Retro Review by Nazeeh Alghazawneh
There are no bad guys in Carlos Reygadas’s Silent Light (2007). No villains, but enough narrative conflict and tension to foster a contempt for lack of a guilty party. In the film, an Anabaptist Mennonite family is caught within the intersection of devout conservatism and an affair that is inexplicably blessed by the grace of divinity. Johan, a farmer in Northern Mexico, is married to Esther and together they have a beautiful family of several children. The family’s surname is never revealed because that is the level of intimacy at work here; an omission of surnames places the audience directly within the fabric of the family structure; everyone is on a first name basis. Any easy parsing of what is going on here would make the film an impersonal spectacle as well as a convoluted bore. Reygadas is only interested in the very messiest components of our deepest transgressions because anything else would be the cinematic equivalent of making small talk. Marianne is Johan’s mistress, The Other Woman; Esther is completely aware of Marianne. Johan admits every indiscretion he commits to his wife, as if he is making Confession and she is a Fatherly conduit for God. Like the great Jesus-loving Kanye West so lucidly distills in his 2011 song “No Church in the Wild”: “deception is the only felony / So never fuck nobody without tellin' me.”
Silent Light’s aesthetics occupy a rather strange middle-space: the film is essentially shot like a documentary, with all the technological accoutrements of contemporary times, but narratively executed in a Biblical, fable-like way. From the magnificent six-minute opening of the sun hazily stretching, the progression of the light’s pour over the landscape feels sourced from an alternative reality – the feeling of a dreamy false memory settles in. The decision to cast actors that were not only non-professionals but Mennonites, a culture and people largely unknown to the world, further solidifies the film’s primary plane to that of ethnographic curiosity, not the high melodrama of a tortured love triangle. The plain, sturdy clothing worn by Johan’s community, utterly idiosyncratic to their niche customs, connotes the implication of religious dedication and steadfast conviction. Johan’s children are captured with unobtrusive, hand-held camera work as they bathe in a river. Reygadas’s direction here is naturally laissez-faire in home video fashion á la Jonas Mekas as one the of little Mennonite girls looks directly at the camera – a startling moment in the film that is simultaneously the apex of Silent Light’s documentational presentation and a red herring to the film’s eventual metaphysical intentions. The idyllic farming lifestyle of this tucked-away Mennonite community nods towards an Eden-like world.
In the second scene of the film, Esther is quite literally adorned in attire not too dissimilar from the Danish priest who inspired her faith (Menno Simons): an all-black dress with floral patterns that might as well be a priest cassock. The scene takes on this eerie sense of precarious dread through the staging of Esther’s POV: she stands behind Johan, in the doorway, looking at him as Johan has his back to her, looking forward. Johan is utterly enmeshed in his own world, with Esther firmly on the outside looking into her own marriage like a stranger. The walls of their kitchen are brightly decorated with beige patterns that starkly contrasts the black gown of a matriarch who somewhat looks out of place in their own home. Johan’s best friend insists that Johan has found his “natural woman” with Marianne despite his marital situation. It is absolutely no coincidence that Esther and Marianne are alarmingly similar in facial features/structure, to the point that they could be sisters. The marriage at the center of the film, pushing at the very boundaries of monogamy, appears to be a fluid trial-and-error approach that transcends anything their faith would deem “immoral” because for Johan to deny himself who he truly belongs with would be just as sacrilegious. The first scene in which the audience meets Marianne is a low-hanging tracking shot in the grass, as the camera hovers in between Johan’s legs while he climbs up a mountain to meet her. Reygadas places the camera firmly against the two lovers’ side-profiles, creating a 2D space against the wide blue sky, the sunlight refracting into the lens, basking them in bokeh divinity. They bore into each other’s eyes, Marianne perpetually looking like she’s on the verge of tears, the verge of collapsing in on herself, while Johan has the countenance of someone blissfully transitioning into the afterlife. Despite whatever their internal reconciliations may be, their shared sentiment is rooted in a complete and utter inability to do anything about the way they feel for one another.
The most shocking aspect of the single sex scene in Silent Light is that it isn’t shocking at all. Between Japón (2002), Battle in Heaven (2005) and Post Tenebras Lux (2012), Reygadas’s penchant for highly graphic sex scenes is well-documented, so the sweet and tender exchange found between Johan and Marianne emphasizes the sense of their union being necessary to the point of surviving. Johan’s gaze upon Marianne is almost a foil of her gaze upon him: Johan appears to have accepted the situation he has found himself in and cannot help his exultation; Marianne is objectively dissatisfied with the circumstances, the affair, the pain she is inevitably causing a woman that has never done anything to her – but there is nothing she can do about it, nothing either one of them can do. Johan gently caresses her face, he slowly unbuttons her shirt, he pleasures her with a mild amount of vigor, nothing too carnal. Tears trickle down Marianne’s face from a blurry complexion of guilt and ecstasy. She tells Johan that “this is the last time,” for her sake, not for his. She claims to Johan that “peace is stronger than love,” but if their love is operating with the ecclesiastical fervor that it clearly is, then history has shown that peace, or a lack thereof, has never stopped people from practicing their faith. “This is the saddest time of my life, Johan,” she says, “but also the best. I don’t regret anything.”