REVIEW - 'Norte, the End of History'

In an attempt at combatting the attentive deficits in the Twitter-age of ephemera, cinema has sought to elevate a sense of immersion within an increasingly anachronistic linear medium. 3D has inflated budgets and revenue returns over the last decade, and 4D is next on the agenda, with cinema seats shaking audiences like kernels of popcorn in a carton. But there is an innovation I don’t believe has yet been exploited – climate cinema.

So it was that on a muggy and sun-baked Tuesday evening, I went along to the ICA cinema on Pall Mall to see Lav Diaz’s new film ‘Norte, the End of History’. With no air-conditioning, as the lights dropped, the cosy 50 or 60-capacity screening room was soon a stuffy cave of hot and languid air.

Set in the Philippines, the torrid heat of the film’s environment appeared to seep through the pores of the screen to bear down onto the audience who could little more than wilt on the cushioned vine.

At 250 minutes, ‘Norte’ is, by any normal standards, an endurance test; although when you consider the marathon standards of Diaz’s previous films - ‘Melancholia’ at 7 hours, and ‘Evolution of a Filipino Family’ at a monumental 11 hours - it begins to look rather more like an effort at restraint.

The film takes as a skeleton narrative, Dostoyevsky’s ‘Crime and Punishment’, upon which muscular issues of humanity, morality, national identity and political struggle are grown.

Fabian and Joaquin are young men separated by class and circumstances. Fabian is a conflicted law student with pseudo-intellectual pretensions on truth, evil and revolution that he expostulates during drinking sessions with his gang of friends. Joaquin is a simple family man struggling to make ends meet following a leg injury, such that he and his wife fear their dream of opening their own eatery may now be hopeless.

The desperation of both men drives them to the gilded door of the heartless local money lender. When Fabian impulsively decides to murder both her and her daughter, Joaquin is apprehended and convicted for the crime.

In the aftermath of this tremulous upheaval in their lives, both men struggle to reconcile their fate with their actions. We observe Fabian, a wonderfully crafted character, gradually become infected by the pernicious virus of guilt. Before the murder, he is egregious and bombastic; holding forth on the ‘death of politics’; how heroes of the Philippine Revolution like Andres Bonifacio ‘fulfilled their purpose and then died’; and advocating a kind of confused proto-fascist state in which any perceived evil be forcibly eradicated.

From the start he is imbued with a reckless and destructive streak, splintering his circle of friends with the revelation of his affair with one of their girlfriends. All the while you can sense that by proselytising such ideals he is at a loss as to how to either live up to or repudiate them.

By murdering the greedy moneylender he makes his primitive strike against what he judges to be the ‘evil’ infecting the community; a one-man army almost anticipating the revolution to be wrenched into being from his decisive action. In the event though, like Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov, he is tortured on the rack of his own guilt, rendered inarticulate and aimless. He attempts to make overtures of reconciliation to Joaquin’s destitute family, but crucially can never bring himself to do the only true and moral thing which is to hand himself in, instead sinking further into the quicksand of self-destruction and brutality.

Meanwhile, Joaquin manages to withstand the torments of prison, taking it upon himself to nurse a sadistic inmate enforcer after he suffers a debilitating stroke; eventually transcending, in a visually Tarkovskian trope, to a higher realm of contemplative benevolence. Despite his freedom, Fabian is en-caged by his turmoil and gradually becomes ever more monstrous; whereas, in captivity, Joaquin, thorough his strength of conviction, is able to cultivate a stoic virtuousness that ultimately enshrines his humanity.

It is the plight of Joaquin’s young family that garners the most affecting examination. The scene in which his wife, at her wit’s end, contemplates committing infanticide, is an astonishingly potent example of the film’s real emotional heft.

Of course, this is a film that requires perseverance and patience; many shots linger interminably (despite the cinematography being constantly wonderful), and many scenes appear to languish unnecessarily; but the overall impact is of a sprawling, novelistic investigation into the lives and fates of two disparate men woven together by the strands of situation and circumstance.

As far as the 'climate experience' went, as the sweaty audience peeled themselves from seats to traipse out into the cool night air, I felt that the immersive potential could certainly be exploited elsewhere: plunge the cinema into iciness for ‘Into the Void’ or ‘Stalingrad’; pump up the tropical humidity for ‘Apocalypse Now’; or whip up the wind for ‘The Perfect Storm’...