Silent Light (2007): C-

Carlos Reygadas (Japón, Battle in Heaven) mars his heretofore spotless track record with Silent Light (Stellet Licht), a film indebted to Carlos Dreyer’s Ordet that’s also the near-epitome of art-cinema pretentiousness. Reygadas not only drains any trace of sensuality and carnal heat – as well as any cultural/political shadings – from his latest, he also empties it of any noise or movement, employing so many slooooooooow-motion camera pans and zooms that his rigorously controlled aesthetic quickly seems a parody of its former self. Silent Light concerns a Mennonite family in Mexico whose patriarch Johan (Cornelio Wall) is torn between his wife Esther (Miriam Toews) and mistress Marianne (Maria Pankratz). Reygadas strives to elevate this tale to a biblical plane through visual and sonic inertia – which often results in a scene-by-scene game in which one strives to guess what’s hidden in the black space his camera is zooming into – as well as via affected symbolic moments such as a first-person shot of Marianne shielding her eyes from the sun with her hand, or the image of a moth flying out of a window immediately after a climactic instance of resurrection. Reygadas’ dedication to exacting formalism is impressive, but said form is itself the height of pomposity, his plethora of prolonged takes and amateurish acting conveying nothing that might qualify as spiritual, but revealing plenty about the vanity of its maker, who ultimately seems to care far less about his one-dimensional, designed-to-impart-messages characters than he does for his own show-offy artistry.

(2007 New York Film Festival)

Comments

[Minella Fransasky]

really? for me this was the best experience I've had at a movie theatre (saw it at Toronto) in the last 10 years (and I'm a critic)

very nice review by the way

[Juan Canale]

I strongly agree with the last lines of your review, because of Japon and Battle in Heaven I came to admire Reygadas and I was very disappointed of Silent Light, I just can’t understand why his film is receiving awards and praises when he should be marked for plagiarism. His previews film Japon was clearly influenced by Tarkovsky but still the film wasn’t a copy of him. Not the case in Silent light, where everything from the pace, images, zooms, sounds were an exact copy from the Russian director and then it ends whit a forced “homage” to Ordet. The movie was more a tribute to Tarkovsky and Dreyer than an original Reygadas film. An advice to Reygadas: stop worshiping your favorite directors and continue developing your own ideas.

[andrea wilkins]

Well, for me, the best film of the last 10 years. Deeply moving, for me, a film student, this is a true inspiration. I didn't care much about Japon, I hated Batalla en el Ciello, but Silent Light had me all excited, like nothing I've seen recently.