When the Waves Are Gone: an impassioned philippic from Lav Diaz

• Reviewed from the 2023 Bengaluru International Film Festival

Filipino auteur Lav Diaz’s reputation as a prolific director of austere, extremely long black-and-white films belies the degree to which his work can be surprisingly accessible both intellectually and emotionally. While it is true that Diaz privileges a detached, master-shot aesthetic, with minimal camera movement or musical score, he remains a filmmaker firmly committed to clear narrative lines and character motivations. Despite his unmistakeable personal style, his films consistently grapple with established film genres, freely adapting conventions from crime movies, melodrama, sci-fi, political thrillers and even musicals.

Diaz’s latest opus When the Waves Are Gone (Kapag wala nang mga alon), which premiered at the Venice Film Festival last year, borrows equally from film noir and the Western, recounting the fated encounter of two violent men with a score to settle. Wracked with guilt over his involvement in the government’s murderous anti-drug campaign, top cop Hermes Papauran (John Lloyd Cruz, in his fifth feature with Diaz) begins to lose his grip on his well-being and family life. He develops severe psoriasis, prompting him to head for the salubrious coastal clime of his native village. In Hermes’ autoimmune disorder, Diaz finds an apt metaphor for a system determined to attack the very thing it is supposed to protect – even if it is also a somewhat puritanical association that views physical illness as an offshoot of moral rot.

Released from prison, meanwhile, ex-sergeant Supremo Macabantay (Diaz’s regular collaborator Ronnie Lazaro) sets out to hunt down Hermes, who was once his protégé at the police academy and who had him arrested for corruption. As is often the case in Diaz’s films, the antagonist proves the more interesting character. A political assassin who is also an evangelist, Supremo commands the best passages of the film: in one darkly humorous scene, he coerces a boatman to jump overboard for a baptism; in another, he brings a young sex worker to his hotel room, only to have her kneel and pray.

For the most part, Waves interweaves the two men’s stories, with Hermes and Supremo biding their time at their respective hideouts before the eventual high noon, which arrives in the shape of a ritual showdown by the sea. Alternating between towns and villages, indoors and outdoors, the film combines significant narrative ellipses with expansive slabs of real-time action, imparting a dynamic rhythm to proceedings.

Waves is of a piece with Diaz’s longstanding, ongoing examination of his country’s embattled moral conscience, but the address is more direct than ever, the tone more despondent. The result is a passionate if somewhat melodramatic philippic against a nation that seems doomed to cycles of enslavement and oppression.