The Upcoming
  • Culture
    • Art
    • Cinema & Tv
      • Movie reviews
      • Film festivals
      • Shows
    • Food & Drinks
      • News & Features
      • Restaurant & bar reviews
      • Interviews & Recipes
    • Literature
    • Music
      • Live music
    • Theatre
  • Fashion & Lifestyle
    • Accessories
    • Beauty
    • News & Features
    • Shopping & Trends
    • Tips & How-tos
    • Fashion weeks
  • What’s On
    • Art exhibitions
    • Theatre shows
  • Tickets
  • Join us
    • Editorial unit
    • Our writers
    • Join the team
    • Join the mailing list
    • Support us
    • Contact us
  • Interviews
  • Competitions
  • Special events
    • Film festivals
      • Berlin
      • Tribeca
      • Sundance London
      • Cannes
      • Locarno
      • Venice
      • London
      • Toronto
    • Fashion weeks
      • London Fashion Week
      • New York Fashion Week
      • Milan Fashion Week
      • Paris Fashion Week
      • Haute Couture
      • London Fashion Week Men’s
  • Facebook

  • Twitter

  • Instagram

  • YouTube

  • RSS

Venice Film Festival 2020

Genus Pan (Lahi, Hayop)

Venice Film Festival 2020: Genus Pan (Lahi, Hayop) | Review
11 September 2020
Joseph Owen
Avatar
Joseph Owen
11 September 2020

Movie and show review

Joseph Owen

Genus Pan (Lahi, Hayop)

★★★★★

Special event

Lav Diaz makes long, slow films. The first point is difficult to dispute while the second functions as a sort of journalistic shorthand. “Slow cinema” usually describes unfurling cinematic illustrations that ignore or withhold traditional conventions of narrative and plot. It has a simple categorical purpose, which dubiously brings Diaz’s works into conversation with such diverse filmmakers as Tsai Ming-liang and Kelly Reichardt, whose most recent efforts found many admirers at this year’s Berlinale.

Yet considering slowness as a critical idiom is not without merit. For Diaz, particularly, it inscribes a certain type of material life in the contemporary age. His focus shifts from those caught within the pincers of modernity to those on the periphery, often in poverty. A Filipino director committed to depicting the rural undulations of his homeland, he presents his fictions as quasi-ethnography, daring viewers to elicit truth and meaning from his careful tableaux.

By Diaz’s standards, his newest feature Genus Pan is short, clocking in at a relatively spry 150 minutes. It is a story about three men (Paulo, Baldo, and Andres) who live in a small community. Their relationships appear mainly determined by debt and obligation: who owes money to whom; the metaphysical nature of transactions (“A deal is a deal.”); and the frustrations wrung from intimate, small-scale commerce. While traipsing through the woodland, the men resort to bickering and minor scuffles. Diaz frames their interactions with studied simplicity. The earth beneath and the trees around them take on an omnipresent tactile quality, beckoning the trio towards genesis and their ancestral states.

The sound design (and its integrity to the action) is intuitive. Oral traditions and indigenous songs act as audio checkpoints. One scene with a radio insinuates a broader political message. Talk on the airwaves of fascists and demagogues provides an admirably direct allusion to the country’s incumbent president, Rodrigo Duterte. Hidden creatures offer both an oppressive soundscape and distant imagery. Gecko calls punctuate the ramshackle journey and “the black horse” endures as an apparently imagined totem of the forest. Diaz has stated his intention here is to show “man honestly acting [as] an animal, as he has been acting […] all his life.” Man descended from chimps; the residue lingers. Women are a bit of an afterthought, victims of male aggression, a silent presence on the other side of leaves.

These deliberately bestial evocations, and their proximity to human psychology, emerge fairly well realised. Diaz inserts enough ironies in his characterisations to undercut the squawking chamber-piece disputes and subsequently neat thematic readings. Protrusions of violence upset any dwelling in the pastoral. Incongruities, such as a figure kneeling in devoted Christian prayer while dressed in a modest polo shirt, speckle the unbroken stream of canvases that constitute the film. Diaz thus renders creaturely life as a semi-spontaneous mixture of splatters, blots and mottles, all contained within the formal order of the frame.

★★★★★

Joseph Owen

Genus Pan (Lahi, Hayop) does not have a UK release date yet.

Read more reviews from our Venice Film Festival 2020 coverage here.

For further information about the event visit the Venice Film Festival website here.

Watch the trailer for Genus Pan (Lahi, Hayop) here:

Related Itemsreview

More in Film festivals

Killing Escobar

★★★★★
Andrew Murray
Read More

“There really hasn’t been a film that deals with a platonic male-female relationship in this way”: Natalie Morales and Mark Duplass discuss Language Lessons

Selina Sondermann
Read More

A Brixton Tale

★★★★★
Andrew Murray
Read More

Surge

★★★★★
Andrew Murray
Read More

The Old Ways

★★★★★
Andrew Murray
Read More

Berlinale 2021 winners: The full list

Naomi Schanen
Read More

A Cop Movie (Una película de policías)

★★★★★
Oliver Johnston
Read More

Human Factors (Der menschliche Faktor)

★★★★★
Selina Sondermann
Read More

Summer Blur (Han Nan Xia Ri)

★★★★★
Selina Sondermann
Read More
Scroll for more
Tap

Movie and show review

Joseph Owen

Genus Pan (Lahi, Hayop)

★★★★★

Special event

  • Popular

  • Latest

  • TOP PICKS

  • The Girl and the Spider (Das Mädchen und die Spinne)
    ★★★★★
    Berlinale
  • Celebrate International Women’s Day with a Bombay Sapphire Cocktails & Create masterclass
    Food & Drinks
  • Kings of Leon – When You See Yourself
    ★★★★★
    Album review
  • Limbo
    ★★★★★
    Berlinale
  • Delectible drinks that would make the perfect Mother’s Day gift
    Food & Drinks
  • Killing Escobar
    ★★★★★
    Glasgow
  • “There really hasn’t been a film that deals with a platonic male-female relationship in this way”: Natalie Morales and Mark Duplass discuss Language Lessons
    Berlinale
  • A Brixton Tale
    ★★★★★
    Glasgow
  • Surge
    ★★★★★
    Glasgow
  • The Old Ways
    ★★★★★
    Glasgow
  • Berlinale 2021 winners: The full list
    Berlinale
  • WandaVision
    ★★★★★
    disney
  • Coming 2 America
    ★★★★★
    Movie review
  • Kings of Leon – When You See Yourself
    ★★★★★
    Album review
  • The Dissident
    ★★★★★
    Movie review
The Upcoming
Pages
  • Contact us
  • Join mailing list
  • Join us
  • Our London food map
  • Our writers
  • Support us
  • What, when, why

Copyright © 2011-2020 FL Media

Venice Film Festival 2020: New Order (Nuevo Orden) | Review
Venice Film Festival 2020: Shorta | Review