Those who love Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light and those who hate it tend to use the same kind of lazy shorthand to describe its pleasures (or tortures). The story of Johan, a devout husband and family man who struggles–spiritually, mentally, emotionally, physically–against his feelings for another woman, Silent Light’s languid, desperately sad narrative takes a turn towards the transcendent about a hundred minutes in, at which point I scrawled in my notebook, “Bresson in Technicolor, maybe on acid.” In my mind, this was high praise. But later in the day, I overheard another critic use a similar analogy to explain why Silent Light is, actually, “terrible”: “It’s like Diane Arbus doing Bergman, on quaaludes.” Maybe it’s just a generational thing–I’m a little too young to know much about ‘ludes–but that sounds even more appealing than what I initially came up with. Still, from here on out, I resolve to resist the dismissively simple equation of (Dead European Master + Passe Party Drug). Silent Light deserves better than that.

This was one NYFF selection that screened for the press sans a post-screening Q & A with the filmmaker, and I think it would have benefited tremendously from one. At the very least, there would have been quite a bit of value in talking to Reygadas about his process (armed with French and Dutch financing, the Mexican filmmaker shot on location in Northern Mexico’s Mennonite community, with a cast full of non-actors speaking their native tongue, the medieval German dialect Plautdietsch).

But admittedly, Reygadas would have been walking in to a tough crowd. Many critics seemingly wrote the director off after his last film, Battle in Heaven, which, in addition to sharing Silent’s ponderous pace, featured a now-infamous scene described by Gerald Peary as featuring an “unhappy, mechanical blow job ministered by a hot senorita on her numb, big-bellied chaffeur.” Peary, one of the film’s staunchest defenders, acknowledged that Heaven “grossed out many American critics” at that film’s Cannes premiere. I imagine that at least some of those who didn’t skip the NYFF screening of Silent Light in avoidance of further revulsion left disappointed when there wasn’t any.
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