CENTURY OF BIRTHING (2011, Lav Diaz, A+30)

 

CENTURY OF BIRTHING (2011, Lav Diaz, A+30)

 

My most favorite scene in the film is the scene of the Poet of the Rain. At first she seems to come out of nowhere. We didn’t know who she is. She just walks past the hero’s house and says something very long. What she says is poetic and seems like a stream of consciousness. After that, the film tells us that she is not a mad woman, but she is a friend of the hero, and she seems to be a well-to-do poet, because the hero wants to borrow money from her.

 

I can’t remember the details of what she says in that scene, and I’m not sure how long that scene is, but it is surely one of my most favorite scenes of all time. I want to screen this scene together with the mad monologue scene in THE ANDECHS FEELING (1974, Herbert Achternbusch, A+30), in which a woman also says something very long in a stream-of-consciousness style.

 

FLORENTINA HUBALDO, CTE (2012, Lav Diaz, A+30) also has a long monologue scene by the heroine near the end, but it is not “mad” like the monologue scenes in CENTURY OF BIRTHING and THE ANDECHS FEELING.

 

In CENTURY OF BIRTHING, I also like the idea that the cult leader may view his cult as a kind of theatre. When he decides to commit suicide, he says something like “the theatre has ended”. It unintentionally reminds me of the ending of the novel VANITY FAIR (1848) by William Makepeace Thackeray, in which every character is revealed as a puppet controlled by a puppetmaster or something like that.