Norte, the End of History

 Norte, the End of History (2013) is film from the Philippines directed by Lav Diaz.  The picture runs four-and-a-half hours and is, I think, very effective despite its length.  Perhaps, the story will seem familiar to you.

In a coffee shop, four friends discuss politics.  Three of them are law students, the fourth,  Fabian, said to be the most brilliant, has dropped out of school.  He espouses nihilistic views, suggesting that society should be torn down, and, then, re-made.  His friends don't take him seriously, but they acknowledge his intelligence.  (Filipino intellectuals are prone to aphorisms stated in English, pop culture references, and lots of puns and word-play; they giggle deliriously at each other's witticisms.)  A poor family lives in a shanty-town on a tidal estuary -- the city is La Paz.  The father, Joaquin, has broken his leg and it isn't mending right -- his inability to work has put stress on the family and his wife has pawned some of her jewelry.  Fabian is also in debt to the same pawnbroker, a fat and despicable woman, possibly ethnic Chinese, who lives with her mentally retarded daughter, Grissella.  Fabian is sleeping with his best friend's girl, something he drunkenly announces when he is chugging beers with his buddies and the girl.  (She pours beer on his head and angrily stalks off.)  Fabian seems increasingly deranged -- he gives a nightmarish speech about eliminating the dregs of society by simply killing them.  (He sounds like an incipient Duerte, the present leader of the country who is notorious for his death squads.)  People mention an apocalyptic cult in the north of the country awaiting the end of days.  Joaquin, the poor man with the broken leg, goes to the pawnbroker Magda and tries to redeem a ring of sentimental value to his wife, Ate.  (He and his wife were saving money to start an "eatery" as it is called in the movie.)  When Magda callously insults him, Joaquin loses his temper and tries to strangle her -- he has been trying to redeem the ring with used CDs that he sells as a side-hustle.  Magda's screams frighten Joaquin and he flees.  Desperate to support his family (he has two children with Ate, his wife), he goes to work shoveling concrete notwithstanding his broken leg.  Fabian, who wants to demonstrate the truth of his nihilistic political views, goes to Magda's place, pretending to pay back his debt.  Instead, he stabs her to death and, when her daughter, cries out in fear, he kills the little girl as well.  The next day, the poor man, Joaquin, is arrested for the crime -- after all, he has made very visible threats against Magda.  Fabian buries the loot.  This brings us to the end of the film's first hour and fifteen minutes.  Diaz isn't subtle and tends to make his points with a sledgehammer.  But he is a very skillful film-maker -- a kind of ominous dread hovers over the very long takes (mostly between two and four minutes in duration).  The camera-work is excellent, suffused with a kind of dense tropical haze -- you can almost feel the jungle-heat in the movie.  Diaz is also capable of expressionistic imagery that harkens back to silent movies.  A scene in which Fabian sits in the shadow of a grotesque contorted wrought iron balustrade looks like something from German silent films and the shot of Fabian burying the money on a steep, foreshortened slope of scrub brush invokes Murnau.

Joaquin is railroaded into confessing to the crime.  When Ate tries to get the lawyer to take an appeal, he harangues her in English (she doesn't speak the language) and blames her for not timely requesting that an appeal be filed.  Ate visits Joaquin in prison with her children and is devastated.  She is now eking out a living by selling vegetables in the slums from a push-cart -- the work exhausts her.  The kids forage for snails in the tidal estuary and Ating, Ate's sister-in-law cooks them in oil with ginger and garlic.  (She and her daughter do laundry for the slightly more prosperous slumdwellers on the weekend.)  After a painful visit to Joaquin, Ate takes the kids to a cliff overlooking the sea and contemplates committing suicide.  She lunges in a frightening way, but this is to embrace her children.  Then, with, Ating, they go to a carnival and the kids ride on a merry-go-round.  (Diaz' shot of the carnival with its ferris-wheel at night is indelibly beautiful).  Joaquin is transported to a remote penitentiary -- he's serving a life sentence.  The prison is too far from La Paz for Ate and the children to visit him and, as the film progresses, we learn that he hasn't seen his family for five or six years.  Meanwhile, the real murderer, Fabian has fled to the north.  Diaz films him sitting in cage-like apartment and peering through barred windows -- as I've noted, he isn't a subtle filmmaker and the point is that Fabian's guilt has now imprisoned him psychologically.  Fabian works at a sleek Art Deco diner.  The owners of the diner are born-again Christians and they invite Fabian to Bible study.  He admits to them that he has done a horrible thing but doesn't supply details -- instead he weeps and rages.  In prison, a sadistic bully named Wakwak torments Joaquin.  After singing "O Holy Night" on Christmas Eve (the film is full of Christmas imagery of stars and trees and bright lights), Wakwak almost beats to death one of the cell-mates, Piryong -- the poor guy's offense is looking at Wakwak.  Joaquin nurses the injured man which enrages Wakwak.  He demands that Joaquin look him in the eye and admit that he murdered a woman and little girl.  When Joaquin looks at Wakwak and says he didn't commit the crimes, the bully accuses him of being a "saint" and takes out a shank to try to cut his his fingers off.  At night, Joaquin dreams of flying back to the shantytown and seeing his wife.  (These are moving-camera shots, some made with drones, that are uncharacteristic of the films very slow and minute camera movements, repositioning as characters move in the sequence shots comprising the picture.)  Wakwak gets sick and collapses.  The inmates are watering a hideously desolate garden next to the prison walls -- the film is full of sacramental shots of water being splashed and sprayed; for instance, Ate splashes water on her produce before she begins her daily ordeal pushing the vegetable cart through the slum.  As Wakwak dies, he begs for Joaquin's forgiveness, which, of course, is not withheld.  When children taunt Joaquin's daughter about her father being in prison, Ate affirms that the man is in jail, but not a criminal and, indeed, a good person.  A fire burns on the other side of the estuary, an orange glow watched by the slum dwellers in a strangely apocalyptic sequence.  Fabian has now returned to La Paz and shadows Ate.  He gives her some money, gouged up out of the scrub-brush slope where he buried the loot.  Joaquin's cell-mates believe that he flies out of the prison at night to see his wife and they think he is some kind of angel. Fabian meets his old friends from law-school who are now cynical attorneys.  He begs them to file a case reopening Joaquin's conviction and says that the man has been wrongfully imprisoned.  This brings us to the three-hour and fifteen minute mark in the picture.

Norte's last hour is harder to parse.  In part, this is due to the fact that many shots, notably those involving Fabian, are lensed at extreme long distance, reducing figures to specks in a landscape. Fabian wanders down a road where people are inexplicably burning something in the middle of the pavement -- the little fires are producing charcoal, perhaps.  (Fire imagery predominates in this section of the film as well as shots of the sea.)  In a surprising cut, Diaz shows a cheerful, attractive woman in a nice house praying and reading her Bible.  This is Fabian's big sister who has, apparently, inherited farm land.  She is efficiently running her farm, growing tobacco mainly but, also, corn and sorghum.  (Consistent with water themes in the film, there are discussions of irrigation in this part of the movie.)  She is delighted to see her little brother, feeds him, and encourages him to go to law school.  She asks him to join her in the farming enterprise.  He abuses her viciously, says that her temperament is such that no man would want to be her lover, and, then, rapes her.  So much for Fabian's family feelings.  Meanwhile, Ate has used the money given to her by Fabian to arrange a visit to Joaquin.  She sits in a courtyard anxiously awaiting his arrival.  By this time, according to the film's scheme, Joaquin has essentially freed  himself and, though he may be nominally incarcerated, he seems to appear in this sequence as a free man.  Ate asks Joaquin to forgive her for not visiting in four years.  The scene clearly mirrors the early sequence in which Wakwak begged for Joaquin's forgiveness.)  Joaquin says that he "will always be with (her and the children)".  What follows is hard to construe:  we see a freeway in a scene that lasts for several minutes -- there's an overpass and we observe a bus.  Next, there is a shot of a bridge with the camera panning across a wasteland of rock in what looks like a  dry streambed -- we hear a baby crying and the camera tracks past corpses strewn on the rocks next to little fires burning in debris.  Ultimately, we see Ate sprawled on the gravel who is identified by her dress (that she wore to see Joaquin) and two Christmas Stars that he gave her during their meeting, apparently for the children.  The scene is not naturalistic and may represent one of Joaquin's visions -- apparently, the bus has crashed, but the people are strewn far from the road in a pattern that suggests enormous violence and the shot is eerily silent (except for the crying baby) -- there are no rescuers.  Fabian is deteriorating rapidly.  After raping his sister, he goes to his grandfather's farm where he is reunited with his beloved dog, Yumi, a handsome-looking German shepherd.  (In an earlier scene, we have been told that Fabian keeps a picture of his dog on his bedroom wall.)  Fabian takes Yumi to the beach and frolics with the dog in the surf -- we can't tell what is happening exactly because the shot is staged with the dog and Fabian hundreds of feet from the camera.  Fabian, then, kills the dog, repeatedly beating and stabbing it.  He wanders to the tidal estuary and rents a fisherman's boat.  In his last shot, we see him very far away sitting on the boat which seems to be becalmed in a sea of mud.  (Again, Diaz opts for expressionist landscapes).  There is another sequence filmed from Joaquin's point of view as an angel --  a drone-shot tilts vertiginously over the sea.  Then, we are shown Joaquin sleeping -- he levitates in his dreams and floats in the air and the place where he is sleeping seems to transform from his prison cell to some other location, perhaps a garden or forest.  The film ends with a protracted take in which we see a rural lane and a strange little community of animals -- there are several hens, a couple of bellicose-looking roosters and some goats with their kids.  The animals assemble and disperse in random patterns, congregating on the gravel lane.  In the distance, Ating appears with Ate's two children -- the absence of Ate suggests that she was, in fact, killed in the bus accident.  They stoically walk toward the camera and the film ends.  Throughout the film, there have been many shots involving animals -- Joaquin and Ate are raising a pig before he is arrested:  the pig is fed with table-scraps and represents an investment for the family.  When the little girl asks about the pig, Ate says:  "It will be killed and eaten.  This is the fate of pigs."  (We see the pig squealing in panic as it is dragged down the street to be butchered.)  Many scenes involve the chickens rooting around and stray dogs.  The soundtrack constantly cues roosters crowing, perhaps, to suggest the Gospel story of Peter denying Christ three times before the rooster's cry at dawn.  The film has no background music.  Most of the atrocities that the picture presents (for instance the death of the dog and the rape of Fabian's sister) take place offscreen, but are rendered more horrible by the bestial cries of rage and agony on the soundtrack.

The reader, of course, has grasped that Norte, The End of History is based on Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment.  The film deviates wildly from its source material after the first ninety minutes but the movie's premise is derived from the Russian novel. I watched the picture over three nights with some misgivings as to its dire subject matter but found Norte to be relatively approachable and very compelling.  The extremity of the film's subject matter is cushioned by Diaz' detached approach to the story -- he uses no close-ups or inserts and the scenes of extreme violence generally involve acts committed in a way that we can't quite see or, even, imagine.  (The sound effects, however, are harrowing:  the brutish grunting when Fabian rapes his sister is particularly disturbing and the high-pitched squeals of the doomed pig will stay with you long after the film has ended.)  Diaz stages important speeches with characters turned with their back to the camera or filmed obliquely in profile.  Their are weird details that I can't interpret -- for instance, in the final shot on the estuary in which Fabian has been reduced to a tiny speck, there's a little boy churning at the mud with a long pole stuck through what looks like a buoy.  In the last shot, the little boy appears ahead of Ating and the two children and marches forward down the road, past the camera and the little conclave of animals.  I have no idea, not even a conjecture, as to what he was doing in the shallow water with his pole and buoy.  The film is schematic, even simple-minded in a way -- Fabian who espouses fierce ideas as to reformng society ends up becoming something that isn't even a human; he's become some kind an animal, or worse than an animal since we see the different species of domestic animals getting along in some sort of harmony; it's a "peaceable kingdom."  Diaz often devises his narration in reverse order -- we see something, can't figure it out, but, later, we will be given information explaining what we have seen.  A noteworthy example is the introduction of Fabian's sister -- we have no idea who she is, until Fabian ambles up, hungry and desiring to be fed.  Of course, as Fabian declines into madness and bestiality, Joaquin becomes an angel -- just as Fabian has become a kind of demon, far below humanity, so Joaquin has become, against his will as it were, a creature that is somehow above humanity.  But Diaz is wise (and humane enough) to know that demons and angels are too abstruse and exotic to retain our interest.  So he keeps the film firmly grounded in imagery that shows ordinary people going about their daily activities.  When Joaquin tries to rent a boat from the fisherman (possibly to commit suicide), he's told by the man:  "Our boats are for fishing not ferrying people around."  Diaz understands poverty and his approach to this subject is matter-of-fact -- some people just happen to be very poor, just as "the fate of the pig" is be killed and eaten.  Although the poverty in the film is Dickensian, Diaz doesn't dramatize it and there's no histrionic posturing about the plight of the poor.  An interesting theme in the film is Joaquin and Ate's discussion about staying in the Philippines to raise their children -- their commitment to not working as Gast Arbeiter in the US or Dubai or Germany is a cause of their poverty and, indirectly, triggers Joaquin's imprisonment and, in fact, results in the very thing that they wanted to avoid -- that their children would not be raised in a home with both a father and a mother.  (Diaz is, at heart, a very conservative film maker.)  By contrast, Fabian says that his parents were always working abroad and that he was raised by the family's "maids" -- but, in context, this seems like a weak rationale for his evil conduct.   

 Most  critics are conventional liberals and so the film has been profoundly misunderstood.  Reviewers point to the fact that movie is "unbelievably depressing".  This betrays an ignorance both of the film and the source material in Dostoevsky.  For Diaz and Dostoevsky suffering is redemptive.  The more terrible the suffering, the greater its redemptive power.  Joaquin is a saint and his martyrdom in prison is an opportunity that Diaz views with mystical fervor, a chance afforded by the grace of God for the character to demonstrate his courage, his generosity, and his virtue -- indeed, Joaquin is a presented as someone to be emulated, an angel who not only redeems himself but the other convicts who seek to imitate him.  There is nothing depressing about the film -- to the contrary, the movie, like Crime and Punishment, demonstrates that all can be redeemed, even the most vicious:  Wakwak dies peacefully when Joaquin, who is massaging his feet and calves, forgives him his offenses.  The film is not depressing because it's two protagonists, in the end, are far beyond the spectrum of the human -- Joaquin is a saint and Fabian is a monster.  Neither are particularly useful to mere mortals whom the film shows simply muddling through the chaos.