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As Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura
was in 1960, Carlos Reygadas’ Battle in Heaven was the enfant terrible at the
2005 Cannes Film Festival. With any luck, Heaven, like L’Avventura,
will one day make its mark in the film canon as the singular film experience it is. But
what was the source of the controversy? To put it bluntly, graphic sex scenes involving
obese, “ugly” people. Those are also accompanied by an obtuse narrative and
often enigmatic digressions. For many, this will be an artsploitation film, to others,
just boring, but to those willing to open themselves up to the unfamiliar, it just might
be sublime.
The movie’s opening, already infamous, presents a nude young
woman, Ana (Anapola Mushkadiz) performing fellatio on a heavyset middle-aged man, Marcos
(Marcos Hernandez), in a blank room. As she does so, she sheds tears, but probably not
for the reason most viewers might think. Marcos is a chauffeur (as Hernandez was in real
life for Reygadas’ father) to a Mexican military general. Ana is the general’s
nubile daughter who dallies in prostitution on the side. Only Marcos, who drives her to
her brothel, knows of her secret. Marcos also has a secret. He and his wife (Bertha Ruiz)
have kidnapped a child for ransom, but the child has unexpectedly died. Where this might
end the second act in most movies, this is where Battle in Heaven begins.
The rest of the story explores what happens when Marcos blurts out his
secret to Ana after she bestows upon him what might be seen as pity sex. The narrative
fails on a literal level, but it’s meant to be taken as an allegory for spiritual
redemption while tangentially relating the social conditions and class differences of
contemporary
Reygadas’ filmic brother-in-arms is Bruno Dumont (La
Vie de Jesus, L' Humanite). They both use
non-professional actors, display a coolly distant tone and share a cinematic interest in
combining earthiness with spirituality. It is these qualities that provide the key to
reading this film so often proclaimed opaque. While Battle in Heaven is open to
interpretation, the most obvious one is that the apparently gratuitous and explicit sex is
a metaphor for spiritual connection. Ana, whose singular physical beauty stands out, is a
Christ figure who tries to redeem Marcos by asking him to turn himself in. Marcos, who
with his wife, like Adam and Eve, have committed an egregious sin, stand in for humanity.
Their far-from-perfect bodies contrast with Ana’s “divine” form.
Reygadas’ treatment of Mushkadiz’s body as a container of
both sensuality and spirituality is reminiscent of Jean-Luc Godard’s similarly
memorable attempt with Myriem Roussel in Hail
Mary. Reygadas also incorporates a playful use of sound and/or silence for which
Godard is well known – notably blasting Bach in a scene at a gas station and erasing
the ringing of church bells.
While sex scenes have a history of controversy from In
the Realm of the Senses to Irreversible,
what is interesting here is that much of the clamor comes from Reygadas using the bodies
of regular people instead of supermodels. Ironically, he has made the ordinary shocking.
- George
Wu
