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Battle In Heaven review
:. Director: Carlos Reygadas
:. Starring: Marcos Hernández, Anapola Mushkadiz
:. Running Time: 1:38
:. Year: 2005
:. Country: Mexico
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Mexico City, a cannibal megalopolis sheltering 20 million souls. Dirty misery pushes the inhabitants, corroded by loneliness, to the most terrible extremes. This is the background of the new film by Carlos Reygadas, who caused a sensation with Japon. Surrounded by a perfume of scandal, this Battle in Heaven fails, not in the cinematographic sense (it is very well made), but in its discourse, a sort of mystic-religious salmagundis, which takes away its power.
The promising opening, all violence retained, forecasted a dry and nervous film. But showing fellatio, in the opening and closing of the film, does not make it an "oeuvre". However majestically filmed, this daring sequence reveals an infinite softness. The camera goes from the face to the sex and from the sex to the face, circumvents the copulation, this taught sex offered to the mouth being synonymous of an intransitive desire. Lovesick, Marcos, a driver, secretly desires Ana, the liberated daughter of the General for whom he works. The young woman prostitutes herself for her own pleasure in a high end brothel where Marcos regularly drives her. When he shares with Ana that he kidnapped a child with his possessive wife, a bond of secrecy consecrated by the flesh unites them. Reygadas imagines the isolation of his hero with virtuosity. The sequence in the subway, where the surrounding noises gradually blur and the frame tightens on Marcos, masterfully translates his distress. Reygadas multiplies the angles to 180 degrees, absorbing the surrounding urban environment, where his seedy characters struggle.
Unfortunately, Reygadas can't maintain this for the duration of the film. Halfway through, one has the impression that his film is finished. Precisely at the moment when Marcos approaches the sky during a walk in the mountains with his family. Drowned in the clouds, the hero disappears. In the last part, with a religious procession in the background, we see his redemption. Heavily symbolic, this segment sinks the ensemble. Almost grotesque, he obliterates all of the deaf violence from the beginning of the film, everything corroborated by a fantasy ending where Ana loves Marcos. Should we count Carlos Reygadas among the heralds of the Mexican cinema, when other young directors like Amat Escalante and his remarkable film Sangre have already gotten the better of him?
Sandrine Marques
Translated into English by Anji Milanovic
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