 |
| Miriam Toews and Maria Pankratz in Silent Light |
A kind of holiness suffuses Carlos Reygadas's Silent Light, a film set in a Mexican community of Mennonites who speak entirely in Plautdietsch, their dialect of German. The actors in the film are real people summoned to play characters who might have existed in their own community, so from the outset there's a strange feeling of otherness transcended into universality. One of the universals of the film is the eternal triangle of a man married to a woman but in love with another woman. Another is the cycle of day and night: The film begins with a day's slow dawning. And then there's the mystery of life and death, epitomized in a scene of resurrection that has inevitably made critics compare the film to Carl Theodor Dreyer's Ordet (1955). Silent Light is a simpler story than the one that great film tells, but also entirely worthy of the comparison.