Film

Finally receiving a week-long run after bowing to rapturous response at Cannes in 2007, Silent Light provokes awe: not just for its sheer beauty but for the astounding leaps in seriousness and maturity that Carlos Reygadas has made since his previous film, Battle in Heaven, a noxious, chilly exercise in corpulent copulation. Opening and closing with majestic scenes of sunrise and sunset, Reygadas’s third feature approaches grace.

It also makes us believe in miracles. An homage to Dreyer’s Ordet (also playing at MoMA this week), Silent Light steadfastly chronicles, through long takes and exquisite compositions, the quotidian tasks of a Mennonite farming family in Chihuahua, Mexico (all played by nonactors, as in Reygadas’s other work). Their language, Plautdietsch, a German dialect, may be unfamiliar, but the questions of faith, love and reconciliation are anything but. When the patriarch, Johan (Wall), finds himself torn between his wife, Esther (Toews), and his lover Marianne (Pankratz), he hides nothing from his spouse and struggles with the divine implications of another woman’s love. Johan may weep, but his wife’s years of hurt erupt unforgettably: “I was part of the world. Now I am separated from it.” By the time you leave the theater, you will have the left the planet, too.