Magellan

MAGELLAN   ***1/2

Lav Diaz

2025

IDEA:  Ferdinand Magellan and his crews wreak havoc on indigenous populations as they seek to bring Christianity to the global East.

BLURB:  It takes quite some time before the nominal hero of Magellan is given his close-up. Aside from a brief, wryly askance angle of him sleeping, he is seen in the first portions of Lav Diaz’s film wandering far afield in the deep-focus frames, marginalized by a foreground of merciless jungle and the lifeless bodies of the indigenous Malacca people his expedition has massacred. Even when Gael García Bernal’s Portuguese general assumes a more prominent visual and narrative role, Diaz continues to subvert his authority in a strategy of inversion that is anti-colonial at its core. Rebelling against “Great Man” historiography and Age of Discovery romanticism, the filmmaker depicts a grinding, sickly, recursive imperialist project carried out by petty, insecure Europeans ready to kill each other before even reaching the other side of the ocean. In the mesmerizing scenes at sea, Diaz films in low-angle shots that might seem reverential if not for the savage behavior of the men within them. He lingers on bodies battered by both the elements and intramural violence, on exhaustion and boredom and quarrels scored to nothing but a creaking ship. The extended duration, static camera, and elision of dramatic spectacle serve to undermine any sense of progress or accomplishment; this is a story, ultimately, of Western ideological and geopolitical failure. That failure becomes the (temporary) triumph of the indigenes in a last chapter that portrays their righteous uprising and the creation of a new national myth. Magellan also creates its own, cinematic myth, one that fascinatingly runs counter to both Western and Filipino grand narratives. Underlying the stunningly immersive sensory experience is the fundamental problematic of how history is written, imagined, and promulgated, and Diaz is bold enough to make his film not an answer, but another question.

Eureka

EUREKA   ***1/2

Lisandro Alonso

2023

*LIGHT SPOILERS AHEAD*

IDEA:  A shapeshifting, time-bending, magical realist exploration of Native American experience.

BLURB:  Eureka contains one of those legitimately astonishing form-breaking moments you see once in a while in the feature-length art film, a consciousness-torquing rupture that’s like the filmmaker pulling off a magic trick. Of course, it basically is; it’s the magic of a medium that can reorganize time, space, and the spectator’s perceptual economy. Lisandro Alonso no doubt exploits this ability in part because of the thrill of it (and it is thrilling to see!), but he also wants to get at something deeper about how film can unsettle the language of the status quo. His project, continuing explicitly from his previous film, Jauja, is to denude hegemonic Western narratives of their mythical heroic trappings. Eureka goes further than Jauja in that it actually centers indigenous subjects, although this isn’t apparent until the aforementioned schism, a masterful fakeout that yanks the film from a seemingly typical Western (albeit a grimly deglamorized one) into a contemporary realist drama layered with the traces of colonial violence. Over the rest of the film, which has in store one further and more metaphysical spatiotemporal shift, Alonso encourages us to find parallels across his different idioms. What is most prominent — from the severe argentine frames of the Viggo Mortensen-led Western to the frigid, durational tableaux of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation to the lush but endangered Amazon — is a history of American indigeneity pockmarked by abuse and displacement. Alonso and his co-writers complicate “positive” representation by showing how these things don’t always come from the top down but are internalized and perpetuated within a community, as in the weary, ethically dubious law enforcement of a Lakota officer (Alaina Clifford) operating within a seriously compromised socioeconomic structure. Perversely, ironically titled, Eureka pointedly offers mostly lacunae and irresolution in its entrancing cosmic tapestry, but there is also startling, poignant clarity in the microscopic human detail it rescues from the gaps.

The Testament of Ann Lee

THE TESTAMENT OF ANN LEE   ***

Mona Fastvold

2025

IDEA:  In the 18th century, Ann Lee begins the Shaker religious movement in England and journeys across the Atlantic to grow her community in America.

BLURB:  As a genre for the exuberant externalization of feeling, the musical is perfectly suited to the subject of ecstatic religious worship. The Testament of Ann Lee is not a traditional musical, but it wholly embraces the roles of singing and dancing as extra-verbal, extra-rational, and transcendent expressions of human experience. Here, that expression is tied to a religious sect primarily characterized by the musicality and somatic energy suggested by its name. The film’s Shakers writhe, stomp, prance, and circle each other in rapt communion, Daniel Blumberg’s sonorous hymnal song-score flowing through them like volts of electricity connecting heaven and earth. In its most potent moments, when Fastvold and Corbet cede the sometimes stodgy narrative to the primal joy of bodily movement, The Testament of Ann Lee captures the euphoria — phenomenological or spiritual — of giving oneself over to a sensation of collective reverence. And in this, the film locates a core irony: that Ann Lee started such a profoundly corporeal movement as a repudiation of sex and earthly desires. She is a mother who refuses the biological mandates of the role, and as such, Fastvold and Corbet render her a kind of queer feminist figure, defined not merely by an opposition to patriarchy but procreation and domesticity. Amanda Seyfried is so passionately, uninhibitedly keyed into her portrayal that she helps mitigate the feeling that this all seems pretty idealized, biographical nuances softened by admiration for Lee’s iconoclasm and tenacity. Maybe it’s worth valuing such an earnest celebration of faith, and one that doesn’t forget its ineluctable basis in a human body at once mortal and malleable.