John Bengan
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The trouble with some countries is that some of its men believe they are good. Or so Lav Diaz has been telling us. No matter how hard they strive for the truth, how valiantly they fight a systemic hydra, they are ultimately contaminated—a sickness that doesn’t seem to have a cure, save for immolation.
In the last two decades, Diaz has shown variations on the tainted man in a series of exigently long features, his panoramas of brooding, searching men imprisoned in their own words—or wordlessness—these anti-heroes who are either hyper-discursive or frustratingly inarticulate; there’s hardly any middle ground. They begin as solitary detectives, at times even of their own future crimes, trying to find equilibrium in a terrain that is both idyllic and nastily punitive. At some point in their journey, they find themselves about to fall off the precipice of their towering conscience. Ultimately, they spiral into ruination.
Kapag Wala Nang Mga Alon pits two policemen: one is discharged long ago, while the other on indefinite leave. Hermes Papauran (John Lloyd Cruz) resigns from his teaching post in a police academy after he beat his own wife who he caught with another man—a fellow cop, who he also brutally assaults in public. Primo Macabantay (Ronnie Lazaro) is suddenly granted presidential pardon after a decade of imprisonment. Hermes used to be Primo’s protégé, back when the older policeman was the model superior, before he got involved in a robbery, an assassination, and a massacre. Investigating these cases, Hermes exposed Primo and brought about his downfall.
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Still from Kapag Wala Nang Mga Alon (Lav Diaz, 2022)
The milieu unfolding around them is a homicidal drug war. The president responsible for that war unwittingly unleashes Primo against Hermes, even if a nameless voice on the cellphone, presumably a high ranking official, assures Primo that they will “take care” of the younger officer. Hermes retreats to San Isidro, a coastal town, and briefly reunites with his older sister Nerissa (Shamaine Buencamino), a teacher living by herself after her husband mysteriously disappeared.
In this world, the prematurely-pardoned criminal thirsts for revenge, but also fancies himself a savior. Primo, who is also called “Supremo” as if to echo the emblematic heroism that Diaz is fond of mentioning in his films, intends to salvage every soul he encounters. When he walks into the frame for the first time, the movie seems to tilt. In an early scene, Primo gives food to a stranger on the street. When the stranger gapes at him in confusion, his invitation starts sounding more like a threat. Later, in a crowded restaurant, he berates a cellular phone and then quickly turns to the crowd to admonish them, as if someone among them had yelled at him instead. In one lengthy shot, he dances frantically in his motel room like a fighter rehearsing for a big match. In another, he makes a request for a basin—the use for which we’ll soon discover—and when a neighbor next door complains about the noise he’s making, he knocks on their door and jabs his finger at the forehead of an unsuspecting woman. A flickering bolt of lunacies, Primo is both the film’s ballast and its silo of rage.
Primo’s sacrificial acts appear to be remedies for his spiritual affliction, an awareness of which he sometimes betrays in his tentative and quivery little gestures, like a middle-aged man baffled by the unfamiliar wobbling of his bones. He passes on the undeserved mercy he received to other people who become collateral in his vengeance: a boatman who luckily only gets thrown into the sea, a sex worker who drowns after her head is dunked into a basin of water, and Hermes’s sister who becomes a casualty of Primo’s wrath. As some kind of divine magistrate, Primo absolves himself of his own crimes, turning the acts more sinister with his eerily familiar invocation of God.
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After his attempts at saving a particular soul goes awry, he tries to cover his tracks like an innocent who has accidentally wrung the life out of a beloved pet. In a darkly absurd sequence, he stops by a pharmacy for some formaldehyde. When the attendant asks him what he needs it for, he says flatly that his dog died. He dismisses the attendant, lamenting, “I beg you, let’s not talk about it. It’s too painful.” Then he goes to another store where he buys several bottles of perfume. Next time we see him, he’s pouring the scents on a dead body in his motel room. Beware the man who saves without consent.
Diaz may be alluding to Duterte’s apocalyptic speeches, but it is Ronnie Lazaro’s interpretation that fascinates. We know this man is twisted, but Lazaro leaves enough room for us to see how Primo’s “deliverance,” rather than a lampoon, is a natural outcome of fate, the divine he evokes merely a symptom of his rot. Lazaro hits a spectacular range of notes to embody Primo’s menace, but he also brings an alarming gentleness to an otherwise deplorable character that, for a moment, we are almost charmed by Primo’s veneer of affability. In a scene quietly chilling for what it suggests, he lures a little girl with a bouquet of flowers. Lazaro dials down Primo’s volcanic presence, his blazing preacher’s eyes turning doleful, his voice a caress. Thankfully, Diaz practices restraint here. A woman, possibly a relative, runs after Primo and takes the girl from him. Exasperation and disbelief ripple in his face, as if he’s been robbed in broad daylight. Later, he draws a sketch of a weapon, one that is supposed to cause a “very painful death,” and when he goes to a blacksmith to have it made, he earnestly demonstrates on the blacksmith himself, spooking the hell out of him.
On the other side of town, the once honorable Hermes regresses further into himself. Psoriasis spreads on his skin and scalp, a psychosomatic reaction to the killings he used to investigate in the city. The closer his former mentor gets, the more he is eaten by darkness—a reversal of Dostoevsky’s The Double, in which an older man meets a young doppelgänger who seemingly takes over his life. And yet the film also insinuates that Hermes was never pristine himself. When Nerissa sees him walking to her yard, she sprints to her house and comes out wielding a bolo. Hermes learns that Nerissa’s husband has disappeared, and she resents him for having gone abroad while their mother was dying. At some point, a distressed Hermes runs half-naked on the beach, waiting as though to be carried away, as the waves stirred by an approaching storm crash and roll on the shores. Cruz and Buencamino both give fine performances as estranged siblings who are mostly given expository dialogue.
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It wouldn’t be a Lav Diaz film if he actually stops himself from saying everything. For a visually austere director, he couldn’t seem to build a moment without turning it into a “message.” The scene, for instance, with a fictional Raffy Lerma, the photographer responsible for the drug war “pieta,” doesn’t ring quite as true as, say, Mae Paner’s monologue in Tao Po. The character’s inclusion here is in itself questionable—as if two policemen aren’t enough, Diaz had to smuggle in someone from the crime beat—but the way Lerma is personified is also clumsy at best. One of the film’s most tin-eared lines comes from Lerma’s conversation with Hermes. “Kumusta ka naman?” Hermes asks him. Lerma casually responds, “Heto, covering human rights violations.” Even Nerissa can’t quite escape the grandstanding. “You are all blind followers,” she berates Hermes while sweeping sand on the pavement. “…Even though their orders are not humane.”
It is a small relief that the film closes with the encounter between the two sworn enemies. They agree to meet at the pier as dawn breaks. But instead of repelling his blows, Hermes submits himself to Primo, their gaunt bodies hunched against the pitch-dark space devouring them. We learn that Hermes’s probe came at such a great cost: Primo’s entire family had been slaughtered in the raid that led to his capture. The hunter and the hunted turned out to be two parts of the same beast, and their collision is what Diaz has been charting from the beginning. When the final offering is made, both men find the peace that has eluded them. They are left to the sounds of the village rising to a new day and the waves that keep coming.