Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas, 2007)

(A word on the "point" of this blog. The point, which is to say, the difference, this space aspires for, aside from the obvious assessment and cataloging for posterity, is to problematize the import of a romance-tinged but discursive movie-watching experience on the appreciation of film; whether the banter, sometimes digressive but necessarily gesturing toward articulation and therefore processing, shapes the formation of opinion; whether the occasional hand-holding, by way of heightening sensory awareness, amplifies and/or distracts from the material currently under perusal. Joke! We just enjoy watching movies.)

Peace is stronger than love.

The supreme achievement first: my attention span, which runs all but 17 seconds, survived this film, a 140-minute Everest of long shots and minute, glacial movements, where the unfolding of things is austere and laborious. Christian lists Carlos Reygadas' Silent Light as among one of his top five favorite films of all time, so obviously, I cannot dislike it. (I can debate him until kingdome come and I will still sound like an idiot). With that in mind, this display of cinematic bravura couched in alternately cosmic and domestic plains is, surprisingly, a pleasure to watch: a phrase one doesn't normally ascribe to movies that subject viewers to two-, three-minute shots of rain pummeling on windshield or cows' udders being milked.

Such is astounding precisely because the premise of the film is old hat: the head of a Mennonite family is besieged with a crisis of love, the "source" of which, a friend counsels, might be "sacred." In short, he's married and falls in love with another woman. But what is old hat is stripped off to its naked sinew: outside the agitation of moralistic finger-wagging, in the calm, bare space of rural Mexico, the question on the fallibility of what we think is love is distilled to its painfully ambiguous core.

Crayola.

Which is to say, everyone suffers in the love triangle, which maybe a separate, wholly disapproving point on romantic love. Most striking is the behavior of the "other woman," whose deadpan post-coitus pronouncement - "Peace is stronger than love." - is the most breathtaking line I may have heard in any movie, coming at a point in the narrative where the toll of the infidelity is starting to manifest, in subtle, though well-acted, fashion. (The film utilized non-actors, Christian volunteered).

And in the film's climax, a transaction between the long-suffering wife and the tortured mistress takes place, defying all realistic expectations. In preparation for such an ending, Christian had offered copious warnings. But when it comes, the unfolding is exhilarating and poignant (the type of cinematic moment when one couldn't help but hold your boyfriend's idle hand). And what rescues it is a theistic, or at least cosmological, framework under which the film operates.

There is no overstating the centrality of such a spirit in looking at Silent Light. Watching the lengthy opening sequence, Christian had to admonish me several times to pay attention, a curt tsk-tsk if I was being particularly listless. It was all done in one take, he said, while remarking on the allusion to the beginning of time itself, of darkness giving way, in agonizing pace, to light, to scenery, then, finally, to the human space where the drama is set to unfold.

The evocation of the Genesis at this juncture is beneficial, for as early as here it absolves the formalist ruckus that this film will likely generate for its frequent violations of editorial handling in the narrative mold. The long shots, for one, are saved from the predictable accusation of cosmetic and existential inanity: superficially, an act that merely admonishes viewers to, you know, stop and consider the rain drops, consider the udders. To what end? the impatient viewer will ask. Once on a theistic framework, that question becomes almost moot.

For in Silent Light, there are frequent demonstrations of a quiet order against which the transgression is set. There is suggestion of an omnipresence in terms of camera work, an austere and demanding attention to scenery. There is frequent interplay between light and darkness, alluding to an age-old dichotomy. There is an insistence on the immutability and irreversibility of time, on the sequential order of things, that life proceeds in this manner and you cannot undo things. There is a treatment to people that is almost condescending: they hardly move, staring into space, tortured in the most private of spheres.

And so, when the final scene comes, and the viewer recognizes that it’s the exact reversal of the opening sequence, the framing of the story is all but too obvious: our world is a stage, in transcendentally huge proportions, and the final act of redemption, once one recognizes its inadequacy, indeed its humanity, is paradoxically still love, for peace and love are one. Cue: holding hands.