Tuesday 18 December 2007

silent light (dir. reygadas)

In Santa Cruz, Bolivia, after a night on the Tren del Muerte, there were Mennonites wandering the streets, looking like something out of an Edward Hopper painting, with their dungarees and wispy beards. They seemed exotic within the context of their exotic locale, and oblivious to this exoticism, as they presumably were.

Silent Light deals with a husband in a Mennonite community who's conducting an affair, and grappling with the consequences of this. It's a film set in Mexico, even though almost all of the dialogue is in the curious German spoken by the community. There's a remarkable moment when Johan, the adulterous husband (a dead ringer for the art critic Robert Hughes), hears a song being played in Spanish on the radio, and starts singing along. At another point his wife brings tacos to the workers in the field. When his wife collapses at the road side a couple of Mexican truckers stop to help. But by and large the film is set in a world of its own, beneath the great rolling sky and the starry night.

This sense of an isolated world within the world must have appealed to Reygadas. The film opens and closes with time lapse sequences of dawn and dusk. It wells up out of the darkness of night, before retreating back there at the close. This gives the film a biblical, elemental quality, which frames the devout Mennonite community Johan belongs to. He has been lead astray, but he is also genuinely in love with Marianne (played with remarkable placidity by Maria Pankratz). He doesn't know if this development in his life has been brought about by God or the devil. Reygadas presents him as a good man in the thrall of greater powers. His father, a preacher, tells him that he would not be in his shoes for anything in the world, and yet he is also envious of him. Later, when the consequences of his actions become clear, Johan's father tells him he cannot hold himself responsible - this has all been ordained.

Underpinning the film's narrative is a latent humanism. None of the characters are unsympathetic, neither the adulterer, his mistress, nor the wife. The film resolutely avoids melodramatic plot developments. (At one point Johan and Marianne sleep together. Johan has left his children with a man in a van. As he approaches the van, looking for them, we fear the worst. But they are fine, laughing in the van, listening to Jacques Brel.) In the end, the plot finds its resolution in an other-worldly twist, which could be seen as evangelical, or magic realism, or both. People are likely to find themselves in situations which are beyond their expectation or rational understanding. And there's not much one can do in that case but trust in God, or fate.

The film's relentlessly slow pace re-affirms this message. Reygadas is never afraid to let the camera linger. He will film an open doorway, with the interior nothing but blackness, and slowly pan in until an image is revealed beyond the darkness. There are things there to be seen, but we need to learn to have the patience to observe them. Our expectations of rapid solutions to vast problems (such as the reason for an affair, or the cause of death, or the existence of God) is presented as naive. Reygadas appears to be encouraging us how to learn how to see oncemore, with new eyes. We stare at a screen and see only darkness. Slowly glimmers of light appear. These give way to the subtle forms of the world, revealed with the rising of the sun. Finally we, the audience, know what we're looking at, and everything is clear.

Cinema, the exercise of training our eyes on a screen lit by silent light, gives us the opportunity to do this. To learn how to look at the world as though it has been made anew.

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