The movie opens with the image of a man's pale, expressionless face looking straight back at the audience. As the camera drifts down to his bare, drooping chest, we see that he's naked and overweight. The view of his private parts is covered by a dreadlocked head. As the camera pans around, it reveals that the dreads belong to a young woman who is fellating him with tears in her eyes. Equally repelling and intriguing, the audacious first shot of Carlos Reygadas's sophomore film signals what's to come: grand directorial gestures that don't add up.
Anapola Mushkadiz in" Battle in Heaven"
"Unfortunately, narrative is still a part of cinema and I don't know how to get around that," says the young Mexican director, celebrated for his 2002 debut "Japon." His disdain for a plain old story shows; "Battle in Heaven" contains elements of a plot, but it lurches forward through indirection. At times, when the camera is stuck in Mexico City traffic or performs a slow 360 degree pan, the movie feels like a tedious experiment in real-time filmmaking. The images are glaringly white, purposefully overexposed. Shots of genitalia fill the entire screen.
But no matter how hard Reygadas tries to circumvent narrative, "Battle in Heaven" still tells a story, a melodramatic one at that, thinly conceived and altogether unconvincing: a working class couple--he is a driver, she sells clocks in the subway--has kidnapped a baby for ransom. When the movie begins, the baby has just died in their custody. During his day job, the man, Marcos (Marcos Hernandez), drives a general's daughter (Anapola Mushkadiz) to her secret occupation: the young woman, her entitlement in stark contrast with Marcos' monosyllabic subservience, works as a prostitute. Apparently she is selling her body as an act of rebellion, but this is never quite made clear.
In fact, the reasons why anybody does anything in "Battle of Heaven" remain obscure, beyond Reygadas's grasp and ours--the kidnapping, for instance, happens before the movie begins and the baby is never seen. If the summary so far sounds implausible to you, just wait until you hear about the stabbing, the pilgrimage, and the doomed love affair between the driver and the princess/whore. I'm not giving much away when I tell you that "Battle in Heaven" does not have a happy ending; this is the kind of film where people die for purely "poetic" reasons.
There are curious and startling moments in "Battle of Heaven." Ghostly fog rolls in as Marcos climbs a mountain. Ana takes his hand after sex in a gentle but controlling gesture. Jesus himself watches over Marcos as he mounts his obese wife from behind. Later, Marcos dons an Abu Ghraib-like hood to atone for his sins. But without a sturdy narrative frame, Reygadas's audacious style only reveals his actors, not his characters: the people on screen remain overexposed but underdeveloped.
