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Carlos Reygadas – Stellet licht / Silent Light / Luz silenciosa (2007)

Posted By: newland

Date: 9 May 2010 09:38:23

Johan and Esther have been married for years, and live with their children in a Mennonite community from the north of Mexico. Against the law of God and man, Johan falls in love with another woman.

I was amazed by Silent Light – the setting, the language, the delicacy of the interactions between the people on screen, the drama of redemption. And most of all by Carlos Reygadas's extraordinarily rich sense of cinema, evident in every frame. A surprising picture, and a very moving one as well. — Martin Scorsese

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.
Though “Silent Light” owes a strong, self-conscious debt to Carl Theodor Dreyer's eccentric 1955 masterpiece, “Ordet,” another story about faith and love, the new film also recalls some of the more pastoral passages in Terrence Malick's “New World,” yet another tour de force about love and faith (in other people, in the cinematic image). In one of the loveliest sequences in “Silent Light,” Johan's family idles in and around a creek that serves as its communal bathing pool. As some of the children drift languorously in the water, their bodies modestly covered and blond heads floating like lilies, the parents tenderly wash the younger ones, scrubbing one child's head with soap, massaging another's feet with oil and exchanging small endearments and instructions.
It's a gorgeous, innocent yet sensuous scene, a glimpse of the prelapsarian with a hint of the viper that Mr. Reygadas closes with a shot of a pink blossom, an image that begins as a blur of color and gently comes into focus. He holds on the image a few beats — much as he often does — not only because, I imagine, he wants us to appreciate its metaphoric resonance but also because he wants us to see its glory. There are a handful of ways to understand the meaning of “Silent Light,” words that I read as an allusion to love, but this is also very much a film about that ordinary light that sometimes still passes through a camera and creates something divine. — Manohla Dargis, The New York Times

Reygadas communicates in a superbly controlled cinematic idiom and conjures up a hypnotic address to the viewer. And he creates a fascinating context for a powerful exchange between Johan and his lover Marianne after they have made love for the last time. Peace is stronger than love, he tells her, and after they have given each other up, "there will be pain, then peace, then such happiness as we have never known". In the midst of his agony, Johan asks his lover, and us, to imagine a future after their love has ceased, and to have faith in it.
I'm not sure I can say quite the same thing about the ambiguously visionary miracle that Reygadas creates for the end of his movie, a miracle that occurs as a result of a form of spiritual meeting between the women: a meeting that is very much the work of a male director.
But like the rest of the film it has a terrific kind of self-possession, and shows a ringing confidence in the luminous strange world it inhabits.
The sheer ambition of Reygadas has always been startling; now he is developing a consistency, a maturity and a rigorous visual sense to match it. There are things here not to like and not to believe in, sure. But what a change from the mediocre and derivative stuff on offer elsewhere. Here is cinema to wonder at, to argue about. — Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian (UK)

In the hushed Mennonite adultery drama Silent Light, the shots drag on and on and the nonactors internalize everything. The Mexican director Carlos Reygadas is attempting to induce a state of transcendence, and his approach sometimes works, because what's onscreen is so ponderously strange, and because you have to surrender to the movie to keep from going buggy. Reygadas is an art-house hot dog, a festival darling, and a brute—although this film is Brief Encounter compared to his last film, Battle in Heaven, which opened with an expressionless fat man being fellated in grisly close-up. Here, the director keeps you at arm's length for so long that when the characters finally express themselves (maybe an hour and 45 minutes in), the impact is thunderous. See pious, plain, stoic Mennonites emote. — David Edelstein, New York magazine

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