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Sex goes neo-realist at Cannes
Carlos Reygadas has dared to put lards of ugly flesh on the screen, reports Saibal Chatterjee.
Carlos Reygadas’ sex-laced, startlingly stark exploration of present-day Mexico City, Batalla en el Cielo (Battle in Heaven), has stirred up the somewhat staid Competition pot at the 58th Cannes Film Festival even as it has split critics covering the event right down the middle.
The applause at the end of the press screening was muted, to say the least, while the boos from certain sections were pretty audible. “The film turns out to be a disappointing turn-off,” says The Hollywood Reporter reviewer. “The film deliberately works against most cinematic expectations.”
“The scenes are drained of emotion. The cityscape of modern-day Mexico City is observed with documentary-like scrutiny but without any particular point of view,” Hollywood Reporter goes on to add.
The review in Screen International is so different that it might have been of quite another film: “Following on the heels of his demanding but brilliant first feature, Japon, Mexican director Carlos Reygadas now bulls his way into a so-far moribund Competition line-up to give us another exceptionally ambitious aesthetic effort.”
It really is rather difficult say which of the above reviews is closer to the reality, but there can be no denying that Battle in Heaven is a remarkably gutsy effort. It delves into a moral hell-hole is search of divine deliverance – Battle in Heaven is chock-a-block full with religious/Biblical/spiritual images and allusions that are played off, sometimes all too predictably but never preachily, against scenes of graphic, but deliberately unerotic, sex.
To put it in a single sentence, sex goes neo-realist in Reygadas’ unflinchingly provocative film. Battle in Heaven opens with a long fellatio sequence between a pretty young girl and a much older, pot-bellied, uncouth man. Opening with a close-up of the face of the man, the camera draws back languidly and moves around teasingly to gradually reveal the entire room – and the whole bodies -before finally zooming in on the face of the girl’s mouth at work.
Turns out that the podgy, middle-aged man is a general’s driver and the girl is the general’s daughter. This is obviously a completely amoral world. The man, aided by his much more corpulent and less scrupulous wife, kidnaps a child for ransom only to end up killing it.
The oversexed girl works in a brothel – not for the money, she has loads of it – simply for the thrill of prostituting herself. When the chauffeur confesses his crime to the girl, the wife blows her top and orders him not mess up things.
A little later in the film, the driver makes love to his grotesquely unshapely wife, both characters shorn off every piece of clothing. Never before has a filmmaker dared to put such lards of ugly flesh on the screen without the slightest semblance of an apology.
That is what makes Battle in Heaven a remarkable, if ostensibly flawed, film. It is certainly not half as contemplative and moving as Japon, which premiered in Cannes in 2002, but it is just as affecting, if only a trifle baffling. What really are these strange lost-in-a-limbo characters up to? Well, Battle in Heaven is essentially about the crisis of faith and morality in a world mired in materialism, corruption, permissiveness and violence. But can God save these souls? The question remains unanswered.
The film closes with the self-same fellatio sequence with which it had so boldly opened (this time it is infinitely shorter) but the audience is none the wiser. The end of Battle in Heaven is just as open-ended as anything else in the film. The question is: will it divide the jury just as much as it has the critics?
