Mennonite love

Carlos Reygadas’s rural drama Silent Light is long and slow but full of moments of beauty

SUBLIME STILLNESS: Silent Light

by MALCOLM FRASER

A prizewinner at last year’s Cannes festival, Silent Light, the latest from Mexican director Carlos Reygadas (Japón, Battle in Heaven) opens with a long shot of a night sky slowly being overtaken by a sunrise, revealing a sprawl of farmer’s fields. The patience-testing pace, the eye for the beauty of nature and the sublime quality of light set the tone for the rest of the film, a drama set among a Mennonite community in Mexico (who knew?).

Johan (Cornelio Wall Fehr) and Esther (Miriam Toews) are the parents of a huge farming family. When Fehr sends his brood out to work the farm, then takes a moment to collapse into a fit of crying, it’s clear that something is amiss. We gradually find out that he’s fallen for another woman in a nearby community, Marianne (Maria Pankratz).

The adulterous dilemma, with a man caught between his family responsibilities and the charms of a seductress, is about as well-tread a premise as possible, but in Reygadas’s hands, it’s far from clichéd, and in the curious context of the Mennonite world, the struggle between tradition and desire is even more pronounced.

Like Lucía Puenzo’s recent XXY, Silent Light starts off with a feeling of impending chaos, like a horror flick or one of Michael Haneke’s emotional torture chambers. But in both films, the chaos that eventually hits is internal. Silent Light has moments of rural beauty that recall Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven, but it’s more like a Bergman-esque study of emotional turmoil, with an unexpected magical-realist twist near the end.

As in his previous films, Reygadas employs non-professional actors, in this case all members of various Mennonite communities. To a one, they do stillness and inner angst very well.

Reaching nearly two and a half hours at an unrelentingly glacial pace, this is most definitely not a film for the ADD set; comparatively, Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers feels like the latest Indiana Jones flick. But the peculiar setting keeps things interesting, the cast is compelling and the cinematography and editing are truly exceptional. If you have the patience for a long, slow drama, you’ll find some moments that are as close to perfection as a film can reach.

Silent Light opens this
Friday, June 27

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