My 10 Worst Films Of 2008: 2: Silent Light
I think that my response to putting this at number two will be hordes (two) people telling me how much I don’t get it. Silent Light, by Mexican director (I refuse to call him an auteur) Carlos Reygadas, was critically gushed over this time last year. And its just out in the States and has been critically gushed over there too. And I hated it. I and my companion came out after its ponderous two hours, looked at each other with disgust. My friend had said she wanted, as a New Years resolution, to see more arthouse films. I’ll go see anything, so I was pleased to have a companion. But Silent Light annoyed us into almost swearing off arthouse cinema forever. It certainly makes me wary when reviews use words like majesty, deliberate, transcendentalist (OK that last one should have been a clue). Its not just that Silent Light is dull. I can deal with dull but beautiful, and I cannot argue that there are moments of Silent Light which are breathtakingly beautiful. But its the moments between those two moments (the start and finish) which make up the lions share of this film, and that was a story which just didn’t grab and sort of offended me.
So the bad then (ie eleven twelfths of the film). A Mennonite community of farmers in Mexico live their slow, country god-fearing ways. It supposedly looks idyllic but for
a) knowing that things that look idyllic in films never are
b) scrub land in the middle of nowhere living a closeted life with a language only you and twenty other people speak, hating your family and wife is not my description of idyllic.
There’s a problem. I am supposed to be interested in this set-up but I am not. I have seen my fair share of Amish and other religious sects in the movies and they tend to annoy me. Their own artificial rules of life create a load of plot engines which always feel artificial and inherently patronising from a film-maker who, by virtue of being a film-maker, is an outsider.
So here there is an aching sadness, some abuse and a bizarre death sequence which is supposed to be metaphorical, or symbolic but in a film which strives for naturalism is just plain bizarre. But not bizarre in a way that is interesting. More bizarre in a way that makes you want to throw the towel in and walk out. And you can walk out quite happily before the end as it ends as it begun.
So it is only fair to talk about the twelfth that is good. Namely the first five minutes. When I say good, I mean striking. And not in a way that is original, but rather technically well done. It starts, simply, with a five minute long widescreen countryside sunrise. Crickets and cicadas screeching at us and the light slowly fades in. Its lovely if a bit like something that might work better in an art gallery and has little to do with the film. But it sets you up for the promise of something good which is slowly drilled out of you. Which is where the last five minutes come in. Because the last five minutes is the same scene in sunset. But whereas the sunrise was inspiring, by the time the last five minutes come on, you just want to leave and be done with the film.
But hey, don’t say I don’t give you anything. Here are those first five minutes so you don’t need to see the rest of the film.
Pete Baran in FT • 125 views • Share/Save
I had a similar response to “Spirit of the Beehive” by Victor Erice which I saw a few months ago. Incredible cinematography, a great performance from 6-year-old Ana Torrent, and yet… it’s the sort of film where the camera lingers on a guy putting a kettle on a stove to boil for a few minutes. I don’t know much about art, but I know what I find hard to like.
Never watched a Reygadas film to my knowledge but from all the descriptions I’ve read he sounds intimidatingly, aggressively auteurish.
Re 1: See also Days Of Heaven – enough wheat fields already (picks up with the fire, mind).
Thing about Spirit Of The Beehive, I liked it a lot despite its ponderousness. But then I realised than rather than watching a film about a young girls reaction to seeing James Whale’s Frankenstein, I’d much rather watch Frankenstein meself like.
spirit of the beehive is 20 billion trillion times better than days of heaven
I like all of the above mentioned films. I think if you have problems with El Espiritu de la Colmena, you won’t much like El Sol del membrillo (The Quince-Tree Sun), which I love, but is almost entirely composed of long stretches of a man painting (watching paint dry, quite literally). And let’s not even go near Bela Tarr or Chantal Akerman in that case, eh?
But no, I agree re the ending to Silent Light, it’s a little bit too Ordet, yes? I mean, everything that Reygadas was reaching for had been done already by Carl Th Dreyer, and more than half a century ago at that!
Yet on the whole I liked the mood. But I have a high tolerance for the long-take not-much-happening style.
The Happening. THE HAPPENING.
haha i just discovered that the present-day mennonites are WANNABE LOLLARDS who (some of them) attempt a historical martyred-apostolic succession back to jesus via the CATHARS and their (imagined) predecessors
Spirit of the Beehive was ultimately a success for me as most of the curious choices of focus could be interpreted as a child’s-eye-view of the world: a different sense of what’s interesting or compelling. Though many of the scenes didn’t even have the child present, so I don’t know I was on the right track or just clutching at straws in my quest to rationalize the choices of content.
In general I am wary of this kind of things though. There’s a scene in Gus Van Sant’s Cobainesque movie Last Days which ends with the camera panning slowly away from the action and coming to rest on a nondescript bit of roadside greenery for about a minute or two. Is the implication that the camera is as spaced, alienated and/or out of its box as the central character? Buggered if I knew.
One film I did really like that used alternate criteria for what the camera considers interesting is oblique Hungarian murder mystery Hukkle: as far as I could tell what was going on there is a camera lens that represents an alien’s point of view that has no strong idea of what’s interesting and what isn’t. Because it has no prejudice towards focusing on the human story that is going on in the village where the movie is set, the audience has to pay quite close attention to discover what the “plot” is from background clues, and becoming a detective in that way turned out to be quite a lot of fun.