In Carlos Reygadas's films, we see an attempt to break away from convention and instead strive for a more authentic mode of representation. We see characters who frequently are unable to fully express their emotions and, instead, greet us with blank faces that attest to moments of despair and suffering. This is the case with the film "Battle in Heaven", the last of the trio of Reygadas films that I have recently seen.
The film is situated in the capital of Mexico, that ennervating universe of desires and conflicts and bottled energy that encapsulates the soul of an entire nation. Having never been to that city, it exerts a strange attraction as well as repulsion for me. It does, indeed, present a squalid yet modern, cosmopolitan yet cut-throat, intimate and yet alienating face that seems to adhere as well to any major metropolitan area, but in this case is accentuated by the fact that it is perceived as the ideological center of a wounded culture.
Tenochtitlan has not recovered from the historical traumas of the past, and as such, in my conception, it is permeated with an at times suffocating historical air that carries with it a strong emotional connection. If the conception of the city is that of a space where people can reconfigure themselves to assume new identities and seek a new destiny, such as we imagine is the impulse behind so many relocations from the countryside to the city, then this instance is different. Mexico City is not quite New York, and instead it seems as if the voyage carries with it a different ideological significance, that of a return to the heartland and to the essence of being, one that is not to be found in the provinces that are so far away.
This conception underlies the movie, and is heralded by the ceremony of the lifting of the flag that takes place in the symbolic heart of the city, the Plaza de Tlaltelolco, the area that was once the capital of the Aztec empire. The protagonist, Miguel, is a member of the guard that is tasked with the ceremony, and this can't help but evoke a sense of the suffering and roiling chaos that accompanies this particular city, with its own particular history that involves conquest and a desperate struggle for survival. It will also involve a quest for redemption.
Miguel is a man who is suffering, and this suffering is expressed in a form that is typical in Reygadas's movies, in a shell-shocked expression that precisely avoids the hystrionics of telenovelas. While melodrama is predicated on given patent expression to that which is hidden, on revealing what Peter Brooks called the "moral occult", here we have characters who instead seem unable to find an outlet for the expression of their internal states, and instead struggle to find a medium for expression. We have the protagonist in the movie "Japon", who limps his way to a barren canyon community in a desperate journey which is supposed to end in suicide, and we have the Mennonite farmer Juan in "Stille Licht" who sits passively at home, unable to bear making the break that will involve rupturing his family. These characters seem awkward and hesitant while they ponder the consequences of their decisions, and that lends to these films a languid air that is filled by tortuous pauses and stationary intervals in which the characters spend many minutes gazing at the world, haunting so to speak their circumstances and their particular personas who find themselves so bereft.
In this instance, Miguel is haunted by guilt. As the movie proceeds, we find out that he and his wife have committed a crime, having kidnapped the child of a friend with the intention of demanding a ransom, only to have the child (a baby, in reality) die while in their custody. These characters, as is the case with so many other characters in Reygadas's films, carry an uneasy secret, and Miguel in particular seems unable to fully recover from this event.
It is an unfortunate reality that life in many major Latin American cities is plagued with many dangers, and kidnapping has becoming an activity that has become endemic to the region. It is justified in so many ways that recall, at times, an attempt to assert a form of political autonomy by disappropriating outsiders of their economic assets, but it is also a crime that hits closer to home, and in this instance, assumes the contours of a betrayal. Their neighbor is a poor woman such as themselves, a widow after all, and one is left to speculate if her husband might not have been a member of the security forces who might have lost his life while carrying out his duties, thus generating a settlement that was coveted by Miguel and his wife. It is a morally reprehensible act, and the two culprits seem to recognize and lament what has happened, although the man is unable to resolve it as easily as his accomplice.
What complicates the matter is that Miguel is a driver/employee for Ana, a cosmopolitan, European-looking woman who is the subject of his obsession. He yearns to achieve a degree of intimacy with her that will somehow resolve his conflict, and this yearning can't help but assume another symbolic meaning by virtue of the racial and ethnic differences between them. He is a stocky middle-aged mestizo who is not handsome, and she is a beatiful, young and wealthy woman who seems not to carry any of the emotional burden that accrues to the underclass, and instead lives a life of idle excitement. She works, after all, as a boutique prostitute, not out of necessity but out of a need for cheap thrills.
She is the antithesis of the Virgen de Guadalupe, a licentious, white, young and seemingly vacuous woman who obsesses him with the vision of a person who has feels no guilt and as such, would seem to be impervious to pain. And it is as a consequence of this perception that we can imagine that his attraction devolves into a form of resentment and hatred that will lead him to commit an act of violence against her, one that will do little to lift the burden under which he is struggling. Sex does not necessarily convey intimacy, and the numerous sex acts that are portrayed in graphic detail in this film, both with Ana as well as with his wife, seem to accentuate his isolation and to indicate the degree to which he has walled himself off.
In the end, after deciding to turn himself in, he commits another act of violence that catalyzes a true process of repentance. With all the subterfuges that are available to humanity, he is unable to hide his fear and guilt, and in this way breaks through to attain a degree of authenticity that would seem to have eluded him before. He is a murderer, in the first instance by accident and in the second by intention, and he now becomes a penitent, ironically following the advice of his wife who had asked him to join a procession earlier to help ease his guilt. But his repentence is not to be an uplifting experience, and with any repentence there must needs be an act of punishment that will help to lift the burden. And such is the case in this film.
The film is filled with many awkward moments and with long and languid takes that exert at times a hypnotic effect, but at others seem almost amateurish. There is little of the sustained break-neck pace of other films such as one finds in the classic from earlier this decade, "Amores perros". Reygadas instead opts for silences and intervals of passivity, and we have many instances in which the characters look at each other without saying anything, as was the case with his other films. This technique of silences and absence suggests a vacuum that seems to point out the way in which the modern sensibility has become isolated from his or her surroundings, as if silence were tantamount to a barrier that everyone carries around with them. It is suggestive, but it also seem a little pretentious at times precisely because it mutes the cacophony of modern life, a cacophony that is pervasive and jarring and disturbing but also, at times, vibrant with the promise of life.
Eternal Observer -- ORomero (c) 2011
Copyrights ORomero 2011
Copyrights ORomero 2011
No comments:
Post a Comment