Venice Golden Lion winner Lav Diaz takes Tolstoy to the Philippines with an intense,four-hour morality tale of a wrongly imprisoned woman seeking paybackLav Diaz’s The Woman Who Left is a vast, dark behemoth of mystery and anguish, and as forbidding as a starless night sky. This is the film that won Diaz the Golden Lion at this year’s Venice film festival and took the Filipino director’s global reputation to a fresh level. Running as it does at a mere three-and-three-quarter hours,it is a squib compared to his other works, such as the eight-hour A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery, and which he premiered at Berlin in February.
Its forbidding sombreness makes it a challenge until the viewer recalibrates their expectations of rhythm and tempo; you must readjust to something slower even than the walking pace of conventional social realism. Diaz works on the film equivalent of geological time. His film has no closeups there is just one medium shot of his heroine and it is strange to near to the finish of such a long film with only a hazy idea,or none at all, of what the characters actually gape like. It is in austere monochrome, and made even more daunting by Diaz’s fancy of darkness in all senses – his unhurried,unlit sequences are something to compare with Pedro Costa’s sepulchral images of Fontainhas in Lisbon or Tsai Ming-liang’s street scenes. It’s a film you have to feel your way into, like a ruined church or a haunted house. Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com