‘Phantosmia’ REVIEW: The Scent of Moral Redemption
‘Phantosmia’ REVIEW: The Scent of Moral Redemption
Ronnie Lazaro as Hilarion Zabala
It is impossible to watch a film in theaters detached from its contemporary cultural contexts, especially when it engages with one’s nation’s history. And in any presentation of history, it often exposes just as much about the past as it does the present in which it is conveyed. In other words, how we interpret the past is always intimately connected to the time and place in which we do so. We cannot escape our presents. And in the same way, Phantosmia cannot escape its historical designation as Lav Diaz’s first film made and released under the presidency of Bongbong Marcos. It’s impossible to ignore. The film is even set during his father’s Martial Law regime 40 years ago. And what do we learn from the film? What does it tell us about our society today?
Phantosmia follows Hilarion Zabala (Ronnie Lazaro), a retired military sergeant whose violent past has been plaguing him with an inability to smell his surroundings. All he smells is the scent of rotting corpses. It comes and goes, but following the death of his first wife, the affliction returns with a vengeance. His psychiatrist recommends that it might be useful for him to return to the service, where these bouts of phantosmia first started.
Perhaps what he needs to do to be cured is to confront and examine his past in order to finally be cleansed of it. He eventually takes the position of Rear Guard at the Pulo Penal Colony, and this is where the bulk of the film takes place. While there, he’s instructed to keep a journal in order to reflect on his time in the military. The film is set from 1979-1980, with some flashbacks to Zabala’s time as a soldier for the Philippine Constabulary in 1969 at Lanao.
In order to more deeply engage with the film’s themes, it is necessary to review the political context of that time in history. We need to address the Moro conflict in Mindanao that reached its violent peak during the Marcos dictatorship. A common conceptual mistake that continues today is to describe the fighting in the region as due to a religious conflict. This was an issue not of religion, but of land.
During the imperial war between the United States and Japan, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Filipinos were displaced throughout Luzon and Visayas. Their homes were ravaged and destroyed, and they looked to the government to remedy their situations. What the newly elected Philippine government did was to grant many of them titles to supposedly unoccupied lands throughout Mindanao. The same strategy was used by the subsequent Ramon Magsaysay administration to quell the discontent driving the Hukbalahap movement in the early 1950s. As a result of these policies, upwards of a hundred thousand citizens resettled in Mindanao. They were only circumstantially Christian due to where they had come from. This caused a lot of conflict because many of those lands were not actually empty.
Mindanao was not ‘a land without people for a people without land,’ to use the Zionist dictum for the colonization of Palestine. When the Christian settlers arrived with their government-sanctioned land titles, they asserted their legal rights, despite the fact that many local families had lived there for generations. These land disputes were the source of the tensions between the locals and the Christian settler populations.
The settlers were considered outsiders, colonizing Moro lands with the legal and military backing of the national government, a government that historically operated separately from Mindanao. Not only was a significant section of Moro Mindanao free from the 300-year history of Spanish rule, but they also ran a separate autonomous region from the rest of the country for the first few decades of American colonization from the end of the 19th century. In their point of view, their historical lands were being taken over by foreigners.
This is the background of the tensions in the region that eventually led to the formation of paramilitary groups such as the Ilonggo Ilagas, the Lanao Barracudas, and the Cotabato Blackshirts, as well as political organizations such as the Nur Misuari-led Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF), during the turbulence of the long Ferdinand Marcos administration. The Philippine government was not a neutral party in this civil war. They militarily supported the extremist Ilagas and helped them massacre tens of thousands of Moros. From 1972 to 1980, at least 50,000 people were killed, one million were internally displaced, and more than 100,000 Muslims had to flee to Malaysia by boat.
A shot from the film of a village in flames due to local fighting
In Phantosmia, we learn about these issues through the vantage point of Zabala, a Philippine military sniper. The film opens up with his recollections of his service in 1969 with an ode to the beauty of a small village in Lanao, the place he was deployed to (Walang mas maganda sa pook na yan). We’re then shown military men searching through the forests for the Ilagas, only to find themselves in the middle of an on-going firefight. We learn that the local Christian and Muslim paramilitary groups were taking turns each day wreaking havoc on the other and even burning each other’s homes down. The smell of the burning corpses from his time there is what has haunted Zabala over the years.
What immediately struck me with this presentation of events was that it positioned Zabala, the representative of the Philippine government, as almost a neutral party between two warring factions, as if as a soldier, he had innocently gone into the region for some sort of peacekeeping mission, but ultimately left traumatized by the barbarity they had witnessed there. In reality, the Philippine Constabulary of which he was a part was historically on the side of the Christian paramilitary groups, a fact that we don’t learn here.
The source of his trauma doesn’t come from his violence against Moro locals, but from his mere witnessing of the outcomes of their violence against each other. Later on, the film also adds his killing of a labor activist as something that he realizes he has come to regret. By centering Zabala, the film digs deeper into the point of view of an active soldier of the Marcos dictatorship, who, the film seems to argue, is ultimately a good person whose participation in state violence was due to the misguided belief that it was the morally correct thing to do at the time.
There’s nothing inherently wrong about presenting this perspective. And it makes sense that someone who served in the military did so because they believed to some extent in what it stood for, even though for this case, it was to violently maintain the Marcos Martial Law regime. In the latter half of the film, when Zabala is stationed at Pulo Penal Colony, he enters the space as representative of the traditionalist old guard of the military. He represents the dictatorial national government entering local politics. He comes with the strict enforcement of bureaucratic rules and regulations, expecting with an almost religious vigor that they must be followed locally.
Zabala at the Pulo Penal Colony
He butts heads with Major Lukas (Paul Jake Paule), the local strongman of the island. Lukas himself runs the colony as a mini dictator who preserves a decorum of professionalism, yet flouts the rules whenever it suits his purposes. These two forces, the strict nationalist Zabala, and the local warhead Lukas, are reminiscent of Philippine politics at large. Perhaps even two opposing ideas for how politics must be conducted. On one hand, Zabala represents the unitary rule of a Martial Law regime that prides itself on the higher values of military discipline, obedience and subservience to the nation-state. On the other, there’s the more decentralized vision of power that gives free reign over smaller territories to local leaders who run their cities like warlords.
The vision of the Lukas-type politician who sees themselves as above national law is very familiar in our contemporary Philippines. It was the standard before the Marcos dictatorship, and after the EDSA Revolution these forms of political arrangements returned. Over the years, political scientists have been trying to understand them through terms such as “bossism,” “cacique democracy,” “patronage democracy,” and more.
Within the context of the film’s time period, the younger Lukas perhaps represented the new generation of leaders that would emerge towards the end of the Marcos regime and soon take over local politics during Corazon Aquino’s. To be fair to the film, it doesn’t necessarily side with Zabala’s vision of things. A lot of the regulations he so ardently wants to uphold, such as the necessary distance between his guard post and the closest built structures, sound very arbitrary. It seems to be less important what the rules are for, and more important that they must be obeyed.
The moral arc in the film comes with the introduction of the plight of Reyna (Janine Gutierrez), a young woman forced into prostitution by her own mother, Nanay Narda (Hazel Orencio). Even Lukas pays for her services. It’s a very black and white situation that leaves no room for moral ambiguity. There’s clearly a certain good and evil here. As Zabala starts to realize what’s going on with Reyna, he’s given the opportunity to do the right thing on his own terms. He’s presented a scenario in which the morally right thing to do is pretty obvious: find a way to save her.
Janine Gutierrez as Reyna
The specific act of saving her does not break any of the national rules that he is accustomed to. In fact, his sense of duty towards her is likely connected to the same values that made him believe it was the right thing to join the military in the first place. It only contradicts the informally established local rules in place that allow Major Lukas free reign over the colony. At the end of the film, Zabala gets his redemption and his sense of smell recovers. But at the cost of violence. It’s a violence that the film appears to present as morally acceptable, given the situation. And finally, we are treated to a happy-ish ending of Reyna free of her oppression.
There’s a lot more in the film than these ideological tensions. It is 4 hours long. There are a lot of engaging supporting performances, such as from the makata (Dong Abay), Reyna’s brother Setong (Amado Babon), and more. That Reyna is explicitly described as half-American, a product of American colonization in the country, must also be of thematic significance. These add a lot of dimension to the presentation of the story.
There’s also the element of mythology (Alamat ng Haring Musang) that acts as a guiding motif in the film. Zabala is even described as a legendary (pinaka-maalamat) soldier. There are also some unique stylistic effects with the black and white digital cinematography, such as how the frame rate for most of the film seems lower than normal, but speeds up greatly during the last scenes of redemption, as if something metaphysically ingrained within the reality of the film changes once Zabala makes the choice to do the morally right thing. Like most Lav Diaz films, there’s a lot to unpack here.
Reyna with her brother Setong (Amado Babon)
But what does it mean for this to have been made today under the presidency of another Marcos? Perhaps it gives insight as to why some have continued to support the family. Maybe they compare the idea of a rules-based society with one that is perceived as anarchic and filled with self-serving leaders who are not accountable to law. The presentation of these two styles of leadership by Zabala and Lukas presents the dichotomy of ways that the Philippines has been ruled.
Maybe Lukas represents the failures of decentralization of power for its own sake, while Zabala represents the problems of blindly following the orders of the nation-state, even as it is couched in the rationale of following one’s moral compass. As in Zabala’s case, following strict orders ultimately left him with innocent blood on his hands and a post-traumatic stress disorder. Perhaps Lav Diaz is trying to show us the flaws of these systems of rule in order to force us to reflect on how we must change going forward.
However, I think it’s a strange choice not to even mention Marcos Sr. or the broader Martial Law regime here. Without any knowledge of Philippine history, it would be easy not to make any of these connections. The only direct references to it are the years in which the events took place. But if you disconnect yourself from the historical realities of the time, the film comes off as more about a military man’s growing ambivalence over his role as an enabler of state violence. But ironically, personal violence still ultimately solves his problems.
If the film directly engaged with the Marcos administration in this film, it could have been possible to situate Lukas as a product of the national environment he had come from, but the film doesn’t push it to those extents. It’s ultimately too insular, too processed through the lens of a member of the military state itself, of a culpable soldier considered spiritually redeemable if he could just turn around and instead kill the right people.
The film appears to condemn fascist tendencies, perhaps as a continuation of his criticisms of the Duterte administration with his past films, but without actually directly condemning the Martial Law regime itself. The deeper issue addressed here seems to be the corrupted desire to exert power over others, as opposed to interrogating the underlying structures that allowed these tendencies to be fostered in the first place. In a way, the film shows that fascism can still occur outside of the strict rules of Martial Law, and that it easily does so when power is localized.
Perhaps that’s what the film wants us to learn and look out for. Perhaps we’re supposed to take from it the idea that fascist tendencies manifest all around us, not just with the Marcoses, but for most of our politicians in general. And so we should always be vigilant. Perhaps ignoring these issues is what led the Marcoses back to power. We never seriously took the underlying problem of authoritarianism into account. And perhaps the film is suggesting that redemption in all its forms can ultimately be found in making the conscious decision to fight against injustice.
Reyna on a boat towards the end of the film
The best of cinema forces us to think and ask questions about ourselves and our societies. And that’s what Phantosmia has done for me over the past few weeks. Although I have some reservations about what the film chooses to leave in and leave out, I think that it ultimately serves its purpose as an important piece of art that will stand the test of time. It engages with our tumultuous history and gives us the perspective of a central figure whose voice has been left out of our normative histories.
We don’t normally learn about what soldiers of the Martial Law regime have felt about their participation in it over time. And although I personally would have preferred a more comprehensive accounting of the points of view of the victims of military violence in Mindanao, perhaps this film opens up the lane for those stories to be told in the future.
‘Phantosmia’ premiered at QCinema 2024 as part of its Screen International section.
