It’s been a little while, but I was away — shooting film and wandering around in Jordan. Because the Sight & Sound poll just dropped, I’ve lost a few days to endless fizzing arguments that have circled back precisely nowhere. Reygadas didn’t make an appearance on that list. But we recorded a podcast about it — with James King. I think you’ll like it.
— I like it when critics vent their spleen at filmmakers — when they exude all this testy ire. Reygadas has this effect. The critics like to call these things [his films] ‘infuriating’ and ‘baffling’, soy-facing into the splayed massif of the cinema screen. These aren’t interesting critiques of anything — least of all film.
— For Post tenebras lux (2012), Xan Brooks fidgets and fusses — he calls it “opaque” and “exasperating”. These critiques amount really to “I don’t get it”. There’s a lot I don’t get. So far, he’s correct — it is opaque, it can exasperate. But where he discovers a dam of dull agony, I find something fringed with sublimity. Here is a film that unpicks — and unwinds — the trajectory of a life, somewhere between the precise, granular knife of autobiography and the oneiric ambience of a quasi-Proustian reverie. This is what memory looks like under the microscope. 1886, Chekhov writes to a pen-pal. People must “work at their aesthetic sensibility, [they] don’t simply obey their baser instincts”. Memory has to be wobbled and adjusted like a television aerial (sea of black-white fizz that resolves into an elbow, a man’s widening mouth, a motorway, and then dissolves back into . . . what?).
— Reygadas gives us a narrative where we don’t expect to find it — and gives us a life as it floods back to us in the moments before sleep. “It is a film about love” (Reygadas). It is littered with allusions and red-herrings — many of which we are supposed to handle as irrelevant and ironic. Juan [stupid and unlikeable] quotes from Tolstoy — at length, Pierre Bezukov (the aristo-farmer) — during a flashy metropolitan dinner. His wife smiles tightly, uncertainly, at his side. In the dank, austere rooms of a Parisian swinger’s bathhouse, the rooms carry the names of artists and philosophers (“is this the Duchamp room? No, this is the Hegel room”). It’s a little bit stupid and blatant, but — again — I think we’re supposed to encounter these literary allusions as the fragments of the justifications and frameworks we use to structure our trajectory in the world. We are in Gaspar Noe’s sex club (he is standing over us, just to our left; salivating). These archly academic allusions are then punctured by primaeval, primitive moments shot with a custom-made bevelled lens (the image shatters into two, ground to black dust around the edges of the frame, bends and softens it). A man — called Seven — chops down a tree in the woods. He says nothing (because he is alone). He is engaged in labour. His axe will eventually make contact with something other than bark. Your stories — [derisively] your books — won’t get you very far. Here’s a book. Carlos!
— Why is her smile strained — what happens between them [man, and wife]? Pushing and pulling. This is a love story, the story of a marriage and of all the tensions and strains that ebb between them. Pleading, appeals, remonstrations, arguments, silences. Reygadas doesn’t give us ‘true’ motivations, only their para-academic ghosts (Tolstoy, Hegel, Duchamp). People act (or fail to act) without the comforting hand-holding of monologue or motivation. Things just happen. We’re left to pick up the narrative pieces. Juan beats a dog very violently — we assume that he is pouring his sublimated sexual rage into this act of hideous battery (the dog itself is kept out of shot, so he holds down ‘nothing’ — punches down, wetly, onto ‘nothing’). Think Bulgakov’s ‘heart of a dog’ — “a dog’s spirit dies hard”. Awoo!
— Later, the film ends during a game of boarding school rugby, in England. Reygadas went to school in England, so this is his memory. It’s also more than this. The awkward, strained team chatter — “they’re individuals, we’re a team” — from the mouths of these boys makes it suddenly so apparent how ill-prepared they (and we) are to confront the world. Juan is felled by a gunshot wound from a man he’d tried to befriend (a junkie and criminal whom he catches in the act of robbing from his house). Domestic scenes [un-blissed] roll and biliously roll around sucked of their immanence. The spectral is happening somewhere else, just out of sight — as if the hum-drum isn’t quite squeezable. It happens on its own time, its own terms. You will be fed your madelaine. These segments are shot like plain documentary. The mind is somewhere else. It’s somewhere else when Natalia (his wife) gets screwed in a chilly, blue-lit sex club bathroom, the sagging flesh and jaunty bones of the attendees offering an ambiguous succour to her, a depth of feeling (we gather) that Juan cannot provide [he stands apart, expressionless — wavering?]. Breast rests against widening mouth (hers). Calming words (not his). She releases herself somewhere else.
— Really he is a kind of Nu-Pierre Bezukhov — Tolstoy’s well-meaning but naive aristocrat who escapes from wealth into the bosom of the countryside. The great moment in War and Peace is Pierre’s joining the harvest. He sweats and swelters, feels at ease in the world. It’s supposed to be a little silly, tinged with irony — he (unlike his peasant-slaves) will sleep on fine down tonight, mop gravy from his chops. Tolstoy — famously — followed suit, later [sans irony], abandoning the prim propriety of the city for a literal anarchist Christianity in the provinces. He died, of course, in a remote train station; many years later. The sordid always comes back to bite us. Woof woof.
— We explained this properly during our recent Reygadas podcast episode, how Reygadas — with Post Tenebras Lux — pulls apart the film that separates the real and the uncanny. The devil — a glowing red animation, a figurine, who prowls a house [we see him twice]; Seven, who wanders bereft into a field – it begins to rain — and pulls his head off his own shoulders. Other moments are equally thronged with transcendence – how a tree crashes mournfully [middle distance] in a forest, without agent. The felling of a life (tree; Juan). It is like a kind of (ugh, sorry) rhizome — egg rolling down a hill and collecting all kinds of fluff and muck. Lines of flight, lines of slight, radiate away. I think about Japon, his first film, with its letterbox ratio, grimacing closeups, and snap tracking shots, the barren landscapes of hinterland Mexico seem mediated through the visual grammar of the western – a sense made to feel very strange within Reygadas’ eroded, rough-and-tumble DVcam footage. Yellows that seem putrefied, greens that appear lurid — MTV spaghetti western. There is always another context wobbling the door handle, jimmying the TV’s aerial. Elbow, mouth, motorway, dog (barking), woman (laughing), glass knocked over. This is a life.
— For Reygadas, we are involved in a kind of going to the people — artists who abscond themselves into the wilderness to off themselves; religious men who do doughnuts in parking lots and pursue love (and find social ostracism). Men at the edge! Men on the edge. Devil (almost too devil, over-determined] stalks the unlit halls of a seemingly suburban house, toolkit in his hand (here is He again, materializing — doing his work on the desiring-unsuspecting). Your life is not your own. Is that the gag? A prelapsarian sense of wonder frets at the edges, as we see the daughter playing in a muddy field — just after the rain has fallen, after Juan’s death? Before. It doesn’t matter when. Your life is not your own, but it’s all you have. Etc.
— Rain is a pathetic fallacy. Reygadas marshals it with studied, compositional brutality. It looks fake because it is fake, the filmmaker showing their hand. Let there be rain! It rushes and harrows down upon Seven, Juan’s killer, who — in a moment of b-movie Dostoevskian duress — yanks his own head off, middle distance. The rain patters to a halt. The filmmaker is watching over his shoulder (and ours). Nod. Cosmic karma? The old woman in Japon who dies in the artist’s ‘place’. Intrusion of a lesson, a moral tale. Hook caught through the cheek. Juan may have sloughed off all the trappings of his metropolitan life, but Reygadas turns up in the provinces with an entire library — scrawled marginalia, ivory-towered observations. It makes him a little unlikeable, but in a good way. No life can escape its own orbit. War and Peace marches into the lands of the Aztec, Napoleon in winter. Adolph Northern’s mirky, sulky painting of the emperor and his grande armee (1851), bundled like old women — a drizzle of piss-coloured light falling short of him, illuminating only his back. Not even god’s judgement (here) is beneficent, but instead quirked up with a slightly mocking fizz. The filmmaker-artist looks on, playing with the tools of Him [by which I mean God] – switching the lights on and off. Is anyone home?
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