CANNES – A film that’s more intriguing in the abstract than it is in an execution that proves surprisingly straightforward, Lav Diaz’s historical biopic, “Magellan” (if one can even call it that) about Ferdinand Magellan is still a fascinating work that takes us back through time to hold the insidiousness of colonization up to the light. It also ponders the agony of loss, how we turn to the heavens in search of answers, and what it is that can come when we hear nothing in return to our desperate cries. 
Indeed, a recurring element of the film involves people desperately trying to get answers after believing that they have been forsaken or that the immense loss they have experienced was all for naught. Repeated scenes of characters of various backgrounds wailing in pain create a throughline about faith and our attempts to use it to make sense of a cruel world that is defined by suffering. It also then becomes about how men like Magellan will work to exploit this and only then bring about more of it as a result. The two-hour and thirty-minute film that captures this is also a formally uncompromising one in which the camera only rarely moves. The few instances where it does usually are when we are being gently taken down a river or when a ship is bobbing out on the water.
Otherwise, it’s about creating fixed cinematic tableaus that resemble paintings more than anything. Only occasionally does Diaz come in for close-ups, instead using extensive shots that remain locked down to let us see the full scope of brutal scenes from a distance that are frequently populated by people in various death poses arranged before us. It’s grim, often effectively haunting in these individual shots, even if the way everything gets cut together in a more familiar fashion is not as effective on the whole. 
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Though the film is broadly centered on the life of Magellan (Gael García Bernal), the voyage he undertook to the Philippines, his eventual destructive desire to convert everyone he came across, and the violence he wielded when he couldn’t get his way that culminated in his own demise, Diaz remains uninterested in giving the man much of any interiority. Save for one scene early on where he attacks someone for challenging him on how the desire to travel the world to wield power and control others is actually immoral, he’s a distinctly and intentionally uncharismatic figure.

This is all part of the film’s overall project, where there is not much in the way of any conventional excitement that lesser works would reduce their historical stories to being. Yes, there are the occasional confrontations, including a battle between ships in the dark of night, where we can hardly see much of anything and a minimalistic mutiny that breaks out on the boat. However, Diaz is much more focused on just letting scenes occur with nothing in the way, they are shot, inviting us to view them as thrilling. This world he immerses us in is instead one of horror that plays out in slow motion, or that we only see the aftermath of, with bodies scattered everywhere. 
It makes explicit just how defined by death the explorations of men who believe themselves to be conquerors undertook were and the way Diaz manages to push us to sit with these moments without ever making them spectacles is to be commended. The film is one of restraint that still captures the genocidal nature of men like Magellan in every single frame. Where the presentation of all this is potent and challenging in the way it’s constructed, some elements late in the film feel like Diaz is holding something back.
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Some of this may come from how there is a rumored even longer cut at nine hours and that this is the streamlined version, though there is also just a general sense that we are seeing a film that’s somehow tied down by its central figure when the most striking moments come when we step away from him. While it is absurd to say that this is somehow the film trying to make itself more accessible, as it’s still a massive work that will likely lose people not wanting to see history made into a work of slow cinema, one can still wonder what is being left on the cutting room floor.

Namely, there are increasing appearances of Magellan’s wife Beatriz (Ângela Ramos) in ghostly form, where Diaz seems to be gesturing towards another film entirely. There may indeed be such a work as this film initially operated under the title of “Beatriz, The Wife,” and there has been conversation that there could be what is essentially an entire other film shot simultaneously to this. Maybe that one will open up new conversations with this one that felt like they were only half finished. For now, while “Magellan” is still a haunting vision, the ghosts of a more impactful film you remember most are also the ones that can feel pushed to the margins of the frame. [B-] 
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