Silent Light
Once you adjust to its purposely languid slow-cinema rhythm, this monumental love-triangle drama from Mexican writer-director Carlos Reygadas delivers an achingly beautiful, quietly devastating story of tortured love and faith in crisis. SILENT LIGHT takes place in contemporary Mexico among a devout rural community of Mennonites who speak an old Low German dialect. Cornelio Wall plays Johan, a hardworking farmer tragically torn between his wife, Esther (played by novelist Miriam Toews), and his lover, Marianne (Maria Pankratz). Reygadas uses nonprofessional actors and painterly landscapes to powerful effect, crafting a prizewinning epic to rank alongside Old Masters like Dreyer, Tarkovsky and Malick.
Cornelio Wall, Miriam Toews, Maria Pankratz
- Notes from Pablo Larraín:I was very impressed when I saw this film for the first time. It presents a moral problem inside a Mennonite community in Mexico, where a couple tries to stay in the religion but has to deal with their own desires. And that breaks the rules in a way that I think is beautifully filmed. They used anamorphic LOMO lenses made by the Soviet Union—the same brand that Tarkovsky used—that create an abstract image with a dreamlike quality. It absorbs and frames the light in a very particular way. Reygadas used wide angles very close to the subjects, so you’re able to be very near them. It’s a movie of long takes that elevate the film into something very spiritual. I connected it with ORDET, the Carl Theodor Dreyer film—I think Reygadas is doing a very respectful homage. It was fascinating how the Mexicans interacted with this religious community, to see the Latin-American perception of that. But the most beautiful element of this film is the tone—the narrative and the sense that you’re seeing something with a very strong spiritual quality. I admire that, and it is a movie I will never forget.
- Notes From Sebastián Lelio:SILENT LIGHT is for me one of the summits of Latin-American cinema. The film masterfully inhabits a territory where passionate humans are fused with nature but oppressed by a belief system—from this junction emerges SILENT LIGHT's poetic heights. It has elements of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s ORDET; Andrei Tarkovsky’s STALKER also looms over it. Drinking from his masters, Reygadas manages to find his own vibration between homage and direct citation, without any shame. The movie possesses the quality of great films, which is the ability to make the viewer feel that what is being seen is more than what we see, that the image reveals a part but there is another part that remains hidden, and that this hidden part is much deeper but nevertheless revealed as a result of that image, of that time, of that space and of that sound. SILENT LIGHT is a kind of tip of the iceberg of an unfathomable human backdrop—that tip of the iceberg is those bodies and spaces that Reygadas sculpts frame by frame, moment by moment.
