Word: silents
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...Silent Light...
...Reygadas, 36, has made the biggest noise at international film festivals and among the more intellectual critics. His Japon and Battle in Heaven won praise for their filmmaking rigor, caustic view of Mexico's social ills and often frank take on sex. With his competition film Stellet Licht (Silent Light), 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, each scene has a visual, emotional luster...
...Reygadas sets Silent Light's agenda in the first moments. The film opens with a time-lapse shot of night sky, stars, dawn slowly breaking, finally full daylight, as the? sound track comes alive with loud crickets, braying, mooing and breathy, muffled screams. Brilliant sunshine bathes the family's kitchen as they take morning prayer in a silence broken only by the loud ticking of the clock. Esther raises her eyes, Johan says, "Amen," and the children dive wordlessly into their cereal. After the meal, Esther leaves to shepherd the kids on errands, returning briefly to tell Johan to take...
...Mennonite edicts: pare movie technique down to its essentials; show characters behaving, however mutely, rather than acting; make the viewer work for their epiphanies. This style has been responsible for many small, lugubrious films and -from directors who know how to make more or less -a few masterpieces. Silent Light is one of them...
...drums pulsate in gentle rhythms, then pick up the pace as the chanting and rocking crescendos to a fever pitch. As the sun sets, soft pink clouds are illuminated in the sky, and a single electric star glows from above the doorway of the mosque. Suddenly, the drums fall silent, and the dancing stops...