Battle in Heaven

(Carlos Reygadas, Mexico)

By Pedro Butcher

The films of Carlos Reygadas can be seen as a tough reaction to the omnipresence of melodrama in Latin culture. Beginning on the radio and eventually ending up as a TV staple, melodrama became the force behind a genre-driven movie industry that grew in the ’40s and ’50s, achieving wide commercial success in South America and even the US, where some theatres showed exclusively Mexican films (like those of Emilio “Indio” Fernandez, who received a well-deserved homage in this year’s Cannes Classics section). Even a prestigious director like Arturo Ripstein, the last of the Mexican habitués in Cannes, used melodrama—though rationalized and re-elaborated—as the basis of his work.

But then came Japón (2002), Reygadas’ feature début, which pointed out possible new directions for Mexican cinema. As he has confirmed even more firmly in Battle in Heaven, the first Mexican film to compete in Cannes since 1999, tear-jerking naturalism is not his concern. By denying melodrama and, even more, its variations in the form of magic realism, Reygadas struggles to broaden the field of audiovisual expression in Latin America while searching for a personal language. And he also seems to bear his own influence, as seen in the Un Certain Regard entry Sangre, by Amat Escalante, his assistant director: in Sangre, watching telenovelas is as much part of a Mexican’s daily life as sex and meals, but the mise en sc è ne owes more to Reygadas than the rest of Mexican cinema.

Though Reygadas’ filmic influences are from the European tradition, it doesn’t mean he has closed his eyes to his own reality. While the more abstract Japón strived for universality, Battle in Heaven is very much Mexican and Latin American, reflecting some of its most complex issues with a very straightforward approach. If Japón was settled in a deserted, rarefied landscape where a man preparing to kill himself regains his will to live by designing a pathway from death to life, Battle in Heaven is an urban tragedy that, on the contrary, takes the road from life to death.

The film’s central character is Marcos (Marcos Hernandez), a private security agent who undertakes two terrible, violent acts. The first one occurs just before the film begins. With his wife, Marcos kidnapped a baby—from one of his neighbours, or maybe a relative—and the baby somehow died. The second violent act, which will initiate the process of his destruction, and is preceded by a foreshadowing 360-degree pan, is one of the most disturbing scenes in recent cinema. The first two-thirds of Battle in Heaven are shot mostly in widescreen, interior close-ups, to give greater impact to the final third, which frames Mexico City in beautiful, almost frightening wide shots. The megalopolis, with its population of 20 million and its monumental Our Lady of Guadalupe basilica, is the via crucis where Marcos will engender his brutal self-punishment.

Like Brazilian Cinema Novo director Glauber Rocha, Reygadas translates Latin America ’s conflicted soul into cinemaby employing a particular baroque style. We should understand “baroque” in the sense of a relation of Heaven and Earth: he’s not talking about redemption, but about religion as a ritualistic, concrete phenomenon, directly related to the body. That’s why sex becomes so important for Reygadas. He starts Battle in Heaven with a much-discussed fellatio scene, accompanied by music of epic proportions. But what we see isn’t at all erotic. It’s much more an effort to isolate the body of his main character and, at the same time, penetrate the film’s heart: his relation with a young woman that will be decisive for the film’s conclusion.

Some could argue that Reygadas’ efforts aren’t at all new due to that strong European imprint—the most obvious influences being Bresson, Dreyer, and Tarkovsky. But the clash of Mexican reality with these directors’ formal devices, such as Bresson’s use of non-actors and his materialist approach, or Dreyer’s mysterious framing and dialogue, produces an almost “foreign”—yet never exotic—point of view. Tarkovsky, the most obvious presence in Japón, reappears in Battle in Heaven as a more discreet but beautiful reference, with the final shots of the church bells strongly alluding to Andrei Rublev (1969). And the sometime-Mexican Luis Buñuel is another inevitable reference, with the Belle de Jour-like (1967) female lead (a beautiful upper-class girl who secretly works as a prostitute) and the Viridiana-inspired (1961) approach to religious issues.

Reygadas once said that “the good cinema spectator is not the one that goes to cinema to escape from life, but the one that goes to cinema to live.” Cinema, for him, is not a closed system, but an interpretation of the world. Therefore, his set of "influences" reflect much more than a passion to the movies. They express a philosophical point of view. In Reygadas' hands, these references are more than empty postmodern resources; they are tools with which he tries to build a personal interpretation of the madness of the world in a Latin American context.

Battle in Heaven

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