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 Entertainment | May 2006 
Ethereal Battle in Heaven set between Bodies and Blowjobs
 Josef Braun - vueweekly.com
If there is a single, fundamental element running through Carlos Reygadas’s Battle in Heaven to which we can attribute most of the reactions that have so far greeted the film in its gradual circulation of festivals and art houses, I’m guessing it’s this:
We have here a movie that wants to work both as a unobtrusive receptor for the infinite strangeness, terror and beauty of the real world, while at the same time unspooling a thread of images and narrative that seem deliberately conceived almost entirely as metaphor.
To top it all off, the precise meaning of the metaphors are far from clear. These sorts of dualities are just bound to piss people off, though I don’t think Reygadas minds much.
Japón, Reygadas’s first feature (which never played here, but is available on DVD), was likewise calculatedly confrontational, attuned to accident and seemingly informed by a peculiar, unspecified spirituality. Concerned with suicide, dignity and the limits of the flesh, it was also beautiful and moving, only once succumbing to bald pretentiousness, and offered something like genuine closure.
Battle in Heaven is a valiant follow-up, moving from the relative safety of Japón’s isolation and bucolic calm to the chaotic, rampant modernity and urban malaise of Mexico City. Although its soul is more clouded, Battle in Heaven is riskier, more ambitious, more audacious and more political.
Bodies flood through bleak corridors full of ringing alarm clocks and cram into subway cars; traffic buzzes around the now two-tiered Periférico freeway; thousands of singing pilgrims walk or crawl night and day through the streets on their journey to Basilica de Guadalupe; the Mexican flag is raised and lowered in the Zocalo by military officers as a routine, empty gesture with much pomp; the apocalyptic nature of life in this city is taken for granted and observed coolly.
The mostly silent witness to all this is Marcos (Marcos Hernández), an apparently gentle, overweight security officer and chauffeur holding onto a secret about a banal crime gone horribly wrong. His body looks toxic, bloated with unease, quietly desperate for tenderness and ready to burst with all manner of fluids.
He finds solace in the young daughter of one of his employers, an enigmatic tattooed rich girl who moonlights in a boutique brothel and, somehow in Marcos’s mind, has come to represent whatever frail purity is left in the world.
Which brings us to the images that bookend the film, the notorious scenes of fellatio that seem closest to representing the heaven promised in the title. Far from naïve fantasy, Reygadas is consciously showing us not only sex between the young and the middle-aged, between the beautiful and the ugly, but between the white and wealthy and the dark-skinned and poor.
Reygadas is indeed allowing for some sort of paradise amidst the pervading gloom, but why in this particular configuration? Again, the persistence of obscure metaphors: What exactly do blowjobs mean in Battle in Heaven? What does obesity mean (Marcos’s wife is even bigger than he is)? While we’re at it, what does soccer (drooled over on Marcos’s television) mean? Do any of these things have to mean anything?
Unruliness of metaphor delivered with unexpected formal grace is perhaps endemic to Reygadas’s cinematic proposal. Channelling all the resources of filmmaking into some cosmic blast of transfiguration, Reygadas resists answers as much as he resists making a single conventional shot.
He wants to rise up and answers just weigh too much. He wants to absorb the world while floating through it, evidenced in another sex scene where the camera’s gaze begins with lovers on a bed before drifting out the window to circle around the neighbourhood before coming back for a post-coital image that renders the lovers like cadavers on a mortician’s table.
It’s as though he wants to wriggle free of narrative while still ensuring there’s no escape—to celebrate surface and depth simultaneously. There’s much in conflict in Battle in Heaven, but at least the conflict is fought in hope of reaching the sublime.
Battle in Heaven
Written & directed by Carlos Reygadas
Starring Marcos Hernández, Anapola Mushkadiz, Bertha Ruiz |
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