The Cameraman's Revenge

It’s a bit of a leap from Borzage to Carlos Reygadas, both in terms of time, space and approach, but I suppose you could argue that there are similar concerns of love and transcendence operating. In truth, though, I’m three films into my acquaintance with Reygadas and I’m no nearer to an appreciation than I was when I first finished watching Japon about five years ago (and Battle in Heaven just left me scratching my head further when I caught that later). I suspect that, if nothing else, this film would’ve looked amazing on the big screen cos it’s impressive enough on DVD; it’s consistently beautiful to watch and it’s filmed in an evidently amazing location. Just a shame that, in this country at least, none of his films seem to have gone beyond the festival circuit (and I don’t really do the Sydney Film Festival for various reasons), cos it’d be nice to see this on the big screen. Good grief, though, could it be any slower? It’s fine and well saying you have to “enter the Zone”, but what about when the slowness serves no apparent purpose (as I felt was the case here)? Discourse on Reygadas usually invokes the likes of Bresson, Tarkovsky, Dreyer, European arthouse masters of that sort (and that era), and often Reygadas invokes them himself; somewhere he even calls Silent Light the “little brother” of Ordet. That’s the company he obviously wants others to see him, and I vaguely admire his nerve, but I’m not sure the comparison isn’t ultimately specious; I get the feeling the chief lesson Reygadas learned from his idols is that the only way to present spirituality on film—if not the only possible path to art with film—was through austerity and grinding, grinding slowness, as if those things were an end in themselves. Maybe I just don’t respond to the various crises his films thus far have presented. Whatever. I hoped this might make me reconsider Reygadas—and I’ll concede it probably does represent some sort of advance on the first two films—but I don’t think it did; still, unlike the first two films, at least I had the sense to borrow this to watch it rather than buy it…

In this modern age it’s kind of nice to know that shonky English subtitling of the sort you used to get on Hong Kong film prints isn’t a lost art; it’s just kind of disappointing to see it applied to what’s widely considered one of the best films ever made. I don’t know where Umbrella sourced their DVD master from, but clearly it comes from a company that doesn’t employ a native English speaker  to get the subtitles right… Anyway, there’s a scene shot from the inside of a shop looking through the  window onto the street outside so we can’t hear what’s being said out there, but we still know that when a middle-aged man approaches a young boy who looks to be about 10 while the latter is looking into the shop, the man is evidently a pedophile looking to score. If you can think of another film made in that period anywhere on Earth that’s as upfront as that, you’re better than me… It’s a scene that floored me, and it sums up the basic ruthlessness of the film; though Bunuel was inspired by neorealism he also criticised it, and goes much further than surely any other filmmaker of the time. While I give him credit for doing so, I have to admit to otherwise being left almost totally cold by the film. Obviously it’s a major progenitor of dozens of other social realism films of what might be called the “Horror of Lower-Class People’s Lives” school, and there’s a similar empty bleakness at work here. I’m sure it makes me a bad person but I didn’t feel like Los olvidados particularly gave me anything, no characters to be interested in, no sense that the grimness served any particular purpose. It’s one of those classics I’ve never had any great interest in seeing for some reason, to be honest, and unlike some other films I wasn’t enthused by before I saw them I didn’t find that finally watching it made me feel I’d been wrong all this time.