Post Tenebras Lux
REVIEWS
Directed by CARLO S R EYG ADAS Starring A DOLFO JIMÉNEZ CASTR O, NATHALIA ACEVEDO, WILLEB ALDO TORRES Released 22 MAR CH
ost Tenebras Lux begins and climaxes with epic thunderstorms. Rain merges with ruddy earth, turning the water blood-coloured, violently charging this standard signifier of redemption. Through a kind of pagan Catholic framework, Carlos Reygadas’ fourth film proposes that expiation is not for the faint of heart. To a degree, this is a simple, elemental story: family man Juan (Adolfo Jiménez Castro) struggles to save his faltering marriage to Natalia (Nathalia Acevedo). Reygadas’ nervy feature debut Japón (2002) was a gleefully impenetrable series of provocations rendered even more disorienting by its 16mm being blown up to grainy, at times nearly illegible 35mm. Upgrading to 35mm and ditching the handheld, follow-up Battle In Heaven (2005) handed equal stylistic gravitas to depicting a young girl giving an obese man a blow job while crying and the folding up of a gigantic Mexican flag, stuffing transgression into a more acceptably ‘masterful’ formal casing. With Silent Light (2007), Reygadas made a bid for overt respectability, invoking Carl Dreyer’s Ordet in a tale of adultery in a selfcontained Mennonite community. A man’s affair leads his wife to complain she feels like she’s no longer part of the natural world. During one of his trysts, a leaf falls from the ceiling, confirming the suspicion that domestic and natural order have been set out of joint. Majestic though it was, Silent Light seemed a trifle overweening for a story about religious self-denial. Post Tenebras Lux is a better package for Reygadas’ maximal effects. The title means ‘light after darkness’; in Reygadas’ oblique B-side to his previous film, male psychic turmoil and guilt again take on cosmic proportions, again causing disruptive weather. Juan wrestles not with adultery but pornography and violent urges, causing his fight-weary wife to raise the prospect of a split. There are 23 sequences in Post Tenebras Lux. The field-set first features Reygadas’ own daughter Rut surrounded by animals which she identifies (“Cows!”) before the storm begins.
In the second, a glowing CGI goat-devil creature enters Juan’s house, gliding frictionlessly through the halls. Only son Eleazar (also Reygadas’ child) sees him, implying that whatever pathology is symbolised by this creature is solely masculine. The next scene introduces local worker 7 (Willebaldo Torres) alone in the forest, chopping down trees. Arboreal devastation is a grandly overscaled recurring motif. In the fourth sequence, we finally see Juan’s family in action, the first scene of the (mostly) linear narrative through-line. An ordinary morning full of father-and-child affection turns ugly when Juan beats one of his dogs in a fit of uncontrollable rage. This unprovoked eruption (a possible metaphor for Reygadas’ own helpless craving to get a rise out of audiences) is apparently a repetition of previous beatings; the devil may be a busy goat, but his spiritual presence may be taken as a constant here. The harm eventually befalling Juan may be a form of karmic retribution, though his destructive impulses aren’t unique: surely the name ‘7’ is meant to evoke the deadly sins. We get examples of each one: wrath (Juan and his dog), sloth (good men failing to act in the form of a lazy caretaker who doesn’t do as Juan orders, resulting in an avoidable crime), lust (Juan’s porn fixation), gluttony (grotesquely round, obese bodies — a Reygadas hallmark — in a steamroom populated by swingers), greed (in the form of a robbery that goes wrong), envy (lower/upper class tensions are prevalent) and pride (Juan’s own). The opening forest segment is stunning, particularly when the camera glides right to left from a great height, taking in the rugged mountainscape as if from a zipline. Outdoors, the square frame’s edges are blurred, creating a kaleidoscopic, near-3D effect when passing over objects. Juan’s ponderous deathbed speech threatens to relax the tone, but the angry narrative fallout toughens up his softball cosmological vision of life as the passage of innocence from parents to children. Animals are everywhere: real, on T-shirts and in the kids’ imaginations. When young Eleazar wears a Spider-Man T-shirt while recapping one of the movies, it might be a very obscure joke about the ultimate protective male, half-human and half-insect. 048
The much-discussed inexplicable episodes — the aforementioned swingers’ interlude, two segments of a young English rugby team — don’t obscure an almost suspiciously clear family-oriented narrative. The rugby makes sense: the final line of the film, shouted by one of the players, is, “We’re going to win, because they’re a bunch of individuals and we’re a team,” reinforcing the film’s emphasis on the family unit, especially important in a nation whose sense of self-identity is shattered, pitting all against each other on both race and class axes. There’s a recurrent emphasis on Mexican identity and its fragmented claimants: Juan (who’s lighter-skinned) gets into an argument with a drunk, darker-skinned, poorer man about whether he looks down on Mexicans. “I’m Mexican too,” he asserts. (Unnervingly, one of his guardian dogs is named ‘Guera’, meaning ‘white girl’.) As Reygadas explained when interviewed at Cannes, for him ending with a unified rugby team means that the Mexican people need to “keep on playing [...] disregarding the fact that it’s raining blood in Mexico.” The film begins with stampeding animals and ends with equally aggro young men running on the same field, the human and animal worlds interchangeable. There’s more than a little grandstanding bunk in its details, but Reygadas’ anti-humanist tract successfully fleshes out its sketchily harsh cosmology. VADIM RIZOV
ANTICIPATION . Reygadas’ Silent Light was something of a marvel, but Cannes audiences were left flummoxed by this one. ENJOYMENT. Those willing to do the leg work will find much to treasure. IN RETR O SPECT. Though it appears entirely oblique and selfinvolved, Reygadas’ fourth film may well be his finest yet.