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January 7, 2009
Silent Light is open
As of today, there's only one movie in theaters worth seeing: Carlos Reygadas' Silent Light, rescued by Palisades from the Tartan library, is opening for a two-week run at the Film Forum today.
"I’ve seen Silent Light three times — it had its premiere at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival — and find it more pleasurable and touching with each viewing. After having wowed and appalled international audiences with bravura technique in his first feature, “Japón” (2002), and assaultive provocations in his second, Battle in Heaven (2005), which opens with the kind of sexual encounter that keeps nunneries in business, Mr. Reygadas has quietly altered his visual style to brilliant and meaningful effect. His silky camera movements and harmoniously balanced widescreen compositions still enthrall, but he now comes across as less committed to his own virtuosity and more invested in finding images — of children bathing, trees rustling, clouds passing — that offer a truer sense of the world than is found in melodramatic bloodletting."
And, once more, my own, as yet to be followed up on:
"In literal terms, of course, heaven is just the glorious skies of the northern Mexican countryside, and its weight is simply the conscience of the characters who move stoically against them. But there seems to be some sort of divinity present in both, and to say that it is merely a trick of the camera isn’t to belittle it; one of Reygadas’ greatest achievements is that he stitches his supremely human narrative together with imagery that’s possessed with a preternatural grace. Perhaps the lens itself represents a divine perspective. If so, Reygadas has reappropriated and repurposed the trope of the God’s-eye-view, which in traditional cinematic terms refers to a vantage point from high above, looking down on the drama and the characters. Here, God is on the ground, in the dirt. Looking up, looking straight ahead."
And Karina Longworth's, which is marvelously graceful in a completely different way:
"Ultimately, the words that serve as the most compelling evidence as to why you should see this “fucking Mennonite movie,” come from the fucking Mennonite movie’s own script. When Johan confesses to Zacharias that he’s gone back to Marianne even after swearing he’d quit her, Zacharias tries to convince his friend that maybe things aren’t so bad, that maybe Johan’s feelings are “based in something sacred…even if we don’t understand it.” Soon after, Johan temporarily gives himself over to the giddy high of his obsession with Marianne: he dances into his pick-up truck, and literally drives circles around his friend in glee, before speeding off to one of the most romantically rendered adulterous kisses in recent movie memory. In these brief moments, Johan is liberated to not understand what’s happening to him or inside him or to the people around him, while Reygadas telegraphs that experience directly to the viewer. Silent Light is a film dedicated to making the incomprehensible tangible, visible, even half-knowable. And that’s why you should go see a movie that’s in fucking Mennonite."
Amen.
Posted by David Lowery at January 7, 2009 2:04 AM