Reviews

Back to melodrama after «Batalla en el cielo», Carlos Reygadas made «Stellet Licht» and he enthralled almost everybody, in Cannes, La Habana, Huelva and México. This time Reygadas distanced even further from his usual references, but the Mennonite subculture in which he placed his adultery tale merely works as exotic décor, since there is no need for such, instead he was trying to emulate Carl Theodor Dreyer. The world intelligentsia immediately established a link to Dreyer's «Ordet», based on the apparent miracle that solves the drama between husband, wife and husband's lover. In Dreyer's film, the family of a Lutheran farmer is divided due to matters of faith, sanctity, and love, when one son asserts he is Jesus Christ, other declares himself agnostic, and a third one falls in love with a fundamentalist's daughter. Mysticism is exposed from the beginning, and the tale deals with different manifestations of mankind's magical thought, with notions of spirituality in conflict, so the resurrections of the farmer's daughter-in-law is in harmony with the whole work. In Reygadas' film the wife resurrected by the breath of her husband's lover is a rather facile and corny effect: the Mennonite milieu does not guarantee mysticism, a quality that is almost absent in the film, unless we take as an ecstatic salutation from the filmmaker that long daybreak that opens the film (and the twilight that closes it). Curiously, in a recent talk with a girlfriend, she spoke with (mystical?) enthusiasm about that first shot. Could it be that human beings have distanced from reality to the extent that they have replaced the experience in direct with digital dawns? «Stellet Licht» also makes evident the slow and reiterative method of «mise-en-caméra» that has become fashionable among world filmmakers. Actions are usually solved in open shots. Sometimes there is a slight approach to the subjects and after the dialogue is said, the camera moves back. The strategy seems to keep the viewer's curious voyeurism under control and to make him/her watch «reality». However what we watch are not registers of reality, but representations. If we'd take representations (the circular shot of the truck, the passionless sex of the lovers, the resurrection, etcetera) as registrations of reality, beyond the obvious images we watch, whatever reality has been captured is the act of shooting by Reygadas and his collaborators. Whoever said that film was better than life is not very wise, and his/her followers quite the same. In any case, capturing reality will never replace the real thing in direct, and that is what beauty is all about.