Japón (Carlos Reygadas, 2002)
Cast: Alejandro Ferretis, Magdalena Flores, Yolanda Villa, Martín Serrano, Rolando Hernández, Bernabe Pérez, Fernando Benítez. Screenplay: Carlos Reygadas. Cinematography: Diego Martínez Vignatti, Thierry Tronchet. Production design: Elsa Díaz, Alejandro Reygadas. Film editing: Daniel Melguizo, Carlos Serrano Azcona, David Torres.
Japón, Carlos Reygadas's first feature film, is the essential "a stranger comes to town" fable. The stranger in this case is a man in his 50s, with a hawklike and impassive face, who walks with a limp. He has come from the city to a remote village in a mountainous region of the Mexican state of Hidalgo where he plans to kill himself. He finds lodging with Ascen, an elderly widow, devoutly religious. And then the story follows the usual pattern of mutual discovery, as she explores his values -- he's a painter who has carried with him an art book and he listens to music on a portable disc player -- and he grows involved with her struggle with a greedy nephew who has laid claim to the very stones from which her house is built. He finds after all that he can't bring himself to commit suicide, but he asks a favor of her before he moves on: He wants to have sex with her. It's an astonishing request even in a film full of audacious moments, and Reygadas follows through with an equally astonishing scene of their copulation, in which Ascen submits to his request with a stoic tenderness and he breaks down in tears. Even more astonishing, the scene follows not long after an earlier one in which a gang of schoolboys interrupt their soccer game to laugh at the mating of two horses. The effect is to defuse any frivolous voyeuristic responses we may have to watching the love-making of the aging couple. Reygadas fills his film with such challenging moments, which take the viewer to task for assumptions we may make about what's happening on screen, especially since the cruelties and harshness of the setting are so alien to the typical film-watcher. It's sometimes a self-conscious film, too. At one moment, we watch a gang of workers getting drunk after having torn down Ascen's house, and we hear one of the men say they should save some of what they're drinking for the people making the film. The scene was evidently improvised, and the remark came from one of the non-professional actors in the scene, but Reygadas clearly chose to leave it in the finished film. The use of the wide CinemaScope screen is effective, too, in keeping the viewer alert, for Reygadas often teases us, keeping elements of the scene just out of the camera's range. The soundtrack is alive with the sounds of insects and animals and birds, but sometimes goes silent to startle the viewer into attention. In short, we're in the hands of a master of the medium.
