With the likes of Alfonso Cuarón and Alejandro González Iñárritu among his admirers, Carlos Reygadas has emerged as the Mexican filmmaker’s filmmaker. Moreover, with his previous two features – Japón and Battle in Heaven – he proved himself among the most distinctive voices in contemporary world cinema. Screened to rapturous acclaim in Cannes, where Reygadas won a much deserved Best Director award, Silent Light is the Mexican’s most assured and least contentious feature yet.
Set amidst a Mennonite community in Chihuahua, northern Mexico, the minimalist narrative focuses on the plight of Johan (Cornelio Wall Fehr), a respected husband and father who breaks the rules of his society by embarking on an affair with another woman (María Pankratz). Johan has been honest with his wife (Miriam Toews) about his adultery, but this does little to reconcile the conflicts raging within him.
Inspired by primal, Neo-Biblical imagery and the work of Carl Dreyer (whose Ordet is directly referenced), Silent Light is a moving meditation on love and betrayal. Shot almost entirely in the Mennonite’s traditional Plautdietsch language, and shorn of sexual explicitness, Reygadas again uses non-actors to superlative effect, casting for their Kuleshov-like expressiveness and teasing out performances of remarkable intensity.
Working for the first time with cinematographer Alexis Zabé, and using only natural light, the film is a visual and spiritual tour de force. The opening and closing time-lapse photography sequences, which reveal a night sky as it slowly turns from dawn to daybreak, are among the most breathtakingly executed cinematic moments of our age.
Though the director has complete mastery of both sound and vision, this is no cold and calculating exercise in technical bravado, but rather a tender, moving and profoundly spiritual work from a first class filmmaker. In a cultural climate in which even the most mediocre works are commonly described as ‘masterpieces’, Silent Light offers evidence of the true value of the term.
