Mexico Or Manitoba? | The women of Silent Light look as though they were plucked straight from the Canadian prairie... and one of them was!

SILENT LIGHT

Directed by Carlos Reygadas. Starring Cornelio Wall, Miriam Toews, Maria Pankratz. Metro Cinema (Zeidler Hall, The Citadel). July 18, 20-24.
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Mexican cinema is experiencing a renaissance, so the conventional wisdom proclaims, and as proof, journalists (without apparently noticing the irony) point to the very directors who have crossed over most successfully into Hollywood, the so-called “Three Amigos”: Guillermo del Toro, whose Hellboy II is currently playing in theatres and who’ll be directing a couple of movies based on The Hobbit for producer Peter Jackson; Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárritu, who enlisted stars like Brad Pitt and Sean Penn to star in his Oscar-nominated films Babel and 21 Grams; and Alfonso Cuarón, whose Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is commonly regarded as the best of the Potter series.

I have no idea if Carlos Reygadas is an amigo of any of these guys or not, and I certainly can’t imagine a Hollywood studio entrusting him with their latest tentpole comic-book franchise (one glimpse of the graphic opening scene of Battle in Heaven, in which a young woman tearfully performs oral sex on a potbellied, unattractive middle-aged man, would definitely put the kibosh on any chances of Reygadas directing X-Men 4), but there’s a formal rigour and a remarkable visual beauty to Reygadas’ work that is more remarkable than all the latex beasties of Hellboy II put together.

Just take the two amazing sequences that open Reygadas’ latest film, Silent Light, for instance. In the first, Reygadas’ camera begins by gazing up at a pitch-black nighttime sky somewhere in rural Mexico. Slowly, stars emerge, while the camera pans down toward the horizon, the sky lightening just enough for us to make out a pair of trees. And as the camera slowly moves past the trees, still in the same unbroken shot, the blackness is replaced by the brilliant, breathtaking orange of the sunrise. In the second sequence, we watch a Mennonite family—part of a small enclave of German-speaking Mennonite farmers near Chihuahua—having breakfast in their immaculate kitchen; the scene would seem warm and contented if it weren’t for the austerity of Reygadas’ images and the incessant ticking of the clock, marking off every second. Soon, the wife and the children clear out, leaving the father, Johan, alone at the table. He sits there for a long while, and then breaks helplessly into a fit of tears.

We gradually learn the source of Johan’s unhappiness: despite his deep religious faith, he has been cheating on his wife Esther with another Mennonite woman named Marianne. Johan genuinely loves both women, and interestingly, no one in the community (where Johan’s situation is apparently something of an open secret), not even his father, seems to regard the split in his affections as a paradox or an impossibility. Johan may be committing a sin, but if he’s sinful, he’s fallen prey to the weakness that all humans are subject to—the question now becomes how he will reconcile his love for his wife with the desires of his heart.

It’s a challenging film—slow-paced, enigmatic, sometimes a little ponderous, and very sketchy on the details of what exactly it is that makes Johan say Marianne is a more compatible partner for him than Esther—but its combination of sexual passion (especially as embodied by the paunchy Cornelio Wall, who plays Johan) and Protestant sombreness feels entirely fresh and novel, especially when combined with the luminous widescreen cinematography of Alexis Zabe (previously best-known for his black-and-white photography on the wonderful low-budget Mexican comedy Duck Season). Zabe’s images have a remarkable clarity: the wide-open landscapes are drenched in sunlight, but not oppressively so—the sun seems impossible to hide from, but its warmth is comforting somehow, even forgiving.

And forgiveness turns out to be the film’s main theme: in the climactic scene, which takes place in a room as astonishingly clean and white as the prison from THX 1138, Reygadas gets the audience to believe in a miracle, and he achieves the effect in the simplest manner possible. In another movie, it might seem like hooey, but here I found myself hardly blinking an eye.

One final note: most of the reviews I’ve seen of this film from Cannes and the New York Film Festival make note of its “non-professional cast.” These reviews, most by American critics, seem unaware that Miriam Toews, who plays the pivotal role of Esther, is a celebrated, award-winning Canadian writer who has contributed pieces to the radio program This American Life. True, this is her first film role, but she’s hardly the simple, unsophisticated Mennonite woman plucked from obscurity that many critics seem to believe her to be. It makes me wonder whether Cornelio Wall also has a background in the arts. Not that this diminishes Reygadas’ achievement: on the contrary, it makes the film’s illusion of artlessness all the more impressive.