Nobody says much in Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light. But it’s the silences that say so much in this long but involving film about a married farmer who’s carrying on an affair with a neighbor.
The movie opens serenely on a family at the breakfast table, before
mom Esther leaves with the six kids. Dad Johan sits alone for a minute,
head down, before getting up to silence a ticking clock. He suddenly
bursts into tears, futilely trying to stifle his cries.
Johan then heads outside, hops in his truck and drives off to get
his tractor fixed. It soon becomes obvious that Johan has a mistress
and that he’s fallen deep for the other woman. It’s a subtle yet
disorienting beginning to a film that has many subtle and disorienting
moments.
Silent Light is set in a modern-day Mexican Mennonite
community, where folks dress like it’s 1569 and speak archaic German.
Everything about these people, in fact, seems stuck in the past. The
children care for one another like grown-ups, everyone has his and her
roles in the household, and there are very few nods to technology (the
kids watch TV in the back of somebody’s van).
Because of this, Silent Light is deliberately slow-moving;
the first line of dialogue isn’t spoken until seven minutes in. It’s
like a Bergman movie at times, with long, silent passages and
uninterrupted close-up shots of characters’ faces. In Johan’s first
scene with the other woman, Marianne, they greet each other on top of a
hill with a long, passionate and, of course, silent kiss.
It’s also a gorgeous-looking movie, with plenty of painterly images
— wide-open fields, big blue skies, green valleys and lush
fields. There are some wonderful placid scenes too, like when the
entire family washes itself in a lake or when a dead body is
meticulously prepared for burial.
Yet there’s still room for some sweaty — well, as sweaty as
two Mennonites can get — sex between Johan and Marianne. Johan
clearly loves Esther, but he loves Marianne more. They’ve been having
an affair for two years, and his wife knows all about it. “I simply
made a mistake with Esther,” Johan tells his father. Johan and Marianne
are a torn couple, guilty over their affair. But it’s something they
have no control over.
Johan and Marianne aren’t typical romantic-movie leads. They’re
homely, paunchy, middle-aged — about as far from Brad and
Angelina as you can get. Still, these very plain people have very real
problems and very real emotions. And Reygadas stages the elegiac
Silent Light with some very real feeling.
This article appears in Apr 15-21, 2009.