‘Phantosmia’ review: Memory as olfactory hallucination

Spoilers ahead.

In an interview with Filmmaker Magazine, Lav Diaz shared that he first encountered phantosmia, a rare olfactory disorder, when a relative was admitted many years ago to the AFP Medical Center in Quezon City, where he discovered patients suffering from trauma due to their involvement in the protracted conflict between the state military and revolutionary group New People’s Army in Mindanao, which was at its peak at the time.

The trauma would lead their bodies to develop a phantom odor, driving them to go mad and hallucinate about smells that aren’t in their immediate environment. “It could be the smell of death, rotting corpses, things they would smell during these encounters,” said Diaz.

That encounter, disconcerting as it was, might just be any other encounter for many, but for an auteur and thinker like Diaz, there was a story there only waiting to be mined, another entry point into his unbridled probing of a griefscape that makes and unmakes a nation, a specter of the past he would carry with him as he premiered Phantosmia, his eighth film at this year’s Venice International Film Festival, where he won the Golden Lion for Ang Babaeng Humayo (2016), which, coincidentally, was eight years ago. Eight years prior to that, he took home the Orizzonti Grand Prize at the same festival for Melancholia (2008), which was nearly eight hours long as well. Talk about serendipities.

In the story, famed military sergeant Hilarion Zabala (Ronnie Lazaro), often seen with a hankie on his face, finds his solitary existence upended when his violent past begins to gnaw at him in the form of an olfactory hallucination, even after years of retirement. The recurring malady troubles him to the extent that he can no longer eat properly or visit certain places, say a restaurant.

This, on top of his debilitating relationship with his two children, especially his musician son (Edrick Alcontado), after cheating on their mother, as well as the state of his house now tenanted by ruin and neglect.

Refusing medication, Zabala’s doctor (Lhorvie Nuevo) prescribes a treatment that is rather radical, if not strange, one that requires him to return to service to trick his memory into exposing the provenance of the illness and trauma, which also means reliving a history he cannot seem to outrun.

For a month he works as a prison cook but later gets assigned as rear officer of the American-built Pulo Penal Colony, apparently the most far-flung prison in the Philippines under the command of Major Ramon Lukas (Paul Jake Paule), who has a proclivity for guns and acts of violence and whose voice thunders through the soundscape of the sleepy barrio.

The island of Pulo, parallel to the depressing town in Mula sa Kung Ano ang Noon (2014), is a character of its own. It is a place enmeshed in relentless rain, somehow hypnotic, tinted with dread, and populated by numbing hardship. It is a place where inmates, supposedly granted liberty, are treated as nothing but mere slaves forced to tend the crops and till the sodden tract of land every waking day; where wildcats, locally known as Haring Musang, are prized and hunted to death.

It is a place peopled by the likes of Narda (Hazel Orencio), whose name curiously invokes the human alter-ego of an eminent heroine in Philippine comics but acts the exact opposite, peddling the body of her adoptive daughter, Reyna (Janine Gutierrez), who is beginning to lose her sight, to the lustful men of the town, including Major Lukas; Setong (Arjhay Babon), also Narda’s adoptive child, whose thick head cannot comprehend and instead enables the monstrosity Reyna is exposed to; Laban (Allen Alzola), supplier of local coconut wine; Marlo (Dong Abay), a bald and bearded poet who at one point dons a formal attire to recite off-the-cuff verses; and Nika and Brando (Heart Puyong and Mitzi Comia, respectively) who visit the island for the annual hunting season.

Such torrents of characters mesh with the grovel of Diaz’s plotting, which, despite its spasmodic departures, is far more accessible than what he’s been churning out as of late, maybe even in the last decade. And such characters are of course allegories, corporeal representations of broader philosophies that Diaz parses, surveys patterns for, and views from all possible vantage points for hours on end.

Zabala in this case is the latest in a formidable line of Diaz antiheroes seeking absolution (such as Hugo Haniway in Ang Panahon ng Halimaw, 2018), if not a physical and moral antidote (early into the film, the clinician hints at a “cleansing” of sorts), the likes of Serafin Geronimo in Ang Kriminal ng Baryo Concepcion (1998) or Hermes Papauran in Kapag Wala Nang Mga Alon (2022) and Essential Truths of the Lake (2023).

Notably, Lazaro in Alon also plays an ex-sergeant, the dementedly beguiling Primo Macabantay, who seeks vengeance after being out of ten-year incarceration due to corruption uncovered by Hermes, his former mentee. Primo runs counter to Zabala, at least in terms of striving for atonement, but both are eroded by their past.

Zabala is the product of a macho-feudal upbringing: a Scout Ranger told to carry out orders with no questions asked, a marksman trained to always hit the target, sharpened at a young age, a soldier primed to take the path to perdition, to be a killing machine.

And the prognosis that Diaz offers as his protagonist comes to terms with his corroded legacy is somewhere between guilt and reckoning, between admission and denial — the same prognosis the director extends to Bandong in Isang Salaysay ng Karahasang Pilipino (2022), only that results in a different course.

In the opening frame, reminiscent of the first image in Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest (2023), only rendered in signature Diaz monochrome, the revered soldier recalls a thriving community by the riverbank, led by women and one called Babu Labi (Loreta Derecho).

It’s a paradise, describes Zabala, where children can be seen playing from a distance, where villagefolk go about their day doing laundry on the river or sharing nice conversations, where the chirping of birds and rippling of the stream, amidst the rich plantlife, coalesce into a lovely, calming acoustic terrain.

It’s Diaz’s version of Eden — a paradise that turns into a site of carnage in an instant, swathed in burning huts, fire still-snapping.

Zabala suspects that it’s the encounter that incited the foul odors he’s been imagining, but there’s no telling for sure. And as seasoned viewers are well aware of, Diaz isn’t one to sprint through his narratives, so he tracks Zabala’s psychological and spiritual decay with stasis, languor, and patience. He tours us around the sights of the countryside (“Nature is always there as a force in my stories. It’s a fixation now,” he admits), shots still often from a distance and strongest at nightfall, harnessing the earthly abundance (as though you can detect the smell of grass and ground awash in rain) and the dramatic glint of light, spiked with vignettes of the central character’s memories, which all blends well with his trademark black-and-white lensing to project a Philippine milieu that feels so surreal, novelistic, and almost antediluvian.

It’s a visual control that is an outcome of Diaz’s deference to a film economy where he can wear many creative hats as director, writer, cinematographer, editor, and production designer of his films, which he has done many times over, like in the 11-hour epic Ebolusyon ng Isang Pamilyang Pilipino (2004), which is set to screen on September 26 at Cinematheque Center Manila to honor its 20th year.

Ronnie Lazaro’s Zabala, while not as towering as his Primo in Alon, is still a marvel of a presence, who finds himself trying to attain some equanimity, perhaps even hope, all the while refusing to cave into the syndrome of authority that has always loomed large in his thinking, in his entire being. 

Janine Gutierrez, who already shot a yet-to-be-released film with Diaz before Phantosmia, also comes up with unflinching work, despite the confines of the dialogue, despite playing a character that can barely take strides or speak, often anxious and trembling.

The story of Reyna, heightened by the neglect of her biological mother and sexual abuse at the hands of her foster mother, is a story that recounts the lived realities of most “Amerasians — people fathered and abandoned by American servicemen stationed overseas,” as TIME Magazine puts it — a remnant of American colonization in the Philippines, which is another commentary that Diaz attempts to draw focus to.

But the real force here, it must be said, is Hazel Orencio, a longtime Diaz collaborator, who stands mighty as the cursing, hot-tempered maternal figure who supposedly wants to earn money for her family’s upkeep and plans for greener pastures but only really cares for herself. She essays a grating, pesky presence that gets into your skin; remorseless as Insiang’s mother in Lino Brocka’s 1976 social realist mastercraft (“Insiang was the bar for social realist cinema,” Diaz once said of the film).

These archetypes, alongside many others, ripen under Diaz’s sleight of hand, under his imposing mode of articulation, all contributing to the auteur’s boundless exploration of sociohistorical trauma and memory, despotic regimes, and the disintegrating lives of the common Filipino. Placed among the films he has birthed since 2020, Phantosmia isn’t as ambitious as those that precede it, but it may well be one of Diaz’s most intact and eloquent visions this decade.

Be that as it may, there is a glaring footnote in the making of Phantosmia that discerning viewers must not overlook, as the film marks another collaboration between Diaz and Paul Soriano, with the latter serving as executive producer this time around; their second since the eight-hour Hele sa Hiwagang Hapis (2016), where Soriano served as producer.

This detail is far from trivial. In fact, Soriano, founder of production company TEN17P, was appointed by his godfather and son of the late Philippine dictator, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., as the presidential adviser on creative communications in October 2022 with, bizarrely, an annual salary of only a peso. The film and television director vacated the position a year later. 

Past this, Soriano — along with his wife, host, and actress Toni Gonzaga, named as among the president’s leading celebrity endorsers — was pivotal in the 2022 campaign ads of Marcos. Soriano was also at the helm of the president’s first State of the Nation Address, and even frequently accompanied Marcos on his official trips abroad.

Phantosmia hacks through the terrors and emotional shrapnels of autocratic rule, of the murderous legacy of the elder Marcos, but shrewd as this assertion may be, it’s difficult to see this latest opus and gloss over the fact that Diaz’s association with the enabler of the fascist dictator wildly clashes with it, with his artistic credo, with what his “free cinema” at large bears witness to.

Sometime in the past, Diaz heard a cautionary advice from Brocka, whose Maynila, sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag (1975) liberated the then-aspiring director “in a sense that you can use this medium to fuck this (Marcos) regime,” about the necessity of compromise for the fruition of a filmmaker’s project.

Considering the cultural and temporal distance, as well as the political realities fracturing our homeland that Diaz has prolifically and expansively observed and rendered on the screen, it’s tempting to mull over that advice now. – Rappler.com