Having missed it while it was being regularly screened last summer, I now took the chance to catch Carlos Reygadas' much-lauded Stellet Licht, as part of the Carl Th. Dreyer related films currently shown at the Arsenal cinema.
This story of Mennonite, Plautdietsch-speaking peasants in Mexico who are struggling with extramaritial desires, is very closely related to one of my favorite films, Dreyer's Ordet (1955): Stellet Licht too features a secluded, fundamentally Christian community of peasants, it too has a main character called Johann(es) and it directly incorporates several scenes from Dreyer's film - including the famously wondersome ending.
Yet, where Dreyer's original is a masterpiece of perfectly economical, formally rigorous story-telling, Reygadas' film creates much "talk" in the sense of a vulgar symbolic naturalism that seems to burden every image, every gesture and action with meaning. Close-ups (not exactly muched used by Dreyer himself) are everywhere, bodies are sweating for minutes after sex, a dead body is washed and cleaned in very close takes, children are bathing in a pond while the camera fondles their hair, a nurse is gratuitously staring into nowhere with the very familiar face of movie agony.
Still, for all the physical intimacy it creates, the characters remain suprisingly detached beings. Where Dreyer could beautifully suggest the conditions of a man/woman relationship just by the way he would place them in and around his interiors, Reygadas needs many "words" besides those few indeed spoken.
And the famous ending? Well, Reygadas employs a certain "twist" that shall not be given away here, but let's just say that what somehow worked as a very sincere, incredibly moving scene the first time (in Ordet), now seems rather awkward, and the way it is framed by yet another (admittedly stunningly beautiful but narcissistic) sunset, diminishes its power. A miracle shouldn't need further blabber.