Carlos Reygadas's Battle in Heaven takes place in a Mexico City of religious processions and flag-raising ceremonies, proliferating highways and improvised market stalls, where the insolent rich literally piss on their servants and the poor ride the subway wearing Aztec Wrestler masks. In explaining why he incorporated such motifs, Reygadas has cited Alfred Hitchcock, who advised that a film set in Holland had better show tulips and windmills. Respect must be paid to convention--all the more so in a film lovingly shot on location, cast with nonprofessional actors who engage in real sex.

The sex bit, even more than the outrageousness of the plot, has raised some clamor against Battle in Heaven. Heavy-breasted, myopic, middle-aged Marcos Hernández--a chauffeur in real life--plays the role of a military chauffeur named Marcos, one of whose tasks is to drive around his general's wealthy and stylish daughter Ana (played by Anapola Mushkadiz, who in real life is wealthy and stylish). To make sure he's got your attention, Reygadas begins Battle in Heaven with Ana naked on her knees before an equally bare and sweating Marcos. Two perfect tears form in Ana's still-juvenile eyes, as she performs a nonsimulated act in close-up. Marcos, meanwhile, stares ahead with the strained, wooden expression he will wear for most of the movie. You can, of course, watch this scene as a tribute to Warhol's Blow Job, following an association that Reygadas all but forces on you. Or you can think about tulips and windmills. Either way, Reygadas is asserting the movieness of the moment and aggressively breaking through it, as he will also do later in a scene of lovemaking between Marcos and his rotund, impassive wife (Bertha Ruiz, who in life as in the movie sells jellies in a subway station).

Reygadas's story, like his sex scenes, merges the materialistic with the fanciful. Throughout the movie, Marcos and his wife bear the guilt of having kidnapped an infant, who died before they could collect the ransom. Since Reygadas refrains from showing either the abduction or the death, and since kidnappers are known to strike frequently in Mexico, there's nothing particularly lurid about this setup. But Reygadas further posits that Ana, like the protagonist of Belle de Jour, works in a brothel; that Marcos has the privilege of knowing this secret, and impulsively shares his own secret with her; and that this confidence somehow moves Ana to grant his dream and let him enter her bed. We are now deep into the territory of the unlikely--which Reygadas then denies by venturing on long, nonnarrative forays through the city.

Battle in Heaven takes its dollop of Hitchcock, some Warhol and a lot of Buñuel and mixes them with a large dose of Bresson, posing awkward "models" in tableaux of crime, repentance and maybe redemption. Reygadas steals from the best; but what he steals, he changes into his own. I have warned you about everything--well, almost everything--that you might find exploitative or false. But once Reygadas draws you in to the visionary intensity of Battle in Heaven, no warning can shield you.

• « Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next »

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 75 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.