Because “Magellan” is a lavish film about the famous Portuguese explorer, one might expect it to be a bombastic epic on the order of Ridley Scott’s “Napoleon” (2022) or “1492: Conquest of Paradise” (1992). But Lav Diaz, a Filipino director known for mastering “slow cinema,” offers nuance, complexity and dark beauty. Gael García Bernal plays Ferdinand Magellan in his final decade, a period that features his participation in the capture of Malacca in 1511 and his voyage, eight years later, to plot a trade route from Spain to the East Indies.
Rather than endorse Westerners’ view of Magellan as a “discoverer” of new worlds, Diaz takes the perspective of the peoples he subjugated. The film opens on images of the Indigenous people of Malacca preparing for prophesied doom after seeing their first white man. The camera abruptly cuts to images of those same people lying dead as Magellan’s crew quarters in their homes. Diaz captures the lush scenery with a painterly eye, slaughter in the foreground, natural beauty behind it.
Magellan is no kinder to his own crew. During their arduous journey across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, he beheads a ship’s captain for sodomy and condemns the crew’s bishop (Brontis Jodorowsky, son of the Chilean filmmaker Alejandro) to death for not divulging secrets he received during confession. Bernal’s explorer is not a maniacal tyrant. He is even-keeled, soft-spoken, and professional. Colonialism in this film is simply business. — Oscar Goff
At Brattle Theatre, 2/6-2/12
Oscar Goff is a writer and film critic based in Somerville. He is film editor and senior critic for the Boston Hassle and his work has appeared in the monthly Boston Compass newspaper and publications such as WBUR’s The ARTery and iHeartNoise. He is a member of the Boston Society of Film Critics, the Boston Online Film Critics Association, and the Online Film Critics Society.
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