“Tell me why I should go see a fucking movie that’s in Mennonite!” — Joshua Rothkopf.
Consider the gauntlet thrown down. The above quote comes from a “pubcast” posted last week by Aaron Hillis on his first day as editor of GreenCine Daily. In this conversation between Hillis, Rothkopf, David Fear and Matt Zoller-Seitz, about where film criticism currently is and where they’d like to see it go, the verdict seemed to be that everyone would like to see more clear-headed advocacy, free of snark and academic flourish. The film implicitly referenced is that pullquote Silent Light – which, though made by Carlos Reygadas in an Mexican Mennonite community and featuring a number of real-life Mennonites in lieu of professional actors, is not “in Mennonite,” but the obscure German dialect Plautdietsch. That kind of quibble, of course, doesn’t really matter. What does matter, is a) that Silent Light is finally having its official for-profit US premiere tomorrow at Film Forum in New York City, and b) Rothkopf’s point is valid. The thing most expressed by most Stateside writers (including myself) to audiences about this near-masterpiece has nothing to do with what’s actually on screen. It’s that, since the film’s debut at Cannes in 2007, Silent Light been rather difficult to see.
That wasn’t intended as a pun, but maybe it should be taken as one: though Light’s path to US distribution has been both thorny and worth noting, it’s also a relatively painless thing to put into plain language. The experience of actually watching Silent Light is not summarized so easily. At its basest level, Silent Light is a film about the gulf between what we can explain (based on evidence and experience and a common language for things that happen to all people) and things we can’t, things which push our understanding of the way the universe works and what it means to be a part of it. Like any number of visually extraordinary epics about big ideas which open up new avenues of interpretation on each viewing (2001 is the example that, perhaps oddly, comes quickest to my mind), words are not always its best advertisements.
This is what I can say, in the plainest language in which I can say it. Silent Light stars Cornelio Wall Fehr (a non-actor in as fully-realized a performance as I’ve seen) as Johan, an early middle aged husband, father and farmer who takes a local woman named Marianne (Maria Pankratz) as his mistress. Maybe “mistress” is the wrong word, because it implies secrecy, and the excruciating twist to Silent Light’s love triangle is the compulsion of this religiously devout but maritally unfaithful man to constantly confess. Johan not only reveals his feelings and his indiscretions to his best friend Zacharias (who thinks it’s a blessing that Johan has found his “natural woman”) and his father (who thinks the same is a curse), but to his long-suffering wife, Esther (played by Miriam Toews, a Canadian novelist acting for the first time). For much of Silent Light, Esther resigns herself to living with a man who not only betrays her, but betrays the knowledge that he betrays her –– not just with words, but with distant, dreamy gazes mid-prayer and private crying jags –– leaving her essentially helpless to watch as he drifts back and forth between teary agony, oblivious bliss, and contrite confession. And then one day, Esther spectacularly cracks, with tragic consequences.
It’s clear that Johan is in two kinds of love, and both are very real. His relationship with Esther is, as far as we see, chaste, but sweetly domestic. When he looks at her it’s with a mix of the contentment (one player in this triangle will call it “peace”) that comes from a shared life built one day at a time over years, and a clear longing to spare his wife from the pain that he knows his mixed feelings have brought her. That respect, that will to protection, cannot keep Johan from Marianne, and a relationship that plays out under the tropes of teenage love: endless kissing, urgent sex, permanent angst. But despite encouragement from his male confidantes to choose one woman or the other — and thereby cast these feelings that Johan himself can’t comprehend as the work of either angels or devils — Johan does nothing at all. He seems to prefer the agony of purgatory, the time-stopping defense of indecision. Early in the film, Johan literally stops a clock so that he can be alone with his emotional trauma and paralysis. The clock stays stopped until Johan’s inner turmoil and its external consequences are divinely resolved.
If it’s impossible to overlook how closely Silent Light borrows, at least narratively, from Carl Dreyer’s Ordet, it’s equally impossible to ignore Reygadas’ masterful artistic choices with which he sets the familiar narrative cogs into motion. Reygadas’ stylistic MO on this film seems to be a boiling down of the vast into the microscopic. The much-vaunted opening shot, in which a deep night sky gives way to early morning light set to a thunderous symphony of ambient and animal noises that could be called Everything In Nature, All Happening At Once, condenses approximately six hours of the Earth’s rotation into six minutes of film. For every moment that Reygadas inflates (Johan’s never-ending, lens-flare spotted first on-screen kiss with Marianne), he also conflates (in a single cut, we move from warm summer to icy winter, skipping over unknown months and narrative detail). For every scene that feels drawn out to the speed of dream time, with every vague gesture almost registering on the level of the subconscious, every now and then there’ll be a moment of incredible precision, such as when Johan very simply explains to Zacharias that thinking about the hurt that reverberates from his affair makes him feel as though his “guts have been filled with lead.” Two and a half hours of inordinate beauty are thus, with six brutal words, knocked down to earth, via language we can all relate to.
Ultimately, the words that serve as rhe most compelling evidence as to why you should see this “fucking Mennonite movie,” come from the fucking Mennonite movie’s own script. When Johan confesses to Zacharias that he’s gone back to Marianne even after swearing he’d quit her, Zacharias tries to convince his friend that maybe things aren’t so bad, that maybe Johan’s feelings are “based in something sacred…even if we don’t understand it.” Soon after, Johan temporarily gives himself over to the giddy high of his obsession with Marianne: he dances into his pick-up truck, and literally drives circles around his friend in glee, before speeding off to one of the most romantically rendered adulterous kisses in recent movie memory. In these brief moments, Johan is liberated to not understand what’s happening to him or inside him or to the people around him, while Reygadas telegraphs that experience directly to the viewer. Silent Light is a film dedicated to making the incomphresensible tangible, visible, even half-knowable. And that’s why you should go see a movie that’s in fucking Mennonite.
Originally posted on:
SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth