GOD & A BOTTLE

Tonight’s movie was Silent Light, a film that i decided to see on premise alone: the patriarch of a Mennonite family begins an extramarital affair and slowly becomes convinced that the ‘other woman’ is part of God’s will. That glib sentence sells this breathtaking film way short, and I’ll fumble forward for meaning and express one huge reservation after the cut.

I was in love with this movie before its masterful opening shot was over. We’re treated to a long sunrise on a Mexican countryside, a shot that lingers for close to seven minutes before we begin the action proper.

And even then, “action” is the wrong word. The film is gorgeously lethargic, holding silences for eternities, reducing paragraphs of emotion to a handful words, dedicating whole scenes to following a car as it drives down a deserted country road. Carlos Reygadas flair for images is flat-out astonishing — the composition of most of these shots is breathtaking. I could watch this guy crawl a camera across wheat fields for six hours. Even when we’re doing nothing more than watching a child’s silent face, it’s absolutely transfixing.

Because it’s so methodically paced, when true wrenching human emotion finally does surface — in the middle of a rainstorm, no less — it’s devastating, a final awful payoff for two hours of watching silent agony build and build and build. The film is even-handed and almost ruthlessly naturalistic, its slowness generating an aura of solemnity that — fittingly enough — feels downright religious.

Which is why the film’s final minutes were such a total fucking drag to me. It’s possible I’m being a clod by interpreting literally the One Big Thing that happens at the end of the film, but there’s nothing that precedes it that implies I should do otherwise. It rang incredibly false to me, a kind of Lars Von Trier Big Statement that was out of step with the rest of the movie’s quiet determinsim. It was like I’d spent two hours lovingly consuming a piece of angel food cake only to discover the middle was full of mayonnaise.

Someone, tell me I’m wrong! If only the director had been available for a Q&A I hadn’t been so goddamned hungry that I skipped the Q&A, I could have asked Reygadas about this myself.