BATTLE IN HEAVEN (NOT RATED) **

 

Directed by Carlos Reygadas. 98 minutes.

Starring Marcos Hernandez, Anapola Mushkadiz, Bertha Ruiz and David Bornstien. Released by Tartan Films.

 

Carlos Reygadas is surely the Mexican director that best uses visuals to express himself since Alejandro Jodorowsky. He uses images solely to express his narratives and, quite often, to shock his audience. In his 2003 debut, Japon, which was critically lauded and partly respected by me, Reygadas told the story of a painter who goes to the countryside to commit suicide, where he meets an old woman and they strike up an unusual love affair. The film featured semi-graphic sex sequences, a horrific scene in which a bird is killed and a masturbation scene. The film made up for its lack of narrative with some beautiful images. Though he bares some similarity to Jodorowsky, he is certainly not nearly as bizarre, but also not nearly as effective.

 

Battle in Heaven is his second feature, which ups the ante on shock value and, perhaps, character development, as well as providing some more divine images, but Reygadas is so intent on slapping his audience across the face visually and keeping them at a distance at the same time that the result is uneven, at best. The film opens with a bang, or close to it. We see a nude, heavyset Mexican man receiving oral sex from a pretty, young dreadlocked woman. Reygadas cuts to her eyes, where tears drip down her cheeks.

 

The film jumps into a story that we never see, but only learn about through words. Marcos, the heavyset man, and his equally heavyset wife are desperately poor, selling cakes and goods to people in the subway. We learn through their conversations that they botched a kidnapping by accidentally killing an infant they were going to use for ransom money. We later learn that Marcos works as a driver for a general’s daughter, Ana, who happens to be the girl giving him a blowjob at the film’s beginning. Both Marcos and Ana have secret other lives. He with his kidnapping, and she with a brothel, of sorts, that she runs with some friends (?) of hers.

 

There is a lot of sex in this film, which, of course, has branded Reygadas as being a director who provides intimate, cinema verite pictures of the real world or, at least, Mexico. I think Battle in Heaven, but not Japon, however; is more Larry Clarke than it is Catherine Breillat. In other words, the sex, like the violence which comes later in the film, borders on the exploitative, certainly as the film goes on. For example, the opening oral sex sequence shocks the audience, but we have yet to give Reygadas time to justify his visuals. Then, there is a later sex scene in which Ana straddles Marcos, rolls over and leaves the audience to stare at Marcos’ wilting penis. We cut to a close up of Ana’s vagina. If you are asking ‘Why?’ then we are on the same page.

 

The film ends in another blowjob sequence, but a more manipulative one, considering all that takes place before it. There is also a sex scene in which Marcos and his wife and heave and grunt, and then leaves Bertha Ruiz – the wife – to stroll naked around the room for several minutes. The film climaxes violently – there is a shocking knife slashing even more gasp-worthy than the one in the far superior Cache, but there is no real purpose for it. Reygadas seems to be going for shock value alone here, though he leaves us at such a distance from the film’s characters, though less so than in his previous effort, that the violent culmination just does not register in terms of why it happens.

 

Several positive reviews have called the film ‘political’ and a story about ‘redemption,’ but neither of these attributes is apparent here. There are several sequences in which the Mexican flag is raised and lowered and soldiers walk by in formation. These scenes both follow graphic oral sex sequences, so what does that mean? There is a fair amount of religious iconography, which results in a mixture of the sacred and the profane, most notably while Marcos and his wife have sex doggy style and he stares at a picture of Christ and another scene in which he stares at a mural of Christ, where pubic hair is barely visible. In terms of redemption, there is a scene in which Marcos attends a religious pilgrimage that he and his wife constantly talk about but, immediately before that, he gruesomely kills someone. So, redemption is slightly far-fetched. The film’s final scene is equally mysterious.

 

Reygadas has mastered filmmaking in terms of visual artistry, but he does not convey what he wants his films to say. I do not believe every film should spell out its meaning or even necessarily have a straightforward one. But, Reygadas appears to have something to say in his films. But what?