Battle in Heaven

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.

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