NY Times on ‘Norte’: Exhilarating triumph

FILIPINO director was commended for “patiently surveying the social and physical landscape with his beautiful, asymmetrical wide-screen compositions.”

After garnering four major awards at the local critics’ group’s Gawad Urian—Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Screenplay, Best Cinematographer—Lav Diaz’s “Norte, Hangganan ng Kasaysayan” has earned a rave review from the New York Times, meriting the coveted NYT Critics’ Pick badge.

The Times’ chief film critic AO Scott described the Filipino film as “a tour de force of slow cinema.”

Scott, however, hastily pointed out that Diaz’s four-hour epic, “something of a sensation at Cannes last year,” is far from “difficult or obscure.”

He explained that a “simple act,” the murder of a ruthless usurer, is at the center of the film’s “large and layered narrative, the focal point through which an entire world comes into view.”

He noted that, prior to the crime sequence (and its consequences), viewers are lulled into submission. “We need to be calmed, to absorb the rhythms of life in a coastal city…before we can be shocked.”

He summed up “Norte” as “partly a political fable, a smoldering, meticulous indictment of injustice and inequality.”

Interestingly, he pointed out that the film’s underdog characters bore their misfortune “with dignity” and thus the narrative is “untouched by easy sentimentality.”

UNDERDOG characters, played by Angeli Bayani (left) and Hazel Orencio (right), bore their misfortune “with dignity.”

Devastating effect

He commended Diaz for “patiently surveying the social and physical landscape with his beautiful, asymmetrical wide-screen compositions,” making inequity “an aspect of the local climate.”

The film, he said, showed social injustice as “obvious and intolerable…yet there is no real sense that anything can be done.”

Pessimism, however, is not the message of “Norte.” In the “harsh story [told to] sometimes devastating effect,” Scott detected glimmerings of hope.

It is not a “document of despair,” he insisted. “Like any true work of art, its very existence is an exhilarating triumph over complacency.”

He lauded “Diaz’s images [as] too rich and lovely to create a lasting sense of doom.”

Filmmaker’s fascination

Scott elaborated: “There is also, above all, an almost inexhaustible humanism at the heart of this remarkable film. It is the work of a director as fascinated by decency as by ugliness, and able to present the chaos of life in a series of pictures that are at once luminously clear and endlessly mysterious.”

Diaz described the Urian triumph and New York Times rave as “humbling.”

“May naabot [ang diskurso] kahit papaano. Gawa lang nang gawa (Our cinematic discourse reached people somehow. I’ll just keep making films),” Diaz said.

Diaz’s latest four-hour movie, “Mula sa Kung Ano ang Noon (From What Is Before),” is competing in the World Premieres Film Festival to be held in Manila from June 29 to July 8.

“Norte, Hangganan ng Kasaysayan” is currently showing in Manhattan until June 26 at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center. It is presented by Cinema Guild and the Film Society of the Lincoln Center. Show times are at 1 p.m. and 6:15 p.m. The 6:15 screening on June 25 is at the Walter Reade Theater.

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