Carlos Reygadas (director)
Drakes Avenue Pictures (studio)
18 (certificate)
115 mins (length)
22 July 2013 (released)
21 July 2013
Post Tenebras Lux begins with a stunning opening that gives you an inkling of why Carlos Reygadas won the Best Director award at Cannes 2012. A beautiful dark landscape populated by wild animals, a child wandering with them completely carefree and lit by lightning.
It segues into surreal territory with a devilish horned dude invading a household, and then long silent interludes throughout, as the director's eye watches his canvas unblinking.
There appears to be a family living in idyllic paradise. which of course is not the case, what kind of film would that be? No, we need conflict, drama, cruelty and confession. While on the topic of cruelty, Reygadas has a precedent for courting controversy with animal cruelty in his film Japón. Post Tenebras Lux features a few brief scenes of casual beatings of dogs, which is unpleasant to see, and no doubt the director will give an excuse of art capturing life. To that I can only reply, is creating art worth the suffering of a living being who has no say in the matter?
The narrative of the film skips around in time. and the director has us opening windows of time in this family's existence. Their primary conflict, though never explicitly stated in true art film fashion, is the matter of sex which has lost meaning to the couple through the years, and they are reduced to resorting to collective hedonism.
This is a film written and directed by the same man, so it's indulgent, meandering, partly auto-biographical, and its disparate scenes are justified by the author of the work as being like expressionist art communicating a feeling to a viewer, rather than exposition. Seemingly unconcerned with viewer comprehension, and more with cathartic expression from artist to the world.
The obvious comparison is to American film-maker Terrence Malick, with the long floating camera capturing the awesome sight of nature and primal human action and inaction. There are memorable moments, but ultimately underneath the masterful capture of images, it feels like a work for Reygadas and not a work for the world.
