Silent Light
Carlos Reygadas’s intractable, luminous film deals in punishing obscurity, uncommonly beautiful images and a kind of tight-lipped mysticism that jibes with the story’s German-speaking Mennonites who have cloistered themselves in Chihuahua, Mexico. The old folks bucked and snorted at the deliberate, lingering pace and the easily pretentious conversations referring to God and “the enemy” (the devil, man’s own true nature, lust?). But while Silent Light is dreamy, it is always coherent. Its story is disarmingly simple: Jonah, a good man, betrays his wife. And while the old folks may have been justified in asking why in the HELL! they are being made to observe shampoo-y scalps and road rushing at windshields for three minute stretches, even the crankiest were sometimes stilled by Reygadas’s craft, his knack for making frustratingly opaque scenarios come suddenly, sharply clear.
Reygadas pays some Malick-esque attention to the natural world and shares with that filmmaker the ability to encourage performances that are charmingly bare, trickless. One shot begins with a woman washing her child’s feet and finds a blurry, pink spot in the background. The camera carefully stocks closer, focusing slowly, until a wild flower is revealed. The image catches something precarious, fragile but always unnamable in the film.
But it’s the human face that really sings in Silent Light. Critics have noted Carl Dreyer’s influence, but Reygadas applies Bergman’s interpretation of those same, still faces, their ability to hypnotize an audience; he’s seen the way Altman used this same technique to ground his reeling Three Women. The faces in Silent Light gaze back at the bewildered or provoked audience with patience and modesty. I started to admire the characters’ mild acceptance of the cruel, enchanted world around them, and of their fates, which they see as written in stone.
The middle-aged husband next to me, frustrated, out of popcorn, glared at the full-screen face of Esther, the story’s betrayed wife. The shot lingered and the husband waved his hand at the screen like an impatient traffic cop (Out with it, already!). Just then, Reygadas pulled his rabbit, such as it is, out of his hat. But the connection had long been missed and the husband felt only more betrayed. -MB.
Director: Carlos Reygadas
Writer: Carlos Reygadas