battle in heaven (w&d reygadas)

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.

japón (w&d reygadas)

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. 

our time (d reygadas)

It feels as though half the city is participating in the Montevideo film festival with the cinemas constantly full. The slew of films permits one to take in a range of cinema you would never normally process in such a short period of time. An inevitable fatigue begins to set in. Many of the films are over two hours long. Almost all have something challenging about them. These aren’t popcorn movies. 

It requires something remarkable to stand out, to grab the viewer with a sense of astonishment and wonder. Our Time achieves this. The opening hour is as good as anything you could hope to see in a cinema. The camera roves around a country estate near Mexico City. There are four groups of people. Young children, adolescents, servants and adults. Each one is its own defined unit, but the edges wash and overlap. There’s a sense of inhabiting a moment, which is extraordinary. (It made me think, obliquely of Virgina Woolf and the almost cubist quality of her writing.) Gradually the threads of a narrative become discernible, but there is no rush: the primary objective is to immerse us completely in this world with all of its layers and subtleties. 

Then, the film becomes extraordinary for other reasons altogether. The narrative kicks in, a narrative which recounts the gradual decay of the protagonists’ marriage. This is told in raw, even embarrassing detail. The husband’s jealousy transformed into a grotesque voyeurism, as he becomes a Shakespearian cuckolded fool, wilfully participating in his own fall from grace. The twists and turns of the marital collapse are traced with an excessive, masochistic glee. It is as close to watching the reality of a break-up as one imagines cinema could get. A sloppy, ineditable narrative which barrels all over the shop, dragging on, remorseless, driven by a logic that seems greater than the will of the two protagonists. Which is very much a mirror to the messiness of a break-up in real life; because break-ups are never clean, they always involve pain and humiliation in one guise or another.

When one then realises that these protagonists are portrayed by none other than the filmmaker and his wife, Natalia López, it adds a jaw-dropping layer of complexity to the experience. What kind of crazy fool would dare to expose him or herself in this fashion? Or are they not really exposing themselves at all? Where does life and end art begin, or vice versa? Is this an act of courage or stupidity? Our Time is one of the most insane pieces of filmmaking ever made. It’s like Charlie Kaufmann stoked on cocaine and tequila. A rambling, chaotic brilliant dark night of a movie that is unlike anything else you will ever sit through. 

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.