It took a few days to process Reygadas’ second film, which provoked much debate in the Fénix bar on a Saturday night before the world changed. Debate focussed as I recall on the breach between Reygadas’ undeniable distinctiveness as a filmmaker as against the coherence of the story his film was setting out to tell. On the one hand, it’s not often that I feel so baffled by a film’s plot. Who’s kidnapping who? Why is the boss’s daughter shagging the driver/ odd-job-man? Why does he do what he does (to refrain from a spoiler). Who the hell is that little police chief and whose side is he on? Not to mention the family that get out of the car in the posh neighbourhood. However, even as I write these questions, I realise that this scene is a mirror image of the quite brilliant scene in the petrol station when an entire indigenous family, at least 20 of them (including Magdalena Flores from Japón) emerge from a car, one by one. This is one of many remarkable scenes in the film, including the march of the penitents. In an ordinary narrative film, the hook that keeps you watching is wanting got know what is going to happen next. In a Reygadas film, the hook is what you’re going to see next. Sometimes the two overlap, but there’s a sly difference. Narrative is normally primary; with Reygadas it’s secondary. We’re closer to the territory of Cocteau or Parajanov. The tension between a cinema of the image and a cinema of the literary is so strong in Reygadas’ work. It makes for an absorbing dialectic.
No comments:
Post a Comment