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Carlos Reygadas' latest film opens with what will almost certainly be the most audacious and beautiful opening shot you'll see all year: a limitless Milky Way that rotates and shifts behind silhouetted trees and slowly fades from sight at the burning crack of dawn, at once evoking the realism, the hidden world and the mysterious Cosmos that will pervade the rest of the film. And it doesn't let up, offering one widescreen vista after another reaching into infinity with an almost electrifying physical clarity as it tells its quiet story of a marital affair within a Mennonite community in Mexico. Even more impressively, its visual clarity is matched by the emotional clarity of its characters, all of whom come across as struggling, intelligent adults who hold no secrets; there are no heroes or villains here.

The drama builds to a shocking conclusion that immediately recalls Carl Theodore Dreyer's masterpiece of hushed spiritual realism, Ordet (1955). But Reygadas' vision is less philosophically structured than Dreyer's; his is a more existential and inexplicable miracle that resonates like an echo of a symmetry buried deep within the universe itself.

 

Doug Cummings on 4th March 2008
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