Carlos Reygadas' POST TENEBRAS LUX

So unlike schlump...

Carlos Reygadas' "Battle in Heaven"

I didn't think PTL was the best thing he's done, but it can stand with Silent Light I think. Liked using the kids' ages to orient the chronology. Anyway, demon to beat for the year or decade.

also spoiler: someone singing Neil Young 'worse' than Neil.

ha. it is forever since i saw this, & whenever i've tuned back into the discussion on it i realise how poor my memory of it all is; i've reduced it in my head into the kind of pastoral, to me martel-esque, social strand concerning the guy's homelife, bouncing eleazar, faded t-shirts, everyone emanating tiredness, & am pretty patchy on everything else. a guy (amusingly also called neil young) wrote one of the early dismissals of the movie, citing the it's a dream piano sequence as an exemplar of its bloat & lack of focus, but this is what i remember best of it - this hazy imbalanced home scene, again like something from ordet (not the end), this awkward clutter of personalities held in the same room, moods tangling. kind of holy in the same way that apichatpong makes his tableaux of people fading slowly in the cave in boonmee holy, classically arranged and positioned.

i don't know that i need to go hard in defending this over stellet licht, they're both very fine & do different things. but this to me earns points for just being so multivalent and far-reaching; the various affecting passages of the raw plains in SL, muted like the life they were surrounded by, are the same sort of thing he's reaching for here - just the presence of mexico, the space & social diffusion of what surrounds the family, that he can take a walk & be in this other zone talking about addictions. it just strays so far in a compelling way. i think i read a slant interview in which he seemed totally uninterested in assigning motive of explanation to the montage or loose assemblage of what was shown. it was all just so immediate for me, like you weren't watching the domestic scenes without feeling the weight of having had access to the same people in other zones, or knowing about who else was around. & for all this talk of its diffusion its story, the flatness of its climax, the sort of distant gaze at terrible events, it was just so far-reaching for me, such an aptly circuitous route to just portraying his protagonists comprehensively.

well Japon (seen it yet?) and BiH still trump these last two for me.

I had forgotten til the credits that these were his (small) kids.

Hoberman scoffs "ultimately insipid":

No less than Lars von Trier or Terrence Malick, Reygadas is an admirer of Andrei Tarkovsky (in this case The Mirror) but if Malick sentimentalizes the Russian master’s lyrical pantheism, Reygadas, even more than von Trier, ambivalently travesties Tarkovsky’s at times overweening spirituality.

http://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/897209/carlos-reygadass-post-tenebras-lux-a-hazy-inconsistent

This film.

just took yr head off, eh

I won't write about it because I wasn't taking notes but the quiet and sinister formality of the compositions (allowing Satan perhaps to slip in) is closer to Joe than Martel, I think (I loved BIH with reservations btw).

well of course you weren't taking notes, NO ONE does that during A FILM.

Sure they do. Then they spend ten minutes reading gnarled handwriting scratched over existent text, thanks to writing in the dark and looking at the screen.

pisses me off every time i see that. no wonder ppl liked Wolf of Wall St, they only SAW 90 minutes.

I too expect to also suffer from an inability to handle many tasks at once when I'm over forty.

maybe ADD goes away

few things this self-indulgent; took a lot of work to get through; totally understand why people would boo this at the end. still thinking about it three weeks later.

one thing has to be asked, at risk of turning this into a dogpile of pointless questions about the filmmaker's arbitrary poetic choices, but there's even less online help for this than there was for 'upstream color' so

SPOILER

so the scene where they flash forward to an upper class family gathering / wedding, and you see the kids are 6-8 years older, and then you see the dad (in a ludicrous wig) quoting Tolstoy to his upscale relatives, arguing that you are only happy after you've lost everything. well, after he gets shot later in the film, I took that scene as a promise that he obviously survived the incident. so the ending is very confusing to someone who's been concentrating hard enough to assemble what plot there is to be had in this.

I only watched it once. Did anyone else catch a detail that helps all this cohere? Or jeez louise is it just the point that the head just kind of falls off of the body when it rains don't you see?

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/27/cannes-film-festival-loud-boos-dont-faze-carlos-reygadas/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

Some scenes — like in the sauna where the wife has sex with other people — are there because it’s also about desire. The film is about fantasy, but probably that scene is reality, who knows?

yes, WHO KNOWS

'The Phantom of Liberty' is probably my favorite Bunuel because I love films that make a point of deprogramming your expectations. that film is a blunt hammer and you can't sleep through the experiment; this one is almost dastardly in how silently it sets you up for having major plot points left open. I think I probably love it. I guess what I am asking other viewers of the film is: did I miss an element that reconciles that flash-forward, or is this a film in which absolutely anything goes to the point where the main character may or may not have been killed?

I didn't worry too much about whether this or that thing actually happened; the whole film is a dreamlike brew of memory, guilt, fear, and hope. If pressed, I suppose the death and the flash forward were both in his head, the one a distillation of his fears, the other a more peaceful hope for the future (the nightmarish nature of the first accounting for the weird coda with El Siete in the field).

yeah i was gonna say i was confused as to any sense of chronology as well. the sauna scene felt very much like a "thesis scene" and as such struck me as guide for watching the movie as a whole--in that respect it's quite possible both scenarios are "real" in the sense that they're two sides of the same thing. there's like dualities at work (a dada dialectics, if you will). or something.

schlump to thread, really.

it's funny i've only seen this once, & had to strain to remember the specific scene you mentioned, the overlap. i am gonna be unapologetically apologetic & just surrender to this being kinda just the Way It Is, in this film, i guess because chronologising it seems like kind of a fool's errand - if it doesn't fall under continuity error, a tension is meant to exist by virtue of both being included, & trying to re-narrativise it goes against its maybe-totally-nebulous intentions. i think we had a discussion in the Wolf of Wall Street thread about to what degree everything was Leo's p-o-v, & i guess i feel like, at this stage, as viewers, we're aware enough of the various schemas & constructs involved in watching a film that we don't have to make sense of them outside of their universe, they don't have to map to our rules, & that the sorta object value of watching something that, like your Bunuel flick, tangles us up & loses us is sufficient. i personally loved how judiciously the available narrative unfurled in this film; it's this thin, twisting string, like something from White Material or The Headless Woman, but chose panorama over focus, i think to the effect of feeling broad & messily panoramic like life does. that there's sorta stretched out, awkwardly handled desire & that there's malcontent in the staff & that once you were in another place playing rugby & that occasionally there's this perfect blurry confluence while you die but as your wife is playing Neil Young & the kids aren't paying attention. so i guess the part of me that's apologising for its maybe mismatching narrative tricksiness is just kinda unconcerned with that, because i think it's super successful as an evocative portrait, something that comfortably mirrors us. & to be slightly more direct, i'd be surprised if you missed a kind of Lynchian master key that reconciles the threads, or maybe think that if you needed a narrative clue the surreal nature of the head-pulling scene maybe suggests similar manifest-exaggeration in the discontinuity (i can never get into was it a dream sequence arguments but sure it could represent something imagined or a road not taken).

something that i'd like to nod to here, but can't find the relevant quote for, is another interview i read with Reygadas which expanded on the reception to the film in Mexico, where it was playing in regular theatres & apparently wasn't treated as/called out for being especially avant-garde, sorta obeying that old Cassavetes thing about wanting to screen his films in a working class rather than art context because that's what they were about. i feel like there are a couple of things recently that have made me slightly more sensitive to the culture-in-translation angle in cinema - like obviously in Apichatpong's films, & then more subtly in something like Neighbouring Sounds, where some of the idioms don't translate & leave the dialogue strewn with nuance unconveyed without Portuguese - & i do think that's probably present here, where a perceived deficit in narrative reflects cues we're missing. i'm not trying to be awkward & call anybody a philistine for trying to overlay a narrative on some pretty diffuse material, but at the same time i don't think it eschews narrative or continuity, i think it's just another kind, a different vocab. i also dug CR saying this in the Times piece,

There’s no code — that was the idea from the beginning. I’ve always thought that intelligent viewers don’t need to be led and will follow eventually. Something I find really strange is that the people who saw the film here last night went to school, read books, and I say this not because I’m comparing myself — but think of “The Metamorphosis” by Kafka, which was written almost a hundred years ago. Nobody knows if he really transforms into an insect or not, and there’s no explanation, and if there was an explanation, I’m sure we wouldn’t be reading that book anymore. Why is it that when people read it — or read Joyce, and again, I’m not saying that I’m like Joyce — but why can they read and accept these books, but why do they need explanations when they’re watching films?

btw i haven't finished reading it yet - & it actually was frustrating me slightly for seeming to avoid dipping into the actual matter at hand - but you might like a piece in the new Film Comment about what it means to see, feel semi-aloof from, but remain tangled up in, To The Wonder & Upstream Color, two things the author picked as examples of to me PTL-y, modern flicks with this new diffuse grammar (Upstream did nothing for me but, still).

keith uhlich thinks it's mostly a joke

nice post schlump!

I think if you get along with this type of movie -- or even this type of art -- it's because you're cool the fact that it's sorta working against your attempts to find a code or narrative, a way to tame its strangeness. at the same time, the issue of "meaning" isn't taken off the table but left there impinging.

a critic I read sometimes had a great line about to the wonder: "malick' snot telling you how to feel, he's telling you how he feels." I think that reversal of commodification is something it def has in common with this movie. it's not telling you what it means!

I think the "it's a joke" thing falls right into that. it is and it isn't. I wouldn't be afraid of getting caught with my pants down by taking the movie "seriously," as it were.

i watched this twice in the past two weeks and i think it's the best thing i've seen in a long while. i'll sit by and watch other people write interesting things about it. i will say that trying to find a hard, literal reading on the narrative here just seems futile and point-missing.

i haven't read Keith Uhlich's thing, & vibe with Ryan's suggestion that (~like the film~) it can operate in both registers, but, just at a slight digression from all this, i do think that Film Critic As Naysayer is like ... the most useless thing possible right now. like is anyone doing that well? i guess i like some of Amy Taubin's icy dissents. i think maybe because i am spending even moments glancing at Indiewire reviews of films from Sundance, or coming across dumb old reviews of this film, there's just so much awful, thoughtless writing happening, with this awful ~analytical~ perspective, that films are too long, or too ponderous, or unfocused, somehow these potentially accurate criticisms seem the trademark of film festival attendees sitting down & trying to laser-determine the quality of a film according to its constituent parts. i am such a sucker for the few critics who are like ... on the side of all film being impressionistic visual matter poetry, without being fully involved in a Deleuzian consideration of bodies in space. Reygadas' kind of why pick holes in imaginary montage attitude seems so otm to me.

btw this is the really nice Fernanda Solórzano piece i referred to briefly, upthread,

When the film premiered in Mexico, the reception was not at all like that in Cannes. Reygadas's countrymen usually regard his films as too arty and custom made for the festival circuit. However, the same viewers who felt alienated by the filmmaker's past intellectual ambitions spoke about Post Tenebras Lux with new-found interest. Few of them complained of obscurity.
Such views can be explained by the film's dozens of subtle references to class interactions so complex they might go unnoticed by non-Mexicans. [...]

I think of this film as a portrait of the father, with glimpses of desires, pasts, futures, etc. It could not be a normal narrative of personal development, since he steadfastly refuses to evolve. But honestly, this reading fails completely in making sense of the last parts of the film.

would gladly trade a showing of this for the entirety of sundance

I wish someone had offered me the dough to write about this with the fullness it deserves. I don't like to say "it's a bunch of dreams, visions, whatever strung together," which is why I never formally reviewed it.

i could get lost in reading about it, sure. we are really lucky to have some of the kind of exploded views of things like the tree of life written by kent jones, &c. i remember seeing syndromes and a century and it feeling so rewarding to have so little in common with the responses the people i'd seen it with had.

this is kind of a filler post, until i'm on a computer while near my copy of film comment, but i read more of the vivian sobchack article i mentioned yesterday & it's excellent. she's kind of studying upstream color & to the wonder through the lens of archibald macleish's ars poetica, it's really rich.

&:

I think if you get along with this type of movie -- or even this type of art -- it's because you're cool the fact that it's sorta working against your attempts to find a code or narrative, a way to tame its strangeness. at the same time, the issue of "meaning" isn't taken off the table but left there impinging.

a critic I read sometimes had a great line about to the wonder: "malick' snot telling you how to feel, he's telling you how he feels." I think that reversal of commodification is something it def has in common with this movie. it's not telling you what it means!

yes! & sometimes understanding that is a kind of pre-requisite; there's that line about oscar wilde, that he's not writing about what life is like but what he wishes it was like, &, in the same way, it's maybe useful to go into seeing like a whit stillman movie or something knowing the conditions of the film's universe.

besides the philosophic inquiry, the intense blurring and intermixing of landscape, atmosphere, color, light, and sound in Japón is beautiful, its heightened sense of place reminds me of Weerasethakul’s films

that film and Battle In Heaven are brilliant and original films that introduce us to him