Silent Light, an unhurried, largely unmodulated story of faith and unfaithfulness in a Mexican Mennonite farming community, is fundamentally a study in opposites. Light and dark are considered in the images that bookend the film, twin tracking shots that depict, in time-lapse, gorgeous sunrise and sunset. So perfectly are these moments captured and compressed, despite the tricky decision to move the camera as they transpire, that the technical facility of director Carlos Reygadas and his crew, including cinematographer Alexis Zabé, is never in doubt. The pictures they gather, which find deep colors and a pregnancy of feeling in simple landscapes, stormy skies, and shadowy figures seen through windows and doorways, express meaning as the narrative progresses deliberately through its paces.
Battle in Heaven
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.