Carlos Reygadas' "Battle in Heaven"

I think it gets a "general' release the following week.

Good to hear you liked it!

haha

There's hope for me yet.

Manohla Dargis in the Times effusively praises Reygadas' eye, but questions some third-act violence and the lead female being a rich whore, which are the most dubious elements to me as well.

So Battle In Heaven is opening LA/NY this weekend and selected US markets over the next month. The SF preview is SOLD. OUT. He's already working on his next film, which he described as "a romantic love story".

I need to talk to someone about Carlos Reygadas' "Battle in Heaven." I've needed to ever since walking out of that cramped screening room on Seventh Avenue where creepy people like me watch movies in the middle of the day. Is that someone you?

Here's the problem, as I see it: Reygadas is already a famous figure within the tiny, insular world of international art film, which means both that a fair number of smart if unbelievably pretentious people are drawn to his work and that hardly any regular moviegoers have the faintest idea who he is. This creates currents of mini-hype and mini-backlash that are difficult to avoid, although I have tried. Considering his work independent of that context is especially hard, because almost nobody outside that context will see it (unless it gets sold in porn outlets by accident).

Reygadas is a 34-year-old former lawyer from Mexico City who makes ambitious, arty dramas with nonprofessional actors, where plot is mostly beside the point, real settings and situations are emphasized and the camerawork is both intimate and meticulous. In his first film, "Japón" (which I haven't seen), as well as in this one, the actors engage in real sex for the camera. Yes, I know, this is a trope or whatever in current cinema. I'm sick of talking about it. Reygadas has been constantly compared to Andrei Tarkovsky, Abbas Kiarostami or Michelangelo Antonioni by his admirers, which is kind of a stretch after two films, I have to say.

Maybe it's just me, but I don't remember the scene in "Andrei Rublev" or "Through the Olive Trees" where a beautiful hippie-punk chick with seashells in her hair is on her knees blowing a big fat ugly guy in an unfurnished room. OK, maybe that's a cheap shot and maybe it's not. But that is how "Battle in Heaven" begins (and ends), and it sort of summarizes the general, er, thrust of the picture.

Reygadas is a masterfully accomplished image-maker even at this early stage -- quite seriously, those scenes are beautifully shot -- and I can see where the comparisons come from. He wants to jolt us awake with virtually every frame of his film, to make us see his distinctly unglamorous characters anew with a sense of wonder, as if they had just been born or were just about to meet their God. (Several people do die in this movie -- and unlike the sex, that's presumably cinematic illusion.) I think all of that is a defensive and maybe a laudable artistic goal, and there are mysteriously powerful shots in "Battle in Heaven" that outdo anything I've seen in the last year.

Traffic flows along the Periférico, the big freeway encircling Mexico City. Troops raise the flag outside the National Palace in predawn darkness. A guy takes his car to a gas station where the proprietor is playing symphonic music, inappropriately loudly. During a sex scene (not the one already mentioned), Reygadas' camera wanders out the window into the surrounding middle-class neighborhood, observing a couple of guys putting up a satellite antenna, some kids playing soccer, and a batch of shampoo bottles arrayed precariously on an adjoining window ledge. I feel like I could watch that stuff all day.

Fortunately or not, "Battle in Heaven" also has a halfhearted plot involving a poor couple who kidnap a baby with disastrous results. The husband in this couple (Marcos Hernández) is also the blow-job recipient in the first scene. He's the chauffeur to a government official, while the lovely, seashell-clad provider (Anapola Mushkadiz) is that official's daughter, who moonlights as a hooker for reasons we never learn. The film also has an impenetrable religious subtext, or maybe just text, along with some glancing references to the issue of wealth and class, and some scenes filmed in Mexico City's chaotic subway system, shot to be as full of irritating glare and noise as possible.

I don't think I have a problem with the blow-job scene as such, or with another still more memorable sex act you see in this film. Where I come down, at this point, is feeling that Reygadas is an undeniably important artist hewing his own path, but who is also self-consciously playing to the tastes of a tiny elite audience that craves obscurantism, confrontation and heavy-handed symbolism. Still, I really want you to see this. Then I'll have somebody to talk about it with.

(but I won't be able to make it obviously)

Let me know what you think, it looks great.

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/film/2007/12/carlos_reygadas_my_cinema.html

this fucking guy.

i only saw the first one he did, the kiarostami rip-off.

balls to that. They're not particularly similar.

so, this is pretty impressive. really beautiful at times, but I'm also not sure it really gets past its own cliches. something about naked fat dude laying next to naked hot chick with a god's eye POV struck me as a little pat. among other things. then again, I'll have to think on this one for a bit.

i swear this guy has laboured over and made two films since stillet nacht, neither of which have surfaced and both of which promise to prior to festivals, etc. one about football + one that might be more of a magnum opus that would explain the delay ..?

he's also featured in a forthcoming agnes varda series in which she goes to meet filmmakers.

re: BIH, i could probably watch it again but think i felt it slightly condemned by the way it traveled, how events unfolded and then the last scene in particular. but interesting all the same. have you seen the next one?

yeah that was my next question, whether Silent Light was worth checking out. I assume it is!

yeah a real step up imo. there were some haters but i thought it was p commanding, & cohesive in a way BIH wasn't. i've never seen japon so can't speak for the progression from that.

i saw post tenebras lux this afternoon & can't understand why it got an ambivalent response; it's incredible, & by so far the best thing he's done, for me (okay i haven't seen japon). i remember when wall-e came out, going to see it & expecting it to be practically a cgi bresson movie on account of how hyped its austere first half had got, & i thought this was going to be super abstract, which it isn't; there's a story, &c, all of which roots it in i guess a vaguely social, lucretia-martel-esque territory. there are these warm interior scenes that reminded me of those in denis' l'intrus. apart from that i'm out of reference points. it's just incredibly beautiful & frequently moving & looks, digitally, incredible. reygadas is totally one of the best.

yeah wow this is really something else. just saw it and it hasn't really cohered into anything yet but it leaves a big impression. I am not pondering it in a bar that is surreally playing Pearl Jam's 10 in its entirely and I'm watching basketball.

The sheer overpowering presence of the natural world, even how it sounds, put me in mind of some Faulkner passages I admire--just the wet squirming mass of it all. Was truly awed by the opening scene and beach scene--and in hindsight how they play off the rugby bits is really cool. Strikes me that squaring the rather direct class conflict stuff with the natural and supernatural elements seems pretty bold.

now pondering, of course!

also Hegel via Duchamp hmm tipping your hand much???