The Other Side

by
Chris Dashiell

 

Let us praise the ambitions of young artists. While market research provides a steady stream of small-minded movies about a world that keeps getting smaller, there's always somebody new who doesn't know any better than to try to scale the heights and plumb the depths of human experience. Mexican director Carlos Reygadas is such an artist. Japón, his debut film, is recklessly generous in scope and profligate in visual glory. The road of excess has led him, if not exactly to the palace of wisdom, then to somewhere astoundingly close.

An unnamed man (Alejandro Ferretis), limping along on a cane, travels to the bottom of a canyon in a remote Mexican desert. His intention is to commit suicide. He stays at the rugged home of an old woman named Ascen (Magdalena Flores). As the weeks go by, his attempts to get up enough nerve to kill himself continue to fail, while he develops a quiet regard for the simple life and personality of the old woman. It turns out that her son-in-law is about to cheat her out of her property - he plans to take her barn apart in order to use the stones to build his own house in town. As the day of reckoning approaches, the nameless man begins to find himself as a human being.

Much of this is an interpretation for the sake of summarizing the story. So much of the film takes place in silence - or rather in human silence, with the noises of nature breaking in all around - that the viewer must absorb the meanings through intuition, a task that is actually not very difficult, because Reygadas' extraordinary style seems designed to transcend words.

Shot in 16 millimeter widescreen, Japón is a film of beautiful and varied textures. Sometimes Reygadas overexposes the film a bit to lend a glaring intensity to the contours of the wilderness. He switches from hand-held subjective shots, with his protagonist scrambling up or down a hill, to operatic shots from overhead in which the canyon seems to swirl madly around the human figures. In fact, the rotating wheel or circle is a recurring motif - the camera will stray away from the man's point of view, revolve around a scene in an arc, and return to the beginning while showing a new perspective or detail of the setting. And the picture's climax is an amazing, extended tracking shot, incessantly circling around and away from its subject - it stands as one of the most remarkable feats of its kind in movie history.

Through its simple story of a man living on the edge of life and death, Japón reveals a world of fascinating detail. During his stay in the canyon, the man is more and more enveloped in the power of nature, benign in its beauty, terrible in its power. Reygadas continually equates this sense of overwhelming transcendence with physical embodiment - the rain, the beetles crawling on the ground, the very stones of the canyon, are in their very solidity the vehicles of the man's journey to himself. That he arrives at sexuality as a symbol of spirituality is surprising on the surface, but makes a strange sort of sense in the context of the writer/director's paradoxical use of concrete materiality throughout the film.

If the old woman's house in the wilderness is heaven, then a nearby village where the man goes to get drunk on mescal is a kind of hell. Reygadas presents the world of heedless men who seek to control their environment through force as a destructive power in opposition to love. In one terribly unsettling scene, the hideous croaking of a romantic song by a drunken laborer evokes all the horrors of human corruption and rejection of the sacred. This tension between the high (the purity and emptiness of nature coupled with the capacity for love) and the low (the degradation and squalor of human society without love or reverence) is the underlying mechanism of the movie's weird visual symbolism and narrative structure.

Japón doesn't always stay on track - this is a first-time effort, after all - but its severe aesthetic is ripe with meaning, while remaining deliberately shrouded in enigma. Why is it called Japón? Maybe we need to travel to the other side of the world, or of life, to find out.

©2003 Chris Dashiell
CineScene