Word: lightness
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...With Stellet Licht (Silent Light), which won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2007 and opened Jan. 7 at New York City's Film Forum, Reygadas shocks again: this drama of a Mennonite community in northern Mexico contains no explicit hanky-panky. In its way, the film is true to the severe, austere code of the Mennonites. Yet it is shot with such care and creativity that each scene has a visual, emotional luster. One critic jokingly called Silent Light the best film ever made in its language - an easy claim to fame, since it is probably the only film...
...Reygadas sets Silent Light's agenda in the first moments. The film opens with a nearly five-minute time-lapse shot of night sky, stars, dawn slowly breaking and finally full daylight, as the sound track comes alive with loud crickets, braying and mooing, and breathy, muffled screams. Brilliant sunshine bathes the kitchen of a Mennonite farm as the family takes morning prayer in a silence broken only by the loud ticking of a clock. Esther (Miriam Toews), the mother, raises her eyes; Johan (Cornelio Wall Fehr), the father, says, "Amen"; and the children dive wordlessly into their cereal. After...
...Reygadas dramatizes this with small, telling gestures in long-take shots of the countryside, using the wide screen to place the land's natural beauty against the internal conflicts of the three main participants. The director also constructs elaborate pairs of sequences, one toward the beginning of Silent Light, the other toward the end. The opening dawn is the prelude to the closing dusk (which consumes the film's last five minutes); a church service precedes a wake; a passionate kiss of love is followed by the restorative kiss of life...
...Harvard had no shortage of opportunities last night, with 15 shots in the first period alone, but the team was unable to light the lamp...
Noise pollution is one problem. The bikes hold 10 to 22 people, and when the drinking starts, the riders' shouts become increasingly difficult to ignore. Wanda Nikkels, who lives in the red-light district, says the more beer passengers consume, the more obnoxious they get and the slower they pedal. They also have a habit of trampling flowers, steering into pedestrian-only zones and blocking traffic. "Recently there was a group of guys who parked their bike in front of some hookers and the girls made a live show and the boys kept screaming," she says. "It was just...