‘Magellan’ review: A long, uncomfortable voyage into the backwaters of colonialism

“Magellan” opens with a young girl looking through a dense thicket of foliage and spotting something alarming.

“I saw a white man,” she tells the residents of her remote island village in the Philippines, who begin praying and chanting to fend off the tide of death and disease surely coming in the newcomers’ wake.

We can anticipate the identity of these white men, whose rather dinky vessel belies the world-straddling mythology that tends to accompany conquistadors of Ferdinand Magellan’s stature. They seem small here, diminished by the vastness of the new world into which their vessel precariously sails. Even the national Filipino hero Lapulapu, whose forces slew Magellan and are still enshrined in the history of anti-colonial resistance, is treated as a phantom here.

This is a movie that lets all the hot air out of the myth it adapts, instead letting a sickly calm seep in: the humidity of jungles, the stink of corpses and the interminable rhythm of long days at sea. You get the acute sense in “Magellan” that these adventurers lived in a world just barely shaking off the dirt from the Middle Ages, and when Magellan (Gael García Bernal) returns to Europe, it’s to visit cheerless alehouses and kick the dust off his boots in rude courtyards.

With the cure for ills like scurvy still only dimly understood, many of the men on a voyage like this would be expected to die, leaving behind destitute widows bound to wear black and never remarry. Scenes between Magellan and the spirit of the lover he left behind (Ângela Azevedo) make a subtle point about the treatment of women in those days — subtler than the farce that plays out between Magellan and the Cebuanos, a major Austronesian ethnolinguistic group originating from the Philippines, in the last half-hour, in which the languid film picks up pace and becomes a small black comedy of human nature (the Cebuanos’ and the colonizers’).

At two hours and 40 minutes, this is the most accessible film yet from the venerable Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz, known for works of extreme duration. “Evolution of a Filipino Family,” his breakout film from 2004, runs nearly 11 hours.

Diaz has been shrewd in marketing his movie, emphasizing the steamy and immersive locations in the trailers. He recently claimed he came up with the casting of Bernal while engaged in intimate relations with two other well-known directors, which may or may not be true but accounted for at least some of this writer’s curiosity about “Magellan.” Good to know stories like the old ones about Oscar Wilde and Walt Whitman are still alive.

“Magellan” itself, though, is deliberately unsensational. The shots dazzle, but they’re held for so long you begin to process them as paintings. The eye scans dimly for motion, and the momentum of a swashbuckler like “Master and Commander” is halted. “Magellan” would make the most despairing double feature of all time with “Black Robe,” Bruce Beresford’s grim 1991 epic about early French Jesuit involvement with the First Nations.

Instead of a score, we hear the endless prayers of the Cebuano people; they’re the sounds of desolation, no easier to listen to than the crying of a bereaved mother. The most poignant scene in the movie shows a Cebuano person discovering the charred remains of a burnt anito, wracked by tears and caressing the idol as if crying over the body of a loved one.

In an early scene, Magellan casually, cruelly acquires a slave, the sound of whose grief wracks the rest of the movie. Later, Magellan catches two men engaged in sexual activities below deck, and one is forced to watch the other be beheaded on the deck of the ship. It’s typical of this movie that the fell stroke is never shown, instead zeroing in on the survivor, whose body contorts until he becomes a character from a Francis Bacon painting.

This is not an easy film to sit through, in part because of the intensity of scenes like this but mostly because Diaz makes no effort to make “Magellan” a comfortable experience. Sit in a theater with it, and you might feel like you’re cramped in a wooden box along with Magellan’s sailors, rocking endlessly on the waves in search of an unseen destination.

‘Magellan’

Stars (out of four): 2.5 stars

Runtime: 2 hours, 40 minutes

Rated: Not rated (nudity, sexual content and some violence)

How to watch: At San Rafael’s Smith Rafael Film Center from Friday through Feb. 4