Carlos Reygadas’s domestic drama of marital infidelity in the strict, German-speaking Mennonite community of Chihuahua, Mexico, exudes an almost Scandinavian chill, specifically a Dreyer-esque severity and self-discipline (to say nothing of his Lutheran rectitude and sense of personal responsibility), characterized by, among other things, front-and-centered compositions, long takes, a clock-ticking tempo. The pace is not merely measured; it is measured at inordinate length, two hours and twenty minutes of heavy-hanging time. The outward stoicism of the farm folk, though, seems to conceal a well of passion: the father of the family, left behind at the breakfast table, crumples into insuppressible sobs, rather as if Grant Wood’s Gothic American had melted into a Francis Bacon. Ah, the mystery of the human heart — a mystery strongly underscored by the indistinguishable physiques and personalities of the wife and the other woman. (What, apart from an Agnes Moorehead hatchet nose, does the desired Marianne have that the rejected Esther does not?) Reygadas, retaining all the rigor of his Battle in Heaven and adding a healthy dose of tact and taste, exhibits an artist’s eye, an unglazed eye, an unglutted eye, such that faces, clothes, decors, landscapes, what-have-you, are seen afresh, fully registered. Then, too, he springs just enough surprises, not simply to enrich the main motif of human-heart mystery, but to pull you through the longueurs. You never quite know what awaits: the ecstatic release, for instance, of a round-and-round 360-degree pan when the stolid farmer, buoyed by a pop song on the radio and by the thought of soon seeing his inamorata, drives his truck in tethered circles. Occasional sun glare spotting the camera lens, as though we’re suddenly in cinematic vogue circa 1969, could be counted as a flaw in such a flinty façade. And it might be judged ill-advised to attempt, in a film already evocative of Carl Dreyer, to pull off the very same turn-back-the-clock miracle as in Ordet. But these are cavils. The prevailing coldness is not a cavil. It’s a positive invigoration. Cornelio Wall, Maria Pankratz, Miriam Toews. (2007) — Duncan Shepherd
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