Young Mexican writer-director Carlos Reygadas remains, even after three films, a rather large puzzle—and a hotly controversial one at that. He says he left his lawyer-diplomat career after viewing films by Andrei Tarkovsky, the great Russian mystic filmmaker (Andrei Rublev), and he also claims the hefty influence of France's arch-Catholic Robert Bresson (The Diary of a Country Priest, The Pickpocket), the fellow who, more than anyone else, put on the cinematic map "transcendental style in film," as Paul Schrader titled it for his classic book. That bodes well for both seriousness and style, unless taken too far, and for that, an over-the-top artsiness, Reygadas has gotten huge flack. In one sequence he may well deliver long splendorous takes of a numinous nature, enough to make the jaded gasp and kneel right there in the theater. And in the next, well, porn—meaning fully graphic sexual display, stark and transgressive, especially in its lack of eroticism.
If that were not discombobulating enough, his most recent film, Silent Light, co-winner of the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2007, tells with elegant respect the story of a Mexican Mennonite couple plagued by the husband's long-running love affair with another Mennonite woman (acted by non-professionals, Mennonites playing Mennonites). Predictable Reygadas is not, even for his hip art house acolytes, of whom there are plenty.
Whatever Reygadas' excesses in his first two films, Japón (2002) and Battle in Heaven (2005), Silent Light delivers a restrained story, sequential and understandable from start to finish, though the ending delivers a first-class jolt of amazement and character motivation, at least in part, stays puzzling throughout.
Here, in the most conventional of Reygadas' films, we mostly watch these unconventional people quietly living, seemingly contentedly, their very ordinary farm life. There is, as always, a rub, the broken part, and in this case it is Johan (Cornelio Wall), husband and father of six, who finds himself and his loving wife Esther (Canadian novelist Miriam Toews), whom he loves in return, entangled with another Mennonite woman, Marianne (Maria Pankratz), who runs a coffee shop in town. While the affair is problematic enough, something with which Johan struggles, even at one point consulting his father (played by the actor's own father, Peter Wall), he aggravates matters still further by keeping his wife informed of the state of both his inclinations and assignations. And this goes on season after season. We cannot decide whether Johan is witless or cruel, for his stoic Esther quietly endures, though harboring vast quantities of wrenching pain. Here Reygadas takes a lesson from the late Ingmar Bergman, who could charge the most mundane setting—a small room with a ticking clock, say—with explosive emotional force.
This strange tale is complicated, first, by the use of non-professional actors, a standard practice for Reygadas, and second, by a directorial nod toward Bresson, who told his non-pros not to act but to perform their roles and lines unaffectedly. Bresson posited that emotional intensity diverted viewers' attention from the larger trajectories of plot that reveal the architecture of the means by which grace emerges. Character portrayal thus has an opaqueness about it, a lack of expressivity in the absence of non-verbal clues that signal subjective mood and idea. The opening sequence of Silent Light ends with Johan sitting alone at the kitchen table wracked with tears. Upset he is, clearly, but whether that emerges from grief, confusion, guilt, or whatever is unclear, especially in what follows, and so it pretty much remains from start to finish. This can prove maddening, as it does in Battle in Heaven, but also, when done well, amply enticing, prodding viewers to ponder the mysteries of the soul and its embodiedness, and especially the depths that lie beyond expression, in words or otherwise. So it is, then, difficult to discern what Johan thinks he's up to in this protracted confessional triangle, both women at different points even commiserating with Johan on the pain each of them (but, strangely, not Johan) must cause the other. And we thought only Woody Allen's New Yorkers behaved this way.
We bother to keep watching because we're curious about the lives of what seem decent, though peculiar, people, and because, more so, Reygadas displays the whole of his tale within an effulgent, circumambient radiance whose quiet majesty seems to bestow meaningfulness of some kind on all that happens. Call it, if you wish, the loving eye of God, which goes everywhere, attending and transfiguring, even into dankest corners of woe and evil. What stood out, remarkably, in Reygadas' first film, Japón, was his camera work, even though that was done in 16 millimeter adapted to a very grainy widescreen. Throughout a somewhat cryptic, disjointed narrative, the camera glides and watches, always relishing what it sees. In Silent Light, the camera is pretty much stationary, but the marvel of light, landscape, and people is all the more entrancing for that. The long rhapsodic opening shot of the sun rising over the farms of Chihuahua sounds sure-to-be draggy, clichéd, and artsy, but in fact, it's quite the opposite: it dazzles, as more than a few jaded reviewers have admitted. The same is true for the long scene in which Johan and family bathe and swim about in an irrigation sluice. And throughout, a purity and whiteness of light in which there is hardly shadow at all adorns people, young and aged alike—especially near the end, as they all sit in funeral vigil.
For Reygadas, that arresting, transfiguring light falls on everything and everyone, and especially on the ordinary and the unlovely. Very ordinary-looking people inhabit his films. The married couple in Battle in Heaven—one portly, the other morbidly obese—parade nude and make love, minutely inspected by Reygadas' go-everywhere camera, and none of it, even in their love-making, panders. So also with the ancient Ascen in Japón, eighty if she's a day, her face a map of wrinkles upon creases; she too appears naked when giving herself to a younger man (that film is an amped-up retelling of Solzhenitsyn's luminous short story "Matryona's Home"). Nor does the mistress Marianne in Silent Light come close to any notion of Hollywood prettiness, and when we do meet her, the unprettiness, at least in conventional terms, comes as a jolt, so inured are we to axioms of attractiveness, and, lo, how little we understand of people and souls.
To see the world this way, as if through a pair of Vermeer-tinged eyeglasses, is, frankly, startling. Perhaps this is Reygadas' foremost gift: his "eye," his luminous apprehension of the physical world. Whether it be the stolid, intractable fleshliness of humanity in Battle in Heaven, or here, among the Mennonites in Mexico, the palpable radiance of the sun on the high plains of Chihuahua and of the plain people in the plain, white interiors of their simple farmhouses, Reygadas imbues the full amplitude of being with just enough "whatever" to inspire awe—what he calls "contemplation." And he does this without recourse to the cheesy devices that Hollywood uses to signal the portentous.
Reygadas seems fully aware of what he's after, confessing in an interview, "In reality, I do not believe in miracles, but I think reality is a miracle." So when the "wow" of the conclusion does come round, it seems a logical extension of the irreducible glory already contained in every sort of thing. Near the end, Marianne tells Johan that "peace is stronger than love," at least of the romantic sort, and it is the fullness of peace, wrought by agapic love, that in the end accomplishes all. Indeed, that old Mennonite banner of peace seems to win the day, celebrating the quiet, grateful heart over the psycho-blitzes of passion and romance. In all of this, loss is perhaps the severest teacher. Reygadas cops his ending from a famous film by a famous Danish filmmaker, though he says his point is different. And so it is.
With Silent Light Reygadas has come to look like the real thing, a filmmaker of enormous visual talent who has something to say, though he tends to scorn the necessity of stories. One reason he left Europe, he says, was that he found it insensible spiritually, and he adds that, while for a long time he wanted to be an atheist because it was cool, he finally couldn't pull it off. He's beginning to sound very much like an orthodox Catholic, talking about love, sacrifice, redemption, and God's own cross-dying. And there's also that profound wonder and reverence for all that is. Indeed, he seems all of a piece, displaying in breathtaking fullness the gift of what Esther at one point calls "the pure feeling of being alive" and the coming of Light itself—all of that, to borrow from Emily Dickinson, a knowledge "Too bright for our infirm delight." Indeed, with "Truth's superb surprise," Reygadas does "dazzle gradually," but dazzle he does, opening eyes and, just maybe, a soul or two.
Roy Anker is professor of English at Calvin College. He is the author of Catching Light: Looking for God in the Movies (Eerdmans).
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