Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas, 2008)

The knowledge to be gained from watching bad movies is deceptively valuable: the negative example casts into bolder relief what good movies do well. Pictures that jerk their characters around with the machinations and contrivances of a too-strong plot taught me how much is to be gained by going a tad lighter on the events. Pictures burdened with an overzealous score taught me that much redundancy and bluntness can be avoided when scores don't underscore (ironically, by overscoring). Pictures edited all herky-jerky-like taught me to value the rare ones that aren't.

Silent Light, however, is astounding, so it holds none of those lessons. As I expected, it's not a forgettable film, though I daresay that I wasn't prepared for just how tenaciously it's clung to my brain. Vastly more memorable than the average movie, it's also more memorable than the average good movie, which raises the question of what it does to achieve that, or perhaps what all the others fail to do that keeps them from achieving that. Though I always try to figure out what makes an effective work effective, this time I find myself laboring under the highly unusual fear of doing some sort of violence to the film by casting its elements into words. It's not a delicate piece of gossamer ready to disintegrate under the lightest examination — far from it — but it's so well-unified with its medium that approaching it in any other is kind of a ridiculous venture. Undaunted, I press onward.

The most accurate way to put it, and still with maddening vagueness, is that the film's strength lies in its ability to bring its moments into reality. It's about suggesting that things happen versus actually making them happen, or at least coming damn close. Implication has its place, but Reygadas' painstaking casting of the happenings of his Mennonite characters' lives — a predawn breakfast, night becoming sunrise, a harrow grinding through a wheat field — into reality is more profitably examined next to the lazier, more common cinematic tendency to depict in a way that possesses neither the finesse of artful implication nor the boldness of real-time realism, a sludgy middle ground seemingly precision-engineered for dissatisfaction, delivering the gist of it and only the gist of it.

In other words, I've opened a brave new chapter of spoiledness in my life as a filmgoer. Now that I know movies can bring the audience into their world as well as does Silent Light, I'm sure I'm going to get pissed whenever they don't. The story is simple, though told more intimately than most, filled as it is with moments we're allowed the space to experience rather than just audiovisually told about. When protagonist Johan, a once-stolid father of at least six, lingers at the kitchen table after the rest of the family has headed out for the day, we witness the complete breakdown process as he collapses into a sobbing mess. The source of his internal battle is revealed as his competing twin desires for his wife Esther and Mariam, whom he believes to be his "natural woman". (I guess that's a Mennonite thing?) In the aftermath of one less-than-secret assignation &madsh; Esther and, apparently, the wider community are well aware of these dalliances — the camera unflinchingly depicts the weight of postcoital confusion and remorse weighing down on the beleaguered Johan; to cut away would have done injustice to the enormity of his dilemma. When the film fires off its controversial closing instance of divine intervention/imagination/magic realism, we encounter it just as the characters do, and are carried right along by it.

It takes some guts to pile so much filmmaking acumen into a story about Mennonites in Mexico. I mean, do I know from Mennonites in Mexico? Do I know from Mennonites anywhere? Does anybody? One strategy would have been to include a lot of background info explaining the whos, whats, whys and wheres of the Mennonites, but Reygadas wisely takes the exact opposite tack, simply dropping viewers into the middle of the community and trusting them to understand what the tale requires be understood, and learn what it holds to be learned. (One thing I learned is that Mennonites can, and do, wear calculator watches.) This is only one facet of Silent Light's blessedly high regard for its audience: Reygadas takes what has sadly come to be known as a risk by assuming our awareness, our patience and our willingness to enter and appreciate a setting foreign in so many dimensions, which indicts pretty harshly all the filmmakers that don't.

* * *
2008

1. Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park
2. Carlos Reygadas' Silent Light
3. James Marsh's Man on Wire
4. Tarsem's The Fall
5. Tomas Alfredson's Let the Right One In
6. Gus van Sant's Milk
7. Alex Gibney's Gonzo
8. Doug Pray's Surfwise
9. Mabrouk El Mechri's JCVD
10. Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind
11. Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona
12. Randall Miller's Bottle Shock

Comments

[mary]

GREAT review, Colin!