CARLOS REYGADAS: METAPHYSICIST AND PROVOCATEUR
by Damir Radić

The archetypal combination of eros and thanatos has been the favorite preoccupation of many artists from different periods, areas, of different world views and sensibility, but rarely, in the history of film, has any author dealt with it in such a devoted and intense way, freed from discipline and pathetic civil scruples, as Carlos Raygadas. Only three of his feature films were enough for this 37 year-old cineast from Mexico City to reach the status of one of the most famous, and also most controversial film artists of today. He is, with no doubt, one of the youngest Mexican cinema aces (Arriaga, Iñárritu, Cuarón, Del Toro), and the only one who managed to hold out from the calls of the USA. All of his films were created in Mexican-European co-productions.
With no formal education for a director, but with an enthusiasm and faith in himself, much as the character of a bell maker boy from “Andrej Rubljov” made by his favorite author Tarkovski, he invested his own five thousand dollars as the initial amount in a feature debut “Japan” (Japón). The film was a sensation on the global scene in 2002. It received many recognitions in numerous festivals, as well as a special Caméra d'Or mention in Cannes. After boldly deciding to use a rare combination of a 16 mm film and a broad canvas, he even more boldly chose his protagonists- a middle-aged city man with suicidal tendencies and a rural old woman close to her biological end. He put them in a spacious ambient of the authentic nature, connecting them with the unexpected erotic ties. Has anyone else ever in the history of film, in the meditative- existentialist mode with untamed sexual explicitness, as Reygadas, actually tried to achieve something similar?
The question is purely rhetorical. This Mexican iconoclast went even further in his next film, this time located in a big city, “Battle in Heaven” (Batalla en el cielo, 2005). While in “Japan” the tabooed sexual relationship between the middle-aged man and an old woman was previously shown at the end of the film, this time his strike on conventional images of sexual interaction came at the very beginning- in an explicit scene where a young and beautiful girl performs fellatio on a middle-aged, by the general standards, unsightly man, and all this before the first letters of the film opening appear. What a sight! A big, dark, slimy, black native fallus in the mouth of a bright occidental girl with soft lips and skin, down on her knees, and completely surrendered to the pleasure of sucking, with a tear falling down her face and a general atmosphere of a solemn moment.

Subversive interaction of porn and subliminal elements, which in its radical approach outmatches all that could have been offered in the time of Oshima, Pasolini or Bertolucci, has astonished the critics and the audience. Both were unprepared for such daring breakthroughs, even in the actual time of the so called “striptease culture” that pretends to be characterized by a complete sexual freedom. So, while “Japan” deals with humanly eroticism of the unconventional, and for that exact reason with the deeply natural and socially-endangered protagonists, “Battle in Heaven” is based on the dialectics of the holy and demonical in the erotic complex of love and sex, with the logical s/m implications, and the climax is reached in a bloody scene when a cold, sharp knife penetrates the warm, soft body of a girl. Crime and punishment, sin and redemption, personal chaos of the soul, and the mass chaos of the religious ceremony mark the dramatic ending of this brilliant, but predictably enough, Reygadas’s least appreciated work.

The idiosyncratic cineast was able to regain the big sympathy of critics and prestigious festivals (numerous awards including, the Jury Prize in Cannes) with his latest, last year’s film Silent Night (Stellet Licht), an ode to the Nordic, metaphysical, but also “natural-working” tradition from Kierkegaard, Hamsun, Sjöström, Stiller and Dreyer to Bergman and Troell. Sin, repentance and redemption along with a story set into a Germanophone community of Mexican Mennonites, are here also closely connected to eroticism. Reygadas portrays the possibility of prurience without any sexual explicitness, this time in a very subtle, “Victorian” way, by discovering eroticism in slender, gracious figures and sophisticated faces of women whose clothes reveal nothing, but also in a possible, implicit pro-lesbian suggestion. Insisting on the long, dominantly static and carefully combined takes, he clearly points to following the “Nordic metaphysical teachings” in order for the final scene, by quoting Dryer’s classical masterpiece “Word”, to pay honors to the best part of a human nature-love, goodness, and hope.

Carlos Reygadas portrays the rare combination of a metaphysicist, and in the best French sense of the word, provocateur. He is an author who succeeds to connect what is considered as traditionally high, and traditionally low, in a natural and distinctive way creating fascinating films that cannot be easily compared to anything similar in the history of film of today.