Battle in Heaven opens with a deliberate, calculated provocation. It seems to be a very explicit fantasy sequence involving a young and rather beautiful woman performing an iconic sex act on an obviously less attractive older man. To be blunt, he’s fat, and blank-faced. The camera spins around the actors, coming to rest in the man’s place so we see this woman from his point of view — the audience is placed in the position of being on the receiving end of this sexual act, an act which seems to be not of love, exactly, but of kindness.
The scene of fellatio, reprised at the film’s end, is dissimilar
to the rest of the movie in tone and visual design. It’s almost
abstract in its conception — I remember nothing in the way of
set dressing and a blank, vaguely luminous, background — and
I’m not sure what exactly it’s meant to represent. Perhaps
it’s a scene that takes place in the Heaven of the film’s
title. There is a scene later in the film where this same man has
sex with a wife who is built quite thickly, and the camera lingers
for long moments on the rounded swells of her flesh. It becomes clear
that bodies are a great visual motif for Reygadas.
Reygadas leaves a clear auteurist stamp, but at the same time scenes
like this one have a documentary feel, owing mainly to his decision
to cast the film with non-professional actors. (The man’s name
is Marcos, and he’s played by a man named Marcos Hernandez. The
young woman is named Ana, and she’s played by a woman named Anapola
Mushkadiz.) More to the point, these scenes cast the audience in the
role of reluctant voyeur; we live in a world where Scarlett Johannson’s
pale ass smiles happily at us from the frontispiece of a mainstream
magazine, but the screen presence of a large, naked Mexican woman with
purple spider veins is a spectacle to which we’ve not yet grown
accustomed. Watching her, I found myself wondering how she felt about
baring her body on screen; how her co-actor felt about pretending to
mount her from behind; what the conversations must have been like in
which Reygadas convinced them both to participate.
The film’s explicitness is crucial to its meaning. By dwelling
on both types of bodies — the trim and conventionally beautiful
versus the flabby and utterly ordinary — Reygadas emphasizes
both physical closeness and economic distance. He seems less interested
in bodies in the erotic sense than in the way that they can be indicators
of class — in the sense that body shapes are influenced by economics,
because the folks without the money to dine well end up feasting on
junk instead, which sticks to their figures.
If I’m writing about this film in clinical terms, it’s
because I don’t know quite what to make of it. The plot is oddly
sensationalistic, given Reygadas’ resolutely imperturbable approach.
Marcos and his wife, who sells clocks and cakes from a blanket spread
on the floor of a subway station, are in trouble. Desperate for money,
they have kidnapped a baby for ransom — and the infant has died
before the mother, an acquaintance, was able to raise the cash. Marcos
knows Ana because he chauffers for her father, a general. She’s
well-off but moonlights in a brothel, and because he knows her secret,
he gets a little action on the side. Things eventually go very badly,
and Marcos ends up setting off on a pilgrimage to the shrine of the
Virgen de Guadalupe, where he seeks some kind of inner peace.
The Virgen de Guadalupe is celebrated in Mexico as a sort of national
symbol, and the film is bookended not just by the spectacle of Ana’s
blow jobs, but by images of the unfurling and collapse of a huge Mexican
flag. As personal as Marcos’ story seems to be, it suggests that
Reygadas has national identity on his mind. But I keep coming back
to Marcos, who seems to be out of his league just existing in this
world.
Reygadas conceives another sex scene audaciously, opening on a medium
shot of Ana on top of Marcos, screwing him gamely but joylessly. The
camera goes out the window and pans around 360 degrees to take in the
entirety of the Mexico City neighborhood around that bedroom before
coming back to the place where it began, an echo of the circling camera
move that opened the film. (The focus then shifts to Marcos’ dick
going flaccid.) Once again, the scene emphasizes the differences between
these two as much as their casual intimacy (the movie’s poster
is a frame blow-up from this scene, and Marcos has been carefully Photoshopped
out of it). And there’s an important scene later in the film
showing the schlubby Marcos sitting alone, totally alien, in Ana’s
tastefully appointed apartments. It suggests the chasm that gapes between
them. And then he explodes.