Battle in Heaven
Written and directed by Carlos Reygadas
Tartan
2006
Rating:


"The good cinema spectator is not the one that goes to cinema to escape from life," director Carlos Reygadas has said, "but the one that goes to cinema to live."

"Battle in Heaven," Reygadas' second feature following his 2002 provocation "Jap๓n," features a protagonist who isn't fully alive, but his existential struggle encourages "the good cinema spectator" to actively engage in his plight and Reygadas' rigorous mise-en-sc่ne.

As in the films of France's Robert Bresson and Iran's Jafar Panahi (who made the thematically similar 2003 film "Crimson Gold"), nonprofessional actors portray the central characters of Marcos (Marcos Hern), a general's driver, and Ana (Anapola Mushkadiz), the general's daughter. The obese Marcos and the blonde-haired punkette are first seen in a moment of shocking sexuality as Ana performs fellatio on Marcos' condom-enshrouded penis. In a virtuoso camera move, Reygadas' camera goes from watching the sex act to, somehow, becoming a part of it — it's as if the camera has suddenly taken on the subjective point-of-view of Marcos' belly button.

The film then cuts to the early morning ritual of the Mexican army's raising of the national flag in Mexico City. Marcos' silent observance of the ceremony is interrupted by his ringing cell phone when his wife (Bertha Ruiz) calls and has him meet her at the subway she works at selling cakes and alarm clocks. Marcos' wife gives him the news that the baby they've kidnapped has died. No backstory is provided for the kidnapping — what lead the couple to commit the crime and whether the victim's mother, whom they know, is a neighbor, friend or relative both go unexplained — and Marcos, at least initially, reacts with remarkable passivity. Reygadas indicates that such a crime has become too commonplace in Mexico City to provoke much discussion or emotion. The exaggerated awkwardness of the moment between Marcos and his wife makes a piercing statement about real human interaction, or the lack thereof.

Reygadas' camera follows Marcos like the helpless angel of Krzystof Kieslowski's "The Decalogue" while also playing with preconceptions of cinematic perspective. The camera's eye wanders, following the people who pass Marcos in the subway station as if it were Marcos' first-person POV, only to have Marcos stumble into the frame.

On the subway, Marcos loses his glasses when a woman kicks him in the head, accusing him of looking up her dress. Marcos' non-reaction to the loss of his glasses indicates that the eyewear was doing little to help his sight — he is a man who has lost perspective.

Marcos picks up Ana from the airport and the young woman, like Ann Darrow approaching King Kong on the streets of New York, emerges out of the haze of Marcos' unfocused perspective. Marcos, who has known Ana for 15 years, drives Ana to the sexual "boutique" she secretly works at like a "Belle du Jour." The driving sequence is a seeming nod to one in Andrei Tarkovsky's "Solaris" that also demonstrates the class rift between Marcos and Ana — Ana's accent, her vocabulary and her commanding demeanor are all in bold contrast to Marcos' working class mien. Nothing symbolizes the opulence of the ruling class more than when Marcos, with sweat dripping down his back, tells Ana he did as she requested and had her boyfriend's ice skates digitally sharpened.

Ana offers Marcos a free roll in the hay with one of the other prostitutes at her boutique, but Marcos admits that he would only want to have sex with her. It is because Marcos has long known Ana's private life, and perhaps because both of their secrets are reactions against feelings of emptiness, that Marcos confesses to Ana that he and his wife have accidentally killed a child. With his soul laid bare, Ana declines to have sex with Marcos and tells him, "Those things you shouldn't tell."

Marcos is left to find solace in mocking the pilgrim processional that passes him by, masturbating to a soccer match and in the cushy, black-veined posterior of his wife. Films rarely depict sex scenes between corpulent characters, and this one is marked by its tender conclusion of a bear hug between husband and wife.

That's in stark contrast to what happens when Marcos' desire for Ana is finally requited. As Ana rides atop Marcos, the camera, in a movement that recalls Dario Argento's "Tenebre," glides to the patio to view the rooftops and windows outside and slowly turns to pointedly watch workers erecting an antennae next door to a satellite dish while two maids lean against a counter in a neighboring apartment. Having viewed the city in macrocosm, the camera returns to the microcosm of Marcos and Ana. Ana has just dismounted and Marcos' penis slowly goes flaccid, but there's no connection between them, just as there's no connection between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

The failure of sex to connect Marcos to reality is illustrated through the fellatio scenes that bookend the film. In the first, Marcos wears a condom and in the second a prosthetic is used. Ana can never really touch Marcos, just like the digitally added tears that streak Ana's face in the first scene indicate Marcos can never really touch her, either.

"Battle in Heaven" is essentially a film of disconnection and the inability of rituals — sex, religion, nationalism, violence, soccer — to create real unions or fill voids. Marcos' growing sense of guilt causes him to turn raw as the calluses of apathy are stripped away. His desperation to clear his conscience through ritual, and the futility of it, lead him to despair.

For Reygadas, the disconnection of Marcos is best viewed in multiple, three-part terms: there is the detachment of mind-body-soul, man-woman-soul, Mexico City-bourgeoisie-proletariat and God-Mexico City-Mexicans. A shot that pans from a sign welcoming visitors to Mexico City and then to the sky indicates that the real battle in Heaven is the battle for the souls of the Mexican people.

Reygadas rigorously symbolizes these tripartite disconnections through the multiple triangles that find their way into his mise-en-sc่ne: a flaccid flag bifurcates the screen, a hanging breast, the way legs are spread apart, the framing of a puddle and a hillside, mountaintops that also serve as an homage to Caspar David Friedrich's 1818 painting "Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog," the lights on top of a building, the shadow of a hanging rain coat, the blocking of three characters before a climactic act of violence, a fallen hood on Marcos' head, the cone-shaped Basilica of Guadalupe and the "Andrei Rublev"-evoking bells that peel when forgiveness is sought.. Reygadas' most remarkable use of triangulation and shift from macrocosm to microcosm is the match cut from Mexico City's triangular Perif้rico freeway to a similar seashell in Ana's hair.

Of course, there's one last triangle, the one between Reygadas, his film and the viewer. Reygadas has crafted a film for the good cinema spectator, the one that actively engages in this deeply encoded critique of social inequality and detachment. In "Battle in Heaven," there's no escaping from life.

Posted Thursday, March 2, 2006

Link to this review:
http://filmzeus.pressbin.com/film/battle.in.heaven