Dir. Carlos Reygadas, France/Mexico/Belgium, 2005, 98 mins, subtitles
Cast: Marcos Hernandez, Anapola Mushkadiz, Bertha Ruiz, David Bornstein
Review by Peter Fraser
Carlos Reygadas, who erupted onto the cinema landscape with Japon and has now made his second feature Battle in Heaven, has a style of filmmaking that at first encounter may seem like a joke with a double punch line. He shuns the conventionally dramatic and au contraire concentrates upon things that market-orientated cinema considers uninteresting or even scandalous. You might be forgiven for thinking that whether you enjoy Battle in Heaven depends upon whether you get the ‘joke’.
In a way you’d be right. While Reygadas is very serious there is nonetheless a puckish sensibility at work and although he’s not really joking, his style may be inaccessible to those unprepared to indulge a spiritual cinema. Reygadas is influenced by the dream-like meditations of Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky and the studied ambiguity of Michelangelo Antonioni. Although as the name of his production company, ‘No Dream Cinema’, emphatically states, Japon and Battle in Heaven should be taken as more than dreams. The opening of Battle in Heaven is perhaps the acid test. A young woman performs – strange phrase – fellatio on a portly middle-aged man. We learn that the woman is Ana (Mushkadiz), a rich-girl prostitute, and that the man is Marcos (Hernandez), her father’s driver. For the moment however we simply know that explicit fellatio is a rarity in mainstream cinema and that it seems to be taking place in some kind of void. Reygadas has been compared to Stanley Kubrick and the metaphysics of 2001: A Space Odyssey is not so far from the pantheism of Battle in Heaven. As I watched Ana pleasure Marcos nothing sprang to mind so much as the wonder instilled by the planetary alignment that forms the transcendent overture to 2001. The question is, do you feel it?
The story is perhaps the least important aspect of the movie. Marcos and his wife (Ruiz) have kidnapped a neighbour’s baby and the baby has died. Marcos confesses to Ana who tells him that he must turn himself in. He decides to do so despite the entreaties of his wife and a further crime sends him on a pilgrimage towards a personal Calvary where he expiates his guilt. Most of the time we’re barely aware of the narrative as Reygadas aggrandises the miniscule, wonders at the infinite, plays with time and space and meditates at length upon otherwise fleeting aural and visual impressions. Moreover, although Marcos has done something terrible he does not show obvious remorse despite the fact that we continually return to his enigmatic eyes, ‘the windows of the soul’.
The film contrasts ritual, as a public way of seeking penance, with spirituality, both more personal and all pervasive. Reygadas abjures the rituals of market-orientated cinema – in which the exaggerated facial tics of movie stars confirm what their characters are supposed to be feeling – by using non-actors. Equally he undermines dominant narrative conventions that are ritualised, and hypocritical, in the way in which they relegate subjective expression. Marcos’ spirit is elevated and his body transcended by the nature that surrounds him, permeating city and country, and the mortal dilemma that faces him. The film references the German romantic painters who believed that nature is a divine unity experienced through the human sense of the sublime. Hence a fat husband and wife making love are also beautiful, untarnished by hypocritical social norms.
