The formula of being Philippine New Wave director Love Diaz is a hyperrealist, naturalist, poet of life details, recorder of trivialities and translator of large-scale historical moments he witnessed during the dictatorship of Ferdinando Marcos. According to the director himself, whose narrative style is characterized by the elevated to the degree of absolute uroboros shakyness, stiffness and heavy-handedness, the effect of an excessively slow passage of time, which is represented not by a copy, but by the very being with its inherent unbearable fluidity, cinema as a pure art form that exists at the level of dialogue and existential reflection, for him it must serve one thing: the total and unquestioning display of life down to the smallest details, from which the entire movie universe consists, the main one is opposed to this philosophical posture of the film. For Diaz, cinema is not life, but life itself, snatched from a piece of private family stories, is the most striking example of pure cinema, where both form and content are equal. If Alexei Herman Sr. in his fixation of reality sometimes took photos of hell, direct reports from the bottom, Bela Tarr spoke about the inevitability of death in the language of mortido, Rivette skillfully weaved webs from literature, theater and cinema, the Filipino Diaz relies exclusively on materials more accessible, albeit stitched with silver threads of hidden metaphysics, drawing his inspiration from the work of the Filipino film classics Lino Brock, in the literature of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Sholokhov, Garaso, and others.
The nine-hour "Evolution of the Filipino family" in 2004, the program film work of the cult Filipino, to be perceived only as a commentary on the reality of the decline of the historical process, as a kind of author's reflection, frustrated into the film text of its too personal and ideologically close, completely fails, although in contrast to the late "Death in the Land of Charms", this tape is even manipulatively straight; so the author's understanding of the world around and the interpretation of living history, which Diaz witnessed, is covered with minimal multi-significantness, and sometimes massiveness is not observed at all with the social frankness and physiology. However, the director, who shoots in general a genuinely authentic, deliberate parable and poetry, deliberately hides in favor of greater transparency of his own message, regularly mounting staged film reality with documentary inserts, passing from the private to the general. From the history of one large family in a small country to the great history and tragedy of the Filipino people; from the history of the historical nightmare to its inexorable oblivion, an escapist coma, which for Love Diaz is much more de (con)structive phenomenon than the glorification of the deeds of Ferdinando Marcos by his contemporary tribesmen.
The Gallardo family, as a symbol of all the Philippines at the time of the flowering of totalitarianism, experiencing all the conceivable problems of the then society - from the coming to power of young revolutionaries to the beginning of mass terror, from universal interrelated conflict to the strictly familiar themes of internal emigration and gaining higher education - one way or another rhymes with literary heroes, first of all with the characters of the Soviet epics "The Quiet Don" or "Shadows disappear at noon", even the heroes themselves are identical with them: quite specific people of work, with their umbilical umbility and ideological differences from the ground - they reject any ideological sense of freedom. But it is also temporary, if this peaceful life is invaded by forces from outside: the conditional village is powerless before more than a concrete city, and the family will begin to disintegrate, evolving in the order of regression. Betraying the ideals of ancestors, perishing or disappearing without a trace at the will of the state, dissolving their personal integrity in the acid of large and small temptations, insignificant and enormous sins - while experiencing an inevitable sense of non-presence. The main problem of all the heroes of Diaz, and in The Evolution of the Filipino Family this is most clearly manifested, is their inability, in their inability, even at the cost of their own skin, to rise above the chaos of the newly created world and come to at least some semblance of a hard-won rebellion. The little man Love Diaz is a stoic, untouchable soldier of a dying old life, deserting. A tin soldier of bloody silence, unable to protect his mother - and the film then broadcasts including the confrontation between the traditional Filipino matriarchy and the brutal paternalism of Marcos and his rabid oprichniki. A doomed confrontation, because worse than the inability to fight can only be a cozy conformism and hibernation, lasting until the vile past, which must be remembered, does not wear off at all.