Reseñas de la crítica

The temptation is to call [Diaz's] shots simple, or austere, but they're actually quite complex and ambitious. Yes, he avoids extraneous camera movements (though he's not above a careful dolly shot or pan), but he composes with the skill of a great painter, playing his foregrounds and backgrounds off one another in ways that draw us into his lush frames. Diaz creates entire worlds within these lengthy static shots, and you can lose yourself in Norte's impeccably filmed landscapes and interiors.

It's not so much that the director is swinging for the fences of film history as he's collapsing the distance between his own film culture — which is still primarily regarded as exotic by Western programmers and festival gatekeepers — and the rest of cinema — even as at the same time Norte stands apart by dint of its length and general severity.

As the years pass and the Diaz ‘formula' hardens, it becomes more difficult to excuse the lack of inventiveness and craft in his work in the name of some spurious ‘neo-neorealism'. Diaz's most vocal fans do him no favours in this regard: he might become a better, more self-critical director if people stopped reassuring him that every new film he makes is a deathless masterpiece.

The humble, Sophoclean assumption that depicting atrocities—in image or sound—on-stage only shows their artifice rather than reality is not one that occurs to filmmakers of Diaz's and McQueen's purpose... And so we're stuck in the familiar arthouse territory of shame-faced spectacle, pioneered by Haneke: it would be impossible to find more tasteful rapes, more tasteful murders, and more meditative carnage outside the canons of such festival luminaries.

Norte is both a radical departure for Diaz and a perfect gateway into the director's work. For one, it's conventionally handsome; though much of his output from the past decade was produced on noisy consumer-grade video and desaturated into black and white, the crisp-looking Norte finds him working in color for the first time since 2002's shoestring sci-fi flick Hesus The Revolutionary.

Norte doesn't feel long in the least: with its narrative economy, clarity, and gently purposeful forward drive, the film is as streamlined and as watchable as any contemporary mainstream narrative, if not more so. At the risk of repeating a weary truism about the relativity of film time, Norte feels a lot shorter than the arduous grind of many an artificially busy Hollywood production.

Norte, the End of History, by Lav Diaz, is an equally complicated brew of traditions. In this case, modern cinema of duration meets the 19th-century novel. Through long takes, Diaz alternates between slums, prisons, and country mansions, capturing a varied social tableaux... [Norte was] among the best that played at BAFICI...

In Lav Diaz's Norte, hangganan ng kasaysayan (Norte, the End of History), a 250-minute musing upon the reality of transgression and the perception of transformation, an old adage springs to cinematic life, its accepted platitudes seemingly proven: The more things change for the film's pair of Filipino protagonists – intellectual Fabian (Sid Lucero) and villager Joaquin (Archie Alemania) – the more the surrounding society stays the same, despite their best and worst efforts.

While Diaz is renowned as an exponent of "slow cinema", the plot actually moves at a rather brisk pace, as the filmmaker follows both characters in their respective descents into the abyss, and in terms of its narrative scope and thematic grandeur, Norte comes close to truly attaining a novelistic quality, worthy of the authors to whom Diaz looks for inspiration.

Novelistic is a term that gets thrown around a lot these days, but Diaz's film more than earns the adjective, and you'd have to go back to Edward Yang's Yi-Yi to find a movie that approaches marathon-length running times yet still makes you wish it were twice as long.

A 250-minute running time necessarily demands patience from an audience, but no less important is the patience of the filmmaker demanding it. This remains a specialty of Diaz's: Interested less in a few major events than in the ongoing banality which surrounds them, he trains his camera on the quiet rhythms of unglamorous routine, lingering on his characters as they wearily go through the motions of another day.

To attempt to seriously braid the political, the psychological, and the spiritual in a single narrative system! Who besides Ford, Mizoguchi, Dreyer, and Rossellini have successfully tried? (And not even their best attempts were flawless.) Norte is a work that deserves consideration in the same terms and contexts as the work of these masters.