Asceticism incarnate: Mennonites down Mexico way

In his second film, Battle in Heaven, Carlos Reygadas poked at the conscience of a middle-aged Mexico City man whose transgressions included kidnapping, murder and graphically depicted sex with his wealthy boss’ daughter (who worked in a brothel for the fun of it). Eventually, the man becomes penitent and seeks salvation via the Catholic ceremonies that still exert a strong influence on Mexican culture. In Silent Light, Reygadas moves from an urban setting and the rituals that define Catholic spirituality to the north of Mexico and the agrarian-based asceticism of Protestant Mennonites who, having settled in the region in 1922, speak Spanish and a German dialect called Plautdietsch.

Again, the protagonist is a man in the midst of a moral crisis. Farmer Johan (Cornelio Wall Fehr), father of at least six kids, has fallen in love with a Mennonite woman who is not his wife. Both tortured and ecstatic, he hasn’t concealed the affair from his spouse, but doesn’t know what to do. One friend tells him he must make himself happy. Johan’s understanding father, a minister and dairyman, sees the bigger picture and possibly even anticipates the way his son’s predicament will play out.

Reygadas forgoes the equivalent of Battle in Heaven’s sordid happenings, yet Silent Light overflows with equally arresting images connected to the everyday cycles of a life led working the land with minimal use of modern technology. His camera contemplates the predawn sky, sunrise, breakfast, swimming and bathing, milking time and, most memorably, the handsome faces of Johan’s brood, wife and lover. The use of nonprofessional actors from the Mennonite community, many of them blood relations, is essential to the movie’s authenticity and impact.

With nods to Dutch landscape painting and still lifes, Reygadas reveals the splendor of an environment that one doesn’t readily associate with Mexico or Mennonites. He studies a seemingly displaced people—descendants of Swiss Anabaptists who came to Mexico via the European lowlands and Canada—endeavoring to show that they belong in this part of the world. And he presents a narrative about how they embody what the faithful might term the “natural moral laws of creation.”

Reygadas isn’t juxtaposing the sacred and profane as he did in Battle in Heaven, nor is he constructing an allegory as he did in his first film Japon. Rather, the point here is that the spiritual and the material—asceticism and carnal yearnings—aren’t easily separated for this Christian community. Johan’s waywardness precipitates an act of healing that keeps the earthly and the transcendent conjoined, and Reygadas is more than sympathetic.

As for his languorous method, there’s a fine line between the ponderous and the slowly evocative, between being pretentious and meaningfully portentous. Whichever side you come down on, and whether or not you buy the movie’s religious content, it’s hard to deny the luminous integrity of Silent Light.

Cast: Cornelio Wall, Miriam Toews, Maria Pankratz, Peter Wall, Elisabeth Fehr and Jacobo Klassen
Director/Screenwriter: Carlos Reygadas
Producers: Jaime Romandia and Carlos Reygadas
Genre: Drama; Spanish- and German-language, subtitled
Rating: Unrated
Running time: 127 min.
Release date: September 24 NY