There’s a strange magic to Reygadas’ film making. What is this magic? Firstly there’s a pursuit of the elemental. Cinema is about light and Reygadas reveres light. It’s also about relationships, human or other and he is one of the most fearless investigators of what that means. One of the things it means is being prepared to embrace images that others might find ridiculous. Masturbation, copulating horses, unsexy sex. On the page this seems like it could be bad taste, but Reygadas is prepared to run that risk if it takes us further into the complex avenues of his mind. This kind of material has long been explored in literature, from Ovid to Chaucer to Donne to Bataille, and many more, but the image is a hard taskmaster and the line between what’s considered tasteful and what crosses the line is a visceral one. Japón is a film about an artist’s search for some kind of redemption. Contemplating suicide for reasons that are never clear, an artist comes to the reclusive home of Ascen, an elderly woman. There, he becomes embroiled in the village politics, as her nephew, recently released from prison is trying to take over her home. The artist finds a cause which gives him some reason to live. It’s a doomed cause, but even so his relationship with unlikely bedfellow, Ascen, offers each of them some kind of strange succour. The film is unwieldy, awkward, but remorselessly brilliant all the same. Reygadas is not afraid to stare into the abyss and ask himself, his characters and the audience, if there’s anything worth fighting for. Perhaps, his films suggest, there might be.
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