After a long, dreamy car trip from the city, a haggard middle-aged man (Alejandro Ferretis) walks through a field, dotted with cactuses and scrubby trees, on the rocky edge of a canyon. He meets a group of hunters, and asks them the way to an obscure, tiny village at the bottom. Someone asks if he is going to visit family down there. ”No,” he replies, ”I’m going to kill myself.”
The production notes inform me that Japón (2002) the first feature by the young Mexican director Carlos Reygadas, whose opening I have just described, was shot in the Mexican state of Hidalgo, and also in 16-millimeter CinemaScope, a format that captures wide expanses of land and sky, as well as flickering nuances of natural light. The way the jagged, austere landscape is conveyed, and that we know nothing about the suicidal protagonist, not even his name, suggest that mundane matters like geography are not Mr. Reygadas’s main concern. His deliberately mystifying choice of title, a sly homage to Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, which Japón does not otherwise much resemble, confirms this impression. The real setting of Japón is neither Japan nor Mexico but rather the land of allegory, where mighty abstractions — life, death, man, nature — are given concrete form.
Japón, which opens today at Film Forum after appearing at the Rotterdam and Cannes Film Festivals last year, is ambitious to the point of grandiosity, an attempt at philosophical cinema that solicits comparison to the work of Andrei Tarkovsky and Abbas Kiarostami. (The main character’s leisurely, discursive approach to self-annihilation recalls A Taste of Cherry, Mr. Kiarostami’s oblique, prizewinning parable from 1997.) Luckily Mr. Reygadas has talent to match his ambitions; or, rather, gifts that undercut them sufficiently to give his film a prickly, haunting poignancy.
For if Japón is unapologetically abstract, preferring metaphysics to narrative, it is also bracingly, even abrasively sensual. The director seems to want to push through the barriers that separate sight from the other senses: even on screen the washed-out, metallic light seems to have a temperature and a taste. When clouds shadow the landscape, you sense a change in humidity as well as luminosity. The spiraling camera movements suggest an intention not just to show you the whole world but to plunge you into the midst of it. Mr. Reygadas wants you to feel the roughness of the stones, the chill of the rain and — especially — the passage of time.
The audience’s experience is thus aligned with that of the hero, whose despair is challenged by the irreducible there-ness of the world and everything in it. And also, not incidentally, by the presence of an old woman named Ascen (Magdalena Flores). She lives on the outskirts of the village, surrounded by portraits of Jesus, and the man rents her barn as he tries to work up the nerve to do himself in. Something about her — her reserve, her air of fatalism, her enigmatic face — stirs a dormant urge within him, and his strange, melancholy ardor sends Japón hurtling toward the intersection of eros and death, as though it were Y Tu Grandmama También.
The nonprofessional cast members, most of them residents of rural Hidalgo (Mr. Ferretis is a family friend of the director), give Japón a stately, enigmatic decorum, as though its half-effaced story comprised the recollected verses of an ancient song. In one sequence a grizzled workman, sent to dismantle Ascen’s house by her nephew, performs a drunken, a cappella mariachi, so extreme in its tunelessness as to be almost sublime.
Sublimity, of a rough-hewn, found variety discovered in weathered bodies and harsh rock formations photographed with equal concentration, is the effect that Mr. Reygadas is most eager to achieve. In this brazenly confident first film he comes close enough to succeeding to make you hope he keeps trying.
Review courtesy of The New York Times
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