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'Japón'
Get another opinion: • Los Angeles Times • Boston Globe • New York Times • Share Your Opinion Starring: Alejandro Ferretis, Magdalena Flores, Yolanda Villa Director: Carlos Reygadas MPAA rating: Not Rated Running time: 122 minutes Release date: May 16 Where "Japón" is playing. More New Releases | |
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By Ty Burr
The Boston Globe
Posted: May 15, 2003
"Japón" takes place in an isolated Mexican village at the bottom of a valley -- about as far from anywhere as can be imagined and, while set in the present, seemingly several centuries in the past. That's not the only way in which this crudely powerful film is a throwback. Unfolding at an elliptical pace that feels like a revelation, or tedium, or both, "Japón" recalls the glory days of 1970s art-house filmmaking.
Director Carlos Reygadas has cited the movies of Andrei Tarkovsky as a key influence, but his film suggests nothing so much as a cross between Luis Bunuel and Werner Herzog, the latter filmmaker especially invoked in the grainy splendor of the wide-screen imagery and the way "Japón" gazes levelly at man's struggle with his own atavism. A privacy of meaning that borders on arrogance is also a shared hallmark. "Japón" is titled after the Spanish word for "Japan," but there is no observable reason why.
It begins with a man (Alejandro Ferretis) forsaking Mexico City for the country. He is middle-aged and has a limp and the gaunt forlornness of a depressive Abraham Lincoln; we never learn his name. We do find out that he intends to kill himself once he reaches his remote destination, like the hero of Abbas Kiarostami's "Taste of Cherry." But people in movies only make suicide plans to be dissuaded.
That said, "Japón" is anything but sentimental, and its hero doesn't end up reaffirming life so much as plug into a current of brutal allegorical earthiness. The man takes lodgings in the barn of an old woman named Ascen (Magdalena Flores); she collects images of Jesus Christ, and there's some evidence that the new boarder may be her latest acquisition. Each day, the villagers go about their farming and the man wanders the wastes, trying to work up the nerve to shoot himself and being slowly altered by the rhythms of the natural world.
Those rhythms, increasingly, are sexual. "Japón" features explicit interludes of masturbation, horses copulating, and a climactic scene of lovemaking that is surreal, emotionally raw, and tawdry all at once. The images shot by cinematographer Diego Martinez Vignatti burn with the intensity of a privileged vision; Reygadas wants to give us life unmediated and direct.
The film's central character yearns to break free, but ultimately he falls back to earth. He tries to defend Ascen from her greedy nephew -- who wants to dismantle her barn and use the stones for his own farm -- but is powerless to stop the nephew's hired work gang. "Go back to your place, foreigner," taunts one of the men, and the remark echoes on any number of levels.
"Japón" grows slower and more willfully obscure as it progresses -- you come away knowing less than when you started (about everything except horse sex). Since most movies work the other way, this approach is not without interest. It's also not without frustrations and pretentiousness. Toward the end, one of the wrecking crew gets drunk and launches into a wheezy, tuneless mariachi song; the camera stays on him for an eternity, seeking poetic truth in a moment of grating atonality. You may debate whether that search is successful. Reygadas has the bones of a major filmmaker, but he spends his first film talking to himself, and not quite loudly enough for us to listen in.