Chris Knipp Writing: Movies, Politics, Art


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PostPosted: Mon Sep 24, 2007 5:24 pm 
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FROM THE OPENING SEQUENCE OF SILENT LIGHT

Beautiful desperation

This third work by the Mexican auteur signals a concern with process right away in a slow opening six-minute shot of stars and clouds in a dark sky. The camera slowly inches forward, shrubbery slides away, the sky brightens along the horizon and turns red, and dawn breaks. The only sound—but it's a powerful one—is the hum and twitter of nature and the mooing of cows, a susurration whose volume modulates as the images do. It's a lovely sequence, smooth and sure and beautiful, but it demands your patience, and it is deliberately ineloquent, and so is the rest of the film, which focuses on a family in a Mennonite community living in Mexico, who speak to each other in Plaut Deutsch, an archaic language. Reygadas assembled most of his cast from this community. They don't eschew engines, like the Pennsylvania Amish. They drive cars and trucks and use modern farm equipment. But their clothes and their ways are simple. The women wear cotton frocks and tie their heads up in little scarves. Their houses are plain and clean and old-fashioned. When trouble comes, there's no external static to hide it.

Reygadas is excellent at working with non-actors. They may share the film's prevailing reserve, but they seem ineluctably real. The children help with this. Whether they're praying or eating or swimming, they're just themselves. Jakob is a dairy farmer. He's having an affair with another woman, and it's tearing him up. His wife knows about it; so does his best friend; and he tells his father in a later scene. He and his wife have half a dozen young children. Their children are bright little things, and they get alone fine; but Jakob believes, and tells others, that the new woman is better for him; that if he had met her originally, he would have chosen her over his wife. Yet he tries to end it. And his girlfriend says after a lovemaking scene that this must be the last time between them. The two women and Jakob are all three suffering. Even in the first scene in Jakob's house, after breakfast is over and his wife and children go out, he sits at the kitchen table and weeps. His wife is quiet and gentle, but she isn't happy any more.

There are some surprises down the line. Silent Light (Stellet licht) is an homage to Dreyer's Ordet, and becomes closer and closer to that film toward the end. There are several particularly memorable scenes—a visit to Jakob's friend's garage where he drives around in circles and sings a Spanish song in his truck; a terrible misadventure by a roadside in heavy rain; a wake. Throughout the editing and images and pace have the same sureness of that opening sequence of sky and dawn. There is a similar, shorter shot of the same horizon that, with a satisfying cyclical effect, ends things. Ultimately this is in its way a very beautiful film. Its protagonist is faced with a moral dilemma in a very pure form because his life itself is pure. His father says his involvement is the work of the Devil. But here is the dilemma: Jakob thinks it may not be at all. He doesn't know what to do. His girlfriend says she is suffering, but at the same time adds that she has never been so happy in her life. There are no distractions from this story, no subplots, no complications. That is the beauty of it, and its purity of focus. The images and compositions, especially the exteriors and landscapes of Silent Light, are exquisite. These are very different people, quite well protected, it would seem, from the distractions and demoralization and social decay of Bruno Dumont's rural France, and the world of Silent Light is very much cleaner and more beautiful than Dumont's, but in its elemental ineloquence this film has some similarities to the French director's, partly perhaps just because both filmmakers work with non-actors and in their own way, at their own pace: both are sui generis.

Silent Light is about people in crisis, but it doesn't exude desperation like Reygadas' two previous films or share their impulse to provoke. It's as if the director found a kind of peace in this special anachronistic community. And perhaps a degree of spirituality. But whether the ending is to be taken in a supernatural or mechanistic sense is left unspecified. Still not for the mainstream, this does show Reygadas reaching out tentatively toward a wider community. Here is a protagonist who's part of an organized, upright world, the father of a family, with a common problem—not a misfit, a desperado, a lowlife, an outlaw, but a kind of everyman.

Shown as an official selection of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center 2007.

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©Chris Knipp 2007


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