Cinema Mishmash

Battle in Heaven is my introduction to Mexican Director Carlos Reygadas. Over the last several years, I have had an unseen copy of his feature directorial debut, Japon (2002), both on VHS tape from cable (since discarded) and on a DVR recording (on two different systems that have since been replaced). After experiencing Battle in Heaven (his second feature), I am ashamed to have been somehow subconsciously avoiding his work. Not since being introduced to Michael Haneke (with Time of the Wolf) has a film’s deliberate, bold, and assured style so fully captured my attention.

Based upon only this film, there are clear parallels to be drawn to Haneke. The central character here, a poor and overweight security guard who has been chauffeuring a wealthy general’s daughter around Mexico City for 15 years, is the type of psychologically flat character that would be right at home in a Haneke picture. For the most part, that’s true of the entire cast of characters. As he so brilliantly symbolizes by a soccer sequence in the middle of the film, Reygadas is making his audience hyper-suggestive to his film’s subtext by deliberately slowing down the action, muting the actors’ expressions, and manipulating the sound. Cinema crafted by someone who fully understands its consumption is impossible ignore, and I found myself transfixed for 98 minutes.

And no, my observational state was not a mere consequence of the visually erotic opening scene, and the several that followed. (The film’s explicit sexuality distinguishes it from Haneke’s work to date.) While the opening is certainly attention-getting, I’m going to make a comment which I found (and still find) preposterous when made by several critics about the sex in Michael Winterbottom’s 9 Songs: the scenes aren’t really very sexy. Marcos is so passionless, so absent, that the intended effect is not to titillate, but to stimulate a cerebral observation about the animal aspects of humanity. There is a lot being said here about not merely poverty, but disparity, and how institutional systems, ranging the whole gamut between church and state, are promising much and delivering little the masses in Mexico City. In one scene, Marcos is asked a question translated as, “Are you on top or on the bottom today?” The double entendre, if it even exists in the original Spanish, appears unintentional. The question is merely, “How are you?” – yet it suggests that for Marcos and those around him, life has become a struggle to remain on top of the overwhelming societal forces (even those that appear benign) that seek to control, if not to suppress, his spirit.

I must close by saying that the final scene really threw me for a loop. At first I found it superfluous, but immediately rejected the idea that a director so deliberate and conscientious would include a single unnecessary frame. Instead, the final scene actually changes my entire perception of the film. Are the bookends of the film pure fantasy, a figment of Marcos’ imagination? The final sequence is the only time Marcos smiles. Is this because he has been released from his earthly turmoil? Or, perhaps, the cinematic bookends are the only deception of reality, and everything in the middle is the type of nightmare that sometimes flashes through your mind in a moment of passion, anxiety, or fatigue. The title of the film is presumably a biblical reference to the eternal struggle between the supernatural forces of good an evil over the fate of humanity. On an much smaller scale, that very battle is destined to destroy Marcos, no matter which side ultimately prevails.