Debut full-length film "Tarkovsky of Mexico" Carlos Reigadas tells the story of a man who decides to commit suicide far from civilization. In a tiny mountain village, he settles with an elderly lady, and what happened later can be interpreted, as the author of the annotation on KinoPoisk did, in order to give the film a false-optimistic coloring, or you can do it quite differently.
In my understanding, the picture is not about “no need to say goodbye” or “should, but not necessarily so soon”, but about the waywardness of life as such, about its silent, stubborn flow in spite of all human aspirations. Reigadas not only makes his character an artist, but also paints the space around him with panoramic spans of camera, capturing nature, animals, people and the endless silence of loneliness in the middle of mountains and hills. In any other work, some insufficiently courageous and sincere author would lay the basis of the hero’s storyline with a pre-prepared speech about the high cost of each moment and the beauty of our world. Here the whole pathos of the situation is expressed much more simply (some people will think that it is more primitive, but here it is everyone’s business): a lost person, still not daring to dare the last step into the abyss of death, in fact clings to life in all possible ways.
He paints landscapes – but landscapes are not needed here: the villagers are already inside them. He observes certain processes occurring in a number of processes, but waits for the hour of their completion, since he remains a stranger to everyone around him and to himself. Meanwhile, the processes do not dry up at all, only replacing each other, alternating circumstances among themselves. He begins to feel sexually attracted to a woman, despite her age - but the primitive instinct is defeated by the inexorability of time. It spares no body, no energy, no attempts to linger in the contrasts of the past, when everything seemed real and one, coveting the other, received in return not polite submission, but passionate coitus. Finally, he intervenes in something he cannot possibly be involved in—and fails in a short struggle against the windmills of other people’s intentions: those who leave must go, that is the law.
The artist is deliberately doomed to die - as the lady with her dilapidated dwelling is doomed; as animals are doomed, with whom the hero involuntarily associates (because if some horses rot in the rain, another is destined to conceive a new offspring - only somewhere in the neighboring meadow, beyond the current twilight); how doomed everything that does not touch the brush of his fate. After one generation comes the next, after the next – another. That's the law, too. Renewal after renewal, loss after loss, layer after layer - and the next dawn will come when all the old has exhausted itself, and illuminate the earth only for those who were born with it.
That's the whole "Japan."
It's time to leave the world, and here are biological and spiritual motives. The artist does not complain when tactlessly stretched and brushes, and paint children (the wind would also not regret the shack). There are no psychological symbols. The hero then comes to life from a pool of blood, then, as one might think, is killed by the “black widow”. The plot of the debut picture does not seem strained, since this is not the case here: life and death are opposed from the first (slow, yes) frames.
The mood resembles “Wild Field” Kalatozashvili.
I specifically did not write a review for this film based on fresh emotions, because I wanted to rethink it, understand what its beauty is, what the director wanted to express and what aesthetics he gravitates to. I needed this in order to try to look at the film through the eyes of the author himself, since I personally did not find any charm here, for which it was possible to give an award at the Cannes Film Festival. In general, I studied several interviews with the Mexican director Carlos Reigadas and found that for me he is the most disgusting person with a huge conceit. He often admits to drawing inspiration from Tarkovsky’s work. And you probably know for yourself that our guru of author’s cinema gravitated to genuine textures and tried to make the most realistic picture without auxiliary expressive means.
In terms of the picture, Reygadas really adheres to the same naturalism, although putting himself on a par with the recognized master is at least immodest on his part. The film, although released not so long ago, but conveys the atmosphere of the old movie. It's gray, it's longing, it's the musty smell of a small village that conveys despondency. The main character comes to some rural area with the aim of committing suicide. But a caring widow gives him a taste for life again, so to speak. I still don’t know what made him rethink his decision. The title itself has nothing to do with the film and is purely metaphorical. Japan is like the land of the rising sun. And this explains the new dawn in the life of the closed protagonist. That is, there are only three vectors: death (starts from the very beginning with shots of a decapitated bird), religion (I believe that the director is cunning and deliberately shocks the audience) and sex (this is perhaps the most vile episode of intercourse with an elderly maid).
As Reidagas explains, his films don’t need a plot because he’s a true artist, not a storyteller. And the whole action comes down to what the characters think about such ordinary things. And he, of course, does not want to shock the audience with scandalous footage. How could you have suspected that he was seeking such cheap fame? It’s just that many film critics and viewers also masturbate and have sex in real life, so there’s no need to be outraged that exactly the same spectacle is shown on the screen. Well, you know, Carlos, in real life, people go to the bathroom, but I don't think the audience wants to watch the excrement on the screen. In any case, adequate viewers without special fetishes. No, well, there's really nothing special about this movie. Just the author removes close-ups and makes meaningful pauses with a claim to the great. In fact, the king is naked!
I sat down to the end, although already about halfway I wanted to turn off this pretentious nonsense. I never saw anything but the author’s self-admiration. In principle, the resonant name can be interpreted differently. Allegedly, the movie came out in Japanese mediative and contemplative. Well, that's if you're an optimist, and for you, the glass is always half full, and the movie is always half conceptual and avant-garde. In any case, I discovered a new name in the world of cinema that would make it into my personal blacklist of directors.
Carlos Reygadas' debut film in 2002 received the Golden Camera as a special prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Directors do not always justify such serious advances, but in the case of Reigadas everything turned out as well as possible. After "Japan", he directed "Battle in Heaven", which entered the main competition Cannes. Then there was Silent Light, which won the jury prize. For the last film with a similar title ("After Darkness Light") Reigadas won the prize for best director. Critics love this Mexican director and hail it as a new classic. The audience, for the most part, bypasses. Carlos Reygadas today is the largest name in Latin American and world cinema. He asks questions that rarely anyone in the art world dares to raise and does so in a remarkably poetic way.
There is no Japan in the film Japan. The name here is a game element, almost random. The journey of an aging artist can be designated as you like, because he has crossed the line when names carry meaning, and is ready to go into eternity. To this end, the hero comes to a remote Mexican village, located against the backdrop of majestic mountains. Somewhere here, the artist plans to commit suicide, but for the time being takes a corner from a lonely old woman, with whom he gradually finds a common language. Both seemed to have a skeptical and indifferent attitude to life for a long time. However, you will agree that the desire to tear your skull apart in a picturesque place in itself requires a considerable love of life.
Reygadas, of course, is one of those writers who like to build ten-minute plans, trying to adapt the video sequence to the requirements of their vision, and that is essentially what it is. The truth with one important difference. Carlos Reigadas mounts his films in such a way that, in addition to the meaning of the image and the audio track, they also give out some hidden meaning that arises between the transitions from one image to another, in the clicks and crackles of sound, color reproduction. Someone calls it the magic of cinema, Reigadas himself says about the cinematic editing. Anyway, his "Japan" contrasts sharply with the bulk of the films. While watching, you touch something bigger, you feel it. With no special education, Reygadas is deprived of the framework in which students of film schools are driven. He shoots as he feels, as it turns out, perhaps on a whim. But over time, he acquires skill, and already in “Silent Light” there is no such magical sloppiness as fascinates in “Japan”.
And yet you should not be misled by the description of Reigadas as a chaste Castaneda: his "Japan" is straightforward in its physiology and symbolism. Working with such large categories as "life" and "death", he gives them a corresponding embodiment on the screen. In the first ten minutes before the eyes of the shrill spectator, the bird is torn off its head, a little later the intestines of the horse are released and the boar is cut. Life will sweep across the screen again in the form of horses, but already mating, in the form of a ravine of children going to school, in the form of a scandalous intimate scene with an elderly woman and an elderly man. There is a lot in this film that is unexpected and attracts attention. Reygadas works in about the same style as his artist: large but bright brushstrokes that form a single picture only at a distance.
The first Reygadas movie I've seen. Impressions are difficult to describe, because the film is not easy. Reigadas wrote a rather complicated story about a man who decided to kill himself, but he changed his story by meeting an elderly woman who gave him faith in humanity, continued existence and, most importantly, love. This story is not new to world cinema. A few years earlier, the Iranian classic Abbas Kiarostami presented to the court of film lovers his painting “Taste of Cherry” with a similar plot. Well, if Kiarostami was surprised by history, then here, first of all, the production of the picture, which the debutant in a big movie came out much more workshop and original than the honored master.
When you watch a picture, you are amazed not by the plot twists, but by the skill with which the film was made. These unusual colors, the beauty of nature, dizzying panoramic shootings, successfully selected powerful music - all this together makes an indelible impression. I don’t know how Reygadas relates to Tarkovsky, but when I saw this picture I had some associations with Tarkovsky – all these long plans, verboseness, impressive powerful music are very similar. Even though Tarkovsky was not the only one who shot such a movie, he was first remembered, and then Angelopoulos and Antonioni. We can say that Reigadas came out with a very talented imitation of the masters of world cinema, but at the same time this imitation is quite original and unusual, very symbolic and metaphorical. In this film, Reigadas showed that he can not just capture the action on film, but also make the viewer’s brain work and let them feel the full range of possible human emotions, because during the film almost all feelings arise, from laughter to compassion. What we see on the screen is striking to the core – the most emotionally powerful movie. It remains only to deal with the incomprehensible name - what about Japan?