Cristian Tablazon
Lahi, Hayop (2020) unfolds with much promise for the first half or so, threshing out a chamber piece among three men who take leave from their harsh jobs at a gold mine and set off home on foot through the forest of Isla Hugaw, haunted by their personal traumas and the dense and insidious context of the island.
In one scene the night before their journey, after recounting over their merry drinking how Isla Hugaw served as a garrison of sex slaves abducted from different islands during the Japanese occupation, Baldo reveals to Andres that he and Paulo and almost all the local people of their age are rumored to have been sired by Japanese soldiers. The overdetermined history of their wretched island looms portentously in Lav Diaz’ gothic melodrama: the place is a liminal and felonious site to illicit trafficking of porcelain, opium, and other contraband during the 250-year galleon trade; the fabricated tales of horror about the charybdian waters of the Punta Negro, the lepers and syphilitics exiled there, and the curse of the black horse; the Japanese war atrocities; and the continuum of rape, murders, exploitation, and corruption between its colonial past and the present day in and around the gold mine.
Complicating the backstory further is the uncanny and sinister figure of the Clown who arrived on Hugaw on a boat when Baldo and Paulo were children and captivated the island folk with his magical spectacles. He handpicked the two young boys from a group of local kids and recruited them into his travelling circus, exploiting Baldo and Paulo and robbing them of their youth. Near the end of their travel through the woods, the inebriated Paulo reveals that he and Baldo have conspired to butcher the abusive Clown in order to break free from his circus, a crime that Paulo believes to have damned them and consequently trapped them on the island, a fate in stark contrast to their itinerant days with the carnival. Besides laying bare the possible root of their hysteric undercurrents, Paulo’s long-standing guilt and fervent religious devotion, and the motivation for Baldo’s sly and pernicious character and manic tendencies, this detail perhaps preempts the almost Darwinian dog-eat-dog motif in the film—that one has to be a more vicious predator in order to persist.
Conversely, in this violent Darwinistic world Diaz has woven, women are peripheral and coded weak and susceptible to infirmity and (male) predation. The films of Lav Diaz may be said to be prolific for their problematic depictions of women, ranging from tokenistic to misogynistic. Lahi, Hayop opens with a man playing the guitar and singing a kundiman, his poignant ode addressing an absent or nonexistent muse and belying a perverse and dystopian world devoid of meaningful coupling and riddled with fraught relationships, greed, and brutal tragedies. The idle afternoon signals the end of the working season and the audience at the mining grounds reveals a stiflingly homosocial setting, preempting an entire first half of the film in which female characters are completely absent. The girls their manager brings to the mine for a night of fun remain off-screen, referenced only in the dialog of men along with dead or faraway wives, an ailing sister, a mother on the verge of becoming mute, a disabled daughter, the incarcerated Aling Imang, the rape of tribeswomen and the Perez sisters…. Instead of eventually complicating or overturning this gap, when women finally emerge in the film’s second half, their visible presence only secures their abject, debilitated, and inarticulate position, and they are cast as the utmost victims of a monstrous system nurtured and propagated by savage men, and almost defined solely by the loss of their fathers, husbands, and sons. Diaz has even chosen the infirm Mariposa, Baldo’s daughter, to represent, in his own words in an interview, “[t]he helpless”, “the weak, i.e., the Filipino masses”. Save for the chorus of old women singing of the dead Christ who are merely relegated to the background, only Aling Mamay (portrayed by the compelling Lolita Carbon), albeit hampered by grief and sacrifice, proves to be the only articulate and agentive female subject in the narrative.
Past its half mark, Lahi, Hayop devolves into a grotesque and nihilistic rambling, tempered only by its consistently well-composed tableaus. The gecko calls, the snake, the apparition of the black horse (which Paulo previously assumed as possibly a colonial ‘leftover’), and the Jar of Truth turn out to be nothing else other than a series of omens either predictable or redundant. Moreover, for the most part, the film shuttles unevenly between confused registers, tugging to and fro between allegory and realism, between natural speech and oratorical flourish, between formal austerity and melodrama, between biologism and mysticism, and ultimately, between the film’s defeatist predeterministic worldview and its scrutiny of material conditions and sounding for social justice. Characters are embroiled in an inane series of contrived and conveniently motivated actions: the impulsive killings in the forest; Andres going about his mawkish and amateur sleuthing even if he already knows the people responsible for his brother’s murder; Mamay vowing to stay in the plains until she finds out the truth, even if the Jar of Truth had already been in her possession for some time, and even if she knows that “There is no answer” and that “people on the island are mute”. Pregnant signs established earlier fall away, barely adding up to anything significant, and the layered context and perverse overdetermination of the island and its history dissolve into mere atmosphere, or footnotes at best, giving way instead to the ensuing mayhem and psychopathic killing spree to make a heavy-handed case for the deranged and depraved Inggo’s innate bestiality and the film’s naturalist and reductive exploration of human agency.
Early into the three men’s arduous passage through the forest, the film’s thesis is blatantly explicated through Paulo’s transistor radio in a tongue-and-cheek caricature of a pop pseudoscience banter between the host and an expert about the genus Pan and its implications on human behavior and types of people. The film essentially conjectures that good and evil hinge on the dichotomy of human sophistication and savagery, or more specifically, the dichotomy of cerebral development and animal drive—a dangerous and overly simplistic dialectic of altruism and wickedness that reeks of biological determinism, and shares, in part, the same impetus at the heart of eugenics.
Such logic brings Lahi, Hayop’s world to a deadlock. At the crux of the film’s thesis, simian atavism turns out to be the vindication of societal evil, explaining away the corruption and systemic oppression and violence that plague its characters. Lahi, Hayop signals a frustrating and lamentable step back in Diaz’ cinema and a contradiction to his previously astute political observations and vehement critique of Philippine material conditions, from his nuanced and haunting reexamination of the Sins of the Father, innocence, and accountability in the brilliant Walang Alaala ang mga Paruparo (2009), to his complex, reflexive, and visceral apprehension of his staple ilustrado antihero (whom Diaz finally acknowledges as thoroughly complicit to the social cancer he denounces) in Norte, Hangganan ng Kasaysayan (2013).
That the film ends with the corpses of penitents in the wake of mad Inggo’s murderous rampage, with Andres’ ambush overkill by the island’s authorities, and with Mariposa’s imminent slaughter coinciding with the Lenten day of God’s death cement Diaz’ deterministic and nihilist vision. Mooring this slew of incoherent violence and the overall atrocities to the film’s reductive dialectic, Lahi Hayop sidelines all attempts at a significant critique and ultimately becomes an unwitting apologia for the brutes and tyrants in our archipelago’s history.