell to alert locals to her presence, Babayeng is mid-healing ritual when the Padre’s men take her and throw her in a makeshift cell. Any refusal to conform to the new Catholic colonialist order is interpreted as dissent. And all dissent is threat. While Dungwen’s little band of workers toil from jungle trail station to station dragging their cartload of church marble like Fitzcarraldo transporting his steamboat, Babayeng sits in her cell, under guard. Himamat petitions everyone he can for help in rescuing her — eventually winding up in Bari Bari’s camp.
Over a long career of often extravagantly long films (this one, coming in at a trim and potent 151 minutes represents far less of an all-day, pack-a-lunch commitment) Diaz has experimented with virtually every approach in the filmmaking stylebook, from the low-definition video aesthetic of “Heremias” to the pictorial splendor of “Magellan.” “Ancestors” sees him revert to his favored black-and-white, but here the images are so lush with detail, each one containing every variant from brightest white to darkest black that you may find yourself remembering it in vivid color, just like the constant wash of insect susurration and whispering foliage starts to sound like quiet music.
Still, some hallmarks remain — Diaz has never been one to force emotion through close-up, and almost everything here happens in wides and mids, choreographed so carefully they feel borderline Kurosawan in their use of space and different planes of action. This remove also forces one to consider the camera’s vantage point, never more so than in one transcendent moment when Babayeng looks up from the dark cell corner where she’s huddled and meets the camera’s gaze. She breaks into a beatific smile. Is she seeing her god? Or her heaven? Or is it her descendents — is it us — she is looking at through the lens of time, connecting us in the now to her long-ago past: our dear ancestor, letting us through.
Diaz’s habit of showing the lead-up to and the aftermath of the most dramatic or violent events, rather than the violence itself, means that even as Bari Bari’s marauders pick over the bones of what was once meant to be the church, we are left unsure about Father Enciso’s ultimate fate. We can but hope it was nothing good. But while there would be quite some satisfaction in witnessing disparate groups of disenfranchised native peoples banding together in solidarity to exact revenge on their colonial oppressors, there would be little truth in it, and Diaz is a filmmaker who values truth above the coy panaceas of storytelling convention. The closing declaration in “Let us Through, Dear Ancestors” ends with the words “it shall be achieved, this vision of liberation” but such a vision was then, and remains now, in the future tense. Lav Diaz does not presume that this or any movie can get his beloved, troubled homeland there, but it can light the way.
