Genus Pan

Genus Pan plays like a morose, minimalist version of John Huston's Treasure of the Sierra Madre.  Three men on leave from the gold mines where they work wander through a wilderness. Gradually, the get on each other's nerves.  Unlike Huston's movie, Genus Pan and its narrative stakes are scrupulously impoverished -- the men aren't lugging sacks of gold dust, but have scarcely enough money to pay for their expenses in trudging home.  In fact, they embark on their odyssey by foot because they don't want to pay for transportation back to their villages and are fearful that predators in the big city through which they would have to pass might cheat them of their hard-earned wages.  Lav Diez, the Filipino director, released this film in 2019.  It's shot in somewhat distressed black and white, composed in long sequence-shot scenes in which the characters appear in middle distance against tangled and menacing foliage.  In the first hour, about six scenes involve fording small streams.  Another six scenes show the men sprawled on the ground resting at the end of a long day trekking.  There are no close-ups, no music on the soundtrack which sometimes features amplified animal sounds -- either roosters crowing in a sinister way or dogs barking or, in one case, some kind primate (I think) howling from an unseen tree.  Like Diaz' El Norte, his apocalyptic version of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, the film seems designed as raw clash between good and evil -- as I have earlier observed Diaz is not a subtle film-maker and he proves his points with brute sledge-hammer efficiency.

The three miners involved in the trek are Andres, a wage laborer in the gold mine, and two supervisors rather incongruously called (by Andres) Sir Paolo and Sir Baldomera ("Sir Baldo").  Early in the film, we see Baldo, who has lent money to Andres, abusing the young man and demanding that he pay back every cent that he was loaned.  Andres doesn't make much money and, when the mining company extracts living expenses and other charges from his pay-check, he has next to nothing to take home to his family.  Andres' mother is ill and losing the ability to speak; Andres' sister requires some sort of operation and, needless to say, the mining company's health care benefits leave a lot to be desired -- in fact, the company doesn't have much of a workers' compensation program either:  the men all recall other workers "buried alive" in the mines without any compensation.  Paolo is a Christian and seems saintly.  We see him kneeling in stream, arms outstretched, praying.  On other occasions, he reads his Bible.  The action takes place on a big island that the Americans call "Sleeping Turtle Island" although the locals call it "Hugaw" or "dirty" island.  The place has an ugly history.  During the second world war, the Japanese used the place for rest and recreation and, apparently, kept sex slaves ("comfort women") on the island for the enjoyment of  their troops.  (The miners make some nasty jokes about this history.  The mining company also apparently provides prostitutes and one scene involves the men waiting their turn with a girl offscreen whom we never see.  The island is windy with high hills covered in tall grass -- it looks a bit like the landscape in Terence Malick's The Thin Red Line.  There are dark forests and lots of streams.  Andres believes that Baldo is becoming "corrupt", ruined by the employment practices of the vicious mining firm.  Paolo struggles to keep the peace between Andres and Baldo.  For his part, Baldo thinks Andres is disrespecting him and, in one scene, takes a machete and plans to hack the younger worker to death -- he repents of this intention and throws the machete in one of the ubiquitous streams.  Paolo asks Baldo to give Andres back the money that he demanded from the worker at the film's outset.  However, Paolo is willing to fund this act of generosity -- he gives Baldo the money and demands that he pay Andres with it, making him whole for the loan.  (Reluctantly, the rather sadistic Baldo agrees to do this.)  Things start to go off the rails when a weird animal cry echoes through the jungle.  Baldo says that it's "Clown" and says that "Clown" is laughing because there are twin lizards in the jungle, seemingly meaning himself and Andres.  Previously, we have heard on the soundtrack a dialogue between a man and woman discussing chimpanzees, the titular "genus pan" -- such beasts are said to be "selfish and violent" although it is also maintained that they have the same sort of brain as homo sapiens.  Andres wanders off to a river bank where he greedily eats fruit from a bush.  This fruit has hallucinogenic qualities and seems to trigger a vision in Andres -- he sees a big black horse.  Apparently, a big black horse appearing out of nowhere signifies bad luck and death.  Baldo is enraged that Andres has seen this evil omen.  However, the Christian Paolo says that this is just heathen superstition and, in fact, the apparition was caused by the hallucinogenic fruit of the Buta bush.  

Things go badly wrong in the last hour of this film -- the picture clocks in at about two-hours and forty minutes, very short by Diaz' standards.  (He has made 11 hours pictures.)  This part of the movie is haphazard, seem incompetently improvised, and deviates sharply from the themes in the earlier part of the film.  In fact, the picture deteriorates into a sort of mad murderer scenario, a Hollywood plot involving an insane killer but not filmed with Hollywood's characteristic aplomb and attention to narrative coherence.  It doesn't help that half of the footage is blurry, the subtitles look like pedantic academic footnotes so small as to be scarcely visible, and the narrative is muddled to the point that you can't figure who is doing what to whom, let alone why -- people's motivations in the last part of the film are indecipherable. 

Just three hours from their village, the three miners spend the night next to a typically murky stream, tangled with big serpentine mangrove roots.  They all get drunk and, finally, mysterious references to Clown and the Two Geckos are explained.  (Diaz tends to show us something inexplicable and, maybe, an hour later gets around to providing background narration making sense of what we've already seen -- and been puzzled-by; it's a valid technique but seems deployed mindlessly by Diaz as an anti-Hollywood trope.  Much of art cinema is based on willfully violating narrative conventions that Hollywood would deploy to make plot points plausible.)  It turns out Clown was the boss of the two men when they were little boys performing a circus act -- a clown show called "the Two Geckos".  Baldo and Paolo were impressed into the circus when they were six and eight years old and, although they initially recall how much fun they had performing, there is a dark subtext.  Alcohol causes Paolo to recall that Clown abused the boys, beat and starved them.  This contradicts Baldo's warm memories of their days in the circus.  Both men are very drunk and in a long monologue scene (it last about ten minutes as a single static shot), Paolo rages about his ruined childhood.  Baldo gets mad and smashes in Paolo's skull with a rock.  The drunken Andres, then, fights with Baldo and brains him as well.  Both of his colleagues now dead, Andres flees to his village having stolen their money.  It seems odd that two of our three characters turn out to be ex-circus clowns now turned gold miners  -- why not former poppy farmers or paratroopers or child prostitutes?  There's no back story to explain this weird development and it feels completely arbitrary, like something made up in a bull-session with the writer while drinking beer or smoking pot late at night.  Back in the village, we get new characters, the homicidal Inggo, "Turtle" Mariposa (Paolo's daughter) so named because she walks with painful stiff slowness something like a female zombie, Sarge, some sort of paramilitary cop, and others whose role I couldn't figure out.  There's more talk of the peculiarities of Hugaw Island, including the fact that the place was a smuggler's paradise and that its various malign legends, including the sinister black horse, were invented to scare off outsiders.  For some unknown reason, Andres confesses to the murders, speaking to his mother, Turtle Mariposa, and a woman who seems to be some sort of local witch doctor.  The fat, malevolent Inggo demands that Andres give him the money taken from dead Paolo and Baldo.  Andres refuses.  Whereupon, Inggo kills Andres' mother with his machete.  It's Good Friday and flagellants are marching around the landscape morosely whipping themselves -- just another day in the Philippine Islands..  For reasons that aren't apparent to me, Inggo kills about five of the flagellants, apparently out of pure malice.  Andres talks to the witch woman who wants him to join their indigenous tribe up in the "serene" and pure mountains.  (This brings an entirely new dimension into the film, something about the exploitation of native tribes in the Philippines.)  She and Andres see the ominous black horse, who announces his presence by pawing at the water in creek.  There's a brilliant and evocative shot of the horse standing in the creek; the water reflects the nearby jungle and the horse seems somehow suspended in the air while the witch-woman gestures in such a way as to seem to be petting the horse -- although she standing about 20 feet away.  Inggo makes Mariposa snitch on Andres -- after all, he has admitted to murdering her father.  It's not at all obvious to me why Inggo is killing everyone in sight.  (We have no idea who he is.)  There's another scene of the murders of Paolo and Baldo in the woods that adds a pointless Rashomon dimension to the movie -- this image of the killing doesn't look anything like what we saw before.  The movie becomes increasingly untethered.  Time passes in confusing succession and the film flits from one vague location to another -- "flits" is the wrong term since each sequence shot last two or three minutes.  People are sitting in huts singing what I interpret to be Easter hymns -- this is all happening between Good Friday and Easter.  The gangster cops led by Sarge surround Andres and gun him down.  Inggo stalks Turtle Mariposa, not a very difficult task since she walks with a painfully slow gait, staggering along one of Diez' trademark white paths in the jungle.  Apparently, he intends to kill her with his machete.  Why? To what end?

It may well be that people are brutish and act like chimpanzees.  But you need better evidence for this proposition than a series of events without any motivation at all except the island's sinister ambience.  This is a bad movie and makes me suspect that Diez' work, with which I'm not familiar, must be extremely uneven in quality.