Film

Some of today’s top Mexican directors refer to Carlos Reygadas as ‘the maestro’, and undoubtedly he aims high. His 2002 debut ‘Japon’ reminded many of Tarkovsky; ‘Battle in Heaven’ was proudly metaphorical and provocative; ‘Silent Light’ borrowed blatantly from Dreyer’s ‘Ordet’. His latest continues in the same emphatically serious vein: some claim it alludes to the films of the Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul and to Sokurov. The Latin title (‘after the darkness, the light’) evokes some sort of parable, and the overall thrust of the narrative, with its elements of crime and punishment, waywardness and redemption, dysfunctionality and diabolical intervention, verges on the spiritual and moralistic.

Lux may be present in the title, but lucidity is not the film’s strong point. It mostly seems to concern a comfortably-off couple and their young kids – the man’s at a point where he can only have sex with his wife with the help of internet porn and he’s prone to taking it out on the dogs. Though precisely which scenes are past or present, real or imagined, is left a little unclear, as is the significance of a red devil (pleasingly reminiscent of the Pink Panther, who’s mentioned elsewhere in the movie by one of the kids). His arrival in the couple’s home (or is it?) kickstarts what semblance of a story we get.

And semblance it is. The scenes – shot in 1:1.33 mostly with a short lens, which for some reasons ‘ghosts’ a lot around the edges – don’t so much hang together as puzzle as to their relationship with one another. A couple, depicting a rugby match in an English school, perhaps autobiographical, feel particularly redundant to the larger project in hand. There are moments that impress (most to do with the weather and landscape), but just as many that feel faintly absurd: a self-decapitation, especially. Yet again, one senses that Reygadas – instead of simply getting on with the job of making a film – has opted instead to go for an opus magnum that reminds us of cinema’s greats. And once again what is finally communicated is vaunting ambition and somewhat frustratingly vague achievement.

Geoff Andrew is Head of Film Programme at BFI Southbank and a Contributing Editor of Time Out