SILENT LIGHT

I've seen all three of Carlos Reygadas' films (the first two are JAPON and BATTLE IN HEAVEN).  This is perhaps his best, and also his most difficult, film to date.  The film's slow and meditative pace gives its audience both moments of transcendent calm and of frustration.  But the film is a bold, sincere piece of art that the current cinematic landscape sees far too seldom.

Many will write of Reygadas' beautiful shot compositions, the effect of the lingering camera over a sunrise or sunset, the lack of score and constant presence of ambient natural sound, the evocative and metaphysically mysterious ending, and of the choice to center the film on the rarely seen subculture of Mennonites in rural Mexico.  While all of these are interesting and contribute to the film's success, they're hardly revolutionary (though the focus on the Mennonites culture and their rarely spoken dialect is fascinating).  For me, Reygadas' major contribution to cinema that reaches its highest achievement in this film is his use of non-actors.  It's not merely the decision to cast non-actors, which has been done by many contemporary and influential directors in the past, but the very specific style in which he films them.

The cast never seems entirely unaware of the camera.  In fact, Reygadas isn't afraid to allow their eyes to occasionally look directly into the lens (he even composes a number of shots to do so intentionally).  Though the leads give us breathtaking moments of unguarded emotion, several of the actors are stiff, and all have moments of deflated naturalism.  But somehow this works to elevate the film rather than distract from it: somehow it simultaneously highlights the allegorical nature of the story while managing to capture something raw and uber-natural about the actors as human beings.  One gets lost in the story, then in the very fact that a story is being told, then in the awareness of the actors of their place within that story, and then yet again in the relationship of that story to the great narrative that is existence itself, and then brought back into the role of film as a fabricator and molder of that existence.  Indeed, time itself is as much a subject of the film as the characters who wish to stall, speed up, or reverse it.

There is a scene of sheer cinematic beauty in which all of the children bathe together in a river.  Their innocence and purity of being is manifest when they lose themselves in the moment and behave as true children, but then reaffirmed rather than broken when a little girl's eyes wander into the lens.  In these moments, one cannot help but be grateful for bearing witness to such a true, though constructed, moment of shining.