Director: Carlos Reygadas
Country: Mexico
Time: 2 hours and 16 minutes
What It Elicits: Desire for life, community life in rural Mexico, Christian symbolism
Where Can I Get It: Criterion (free w/subscription)
Age and desire are often held to be things incompatible in film. This remains different from lechery and age—particularly male lechery—which exists in plentitude. The complexities of physical attraction and the unfurling of desire tend, unfortunately, to be glossed over by many filmmakers. One imagines their view as such: “Just look at these two beautiful people. How could they not want to be with each other?” This makes some sense: Film remains a visual medium full of visually attractive people, so an emphasis on the ocular side of things may simply be excused as the cost of the camera. Nonetheless, it tends to foreclose examination of desire amongst those beyond the age normally permitted by our conventional notions of romance and beauty. Outside film, individuals who instantaneously command others’ desire appear less frequently: desire builds, unspool, and concentrates itself within conversations and particular confines. Indeed, this insight may explain the popularity of Richard Linklater’s Before series which, at base, depicted two people talking continuously and, in so doing, falling in love.
Carlos Reygadas’s debut film Japón takes as its subject desire—not between two steamy twenty-somethings, but between individuals looking back on life, aged, and coming to terms with the end of things. Our unnamed male protagonist, flirting with suicide, leaves Mexico City in the films opening shots (all wide-angle images capturing the sheer magnitude of landscapes) and drives north into the state of Hidalgo, ending up in a poor and remote farming town. He may or may not be a painter, but he paints and carries an art book in his knapsack. (The religious connotations of Mondrian and his geometrical shapes’ similarity to cards depicting saints comes up.) While in this town, our protagonist observes peasant life, drinks too much, wrestles with his own unhappiness, and meets an even older Ascen—named for the Ascension, or Christ’s assumption into heaven. Their mutual desire, building slowly and unevenly, offers purpose to them both, albeit in very different ways. Throughout, ideas of Christian sacrifice (alongside a healthy dose of Christian imagery) coexist beside images of animal desire and nature—horses copulating, hunters shooting fowl—and acts of cruelty, both human-to-human and human-to-animal. In the film’s final scenes, our expectation of who has claims to being read as the Christ-like figure alters: a different redemption through sacrifice leading, perhaps, to an embrace of life. Needless to say, there is a lot here to unpack.
Reygadas remains the most famous active Mexican director to not be a major name north of the border. Unlike Iñárritu (The Revenant, Birdman, Amores perros), Cuarón (Roma, Children of Men, Y tu mamá también), or Guillermo Del Toro (The Shape of Water, Pan’s Labyrinth), he has never made an English-language film. And, in some sense, unlike those directors, his films remain difficult because they examine the under-depicted aspects of the quotidian which, when put on the screen, upend our expectations. In life, there remains nothing shocking about the nude body of an elderly woman and man. In film, the story tends to be different. As Reygadas recognizes, this is film’s loss.
Go Down The Rabbit Hole With:
Carlos Reygadas — Silent Light (2007)
Robert Bresson — Au Hasard Balthazar (1966)