Silent Light (2007) User Reviews

Visually and aurally breathtaking cinema

[JuguAbraham · 8/10 · 2 January 2008]

Can light have sound? So what is silent light? Something surreal, somehow related to the hymn "Silent night"? The intriguing answers are provided in the film to the patient, thoughtful viewer. This is not a film for the impatient viewer. "Starlight" (accessible cosmic wonders) begins and ends the film—silence dominates the soundtrack, except for sounds of crickets, lowing of cattle, and an occasional bird cry.

This opening shot sets the tone for a film made with non-professional actors. The film won the Jury's Grand Prize at Cannes 2007. It is a spectacular film experience for any viewer who loves cinema. This is my first Reygadas film and I have become an admirer of this young man.

Mexican filmmaker Carlos Reygadas writes his own scripts. He is one of the few filmmakers of importance today who does that—-alongside Spain's Pedro Almodovar and Japan's Naomi Kawase.

Reygadas' stunning movie "Silent Light" is centered on a collapsing marriage within a religious Mennonite community in Mexico, speaking not Spanish (the language of Mexico) but a rare European language (Plautdietsch) that mixes German and Dutch words, leading up to the eventual renewal and strengthening of this fragile family. Reygadas begins the film with a 6-minute long time-lapse photography of dawn breaking to the sounds of nature and ends the film with twilight merging into the night.

The opening shot was lost on many viewers; a noisy viewer kept talking three minutes into the film, unaware that the film was running, until I had to reveal this surprising fact to him at the 12th International Film festival of Kerala. The film's opening shot was so stunning that after the 6th minute the audience who grasped what was happening began clapping, having savored the effect. The last time I recall a similar involuntary reaction from an audience was when Godfrey Reggio's "Koyaanisqatsi" was screened decades ago in Mumbai at another International Film Festival.

There is something magical, supernatural in nature if we care to reflect on a daily occurrence. There is a touch of director Andrei Tarkovsky in Reygadas' "Silent Light" as he captures the magical, fleeting moments in life that all of us encounter but do not register as such. There is a touch of director Terrence Mallick's cinema as he connects human actions with nature (a heartbroken wife runs into a glen and collapses trying to clutch a tree trunk). And there is a touch of director Ermanno Olmi in the endearing rustic pace of the film. Whether he was influenced by these giants of cinema I do not know—but many sequences recall the works of those directors.

That the film recalls Carl Dreyer's "Ordet" (1955) is an indisputable fact. "Ordet" was based on a play by a Danish playwright Kaj Munk. Reygadas film is based on his own script that almost resembles a silent film because of the sparse dialog. Both films are on religious themes, on falling in love outside marriage, and leading up to an eventual miracle. Reygadas uses these basic religious and abstract ingredients to weave a modern story that is as powerful as Dreyer's classic work by adding the realistic and accessible components of nature—automated milking of milch cows (without milking, the cows would be in distress) and a family bathing scene—do seem to be included as daily occurrences that have a cyclical similarity to the main plot—the collapse and rebuilding of a marriage. Reygadas' cinema invites the viewer to look at nature captured by the film and discover parallels to the story-line. This film is one of the richest examples of cinema today that combines intelligently a structured screenplay, creative sound management, and marvelous photography that soothes your eyes, ears and mind.

Early in the film, the "family" is introduced sitting around a table in silent prayer before partaking a meal. The silence is broken by the tick-tock of the clock. The children are obviously unaware of the tension in the room, except that they would like to eat the food in front of them. The adults are under tension. When the head of the family remains alone on the table (symbolic statement) he breaks into uncontrollable sobs. He gets up to stop the loud clock (symbolic) that evidently disturbed the silent prayer. This action becomes important if we realize that the clock never bothered the family silent prayers before. All is not well. Time has to stand still.

Composition of scenes of scenes in the film remind you of Terrence Mallick—the balancing visuals of men and children sitting on bales of hay on trailer—again recalling a cosmic balancing force in life Both "Silent Light" and "Ordet" revolve around a miracle, where a woman's love for a male lover and tears for his dead wife leads to calming a turbulent marriage. The film is not religious but the Mennonite world is religious. Religion remains in the background, In the foreground is love between individuals, lovers, husbands, wives, sons, parents, et al. What the film does is nudge the viewer to perceive a mystical, cosmic world, a world beyond the earth we live in, which is enveloped in love. There is a cosmic orbit that the director wants his viewers to note—similar to the erring husband driving his truck in circles as though he was in a trance on the farm, while listening to music. Mennonite children who are not exposed to TVs seem to enjoy the comedy of Belgian actor and singer Jacques Brel in a closed van. While Reygadas seems to be concentrating on the peculiarities of a fringe religious group, the universal truths about children's behavior and adult behavior captured in the film zoom out beyond the world of Mennonites. They are universal.

The film begins in silence and ends in silence against a backdrop of stars in the night. The indirect reference to the "Silent night" hymn is unmistakable. For the patient viewer here is a film to enjoy long after the film ends.

Stillness speaks (but not to everybody)

[Serge Bosque · 7/10 · 17 December 2007]

This is certainly not a film for everybody and I will be careful in who I recommend this movie to. It is challenging because it is very unsatisfying to the 5 senses we are used to (over)feed. This movie is like meditating, you need to surrender to it, ignore what your mind is telling you about what a movie should be, surrender to the slowness first and then to the lack of almost everything we are normally used to in a movie. There is so little you can chew on, no acting, inhibited emotions, no laughter, even the acclaimed picture is unsatisfying (don't see this movie for that reason). Everything is internal, barely reaching the surface. If you can tune in though, like in a meditation, you will become ultra sensitive, sense the subtle and begin to enjoy. Some scenes may even totally fill your spirit. One word of caution though, if you intend to see this movie in a theatre: it is very likely that some people will become uncomfortable and leave, keep talking, protest etc... which makes it even more difficult to watch it with serenity so renting it as a DVD may be a more suitable option. If you are the kind of person enjoying a walk in the countryside contemplating nature without talking you'll probably enjoy this movie. If you prefer talking or being entertained then chances are that you will not.

The sights and sounds, the seriousness these Mennonites take their love and death, is all moving

[secondtake · 7/10 · 5 August 2010]

Silent Light (2007)

I don't think you should pre-judge this film by director Carlos Reygadas's known style--lots of long, matter of fact takes, and mostly amateur actors. This is a Mexican film, and some Spanish language appears, but most of it is in a Mennonite dialect, a kind of country German carried over by Russian immigrants. Seeing these simple people from the inside is a large part of the interest here, even though it's not a documentary. Reygadas makes it a point to get the pace of their lives, which is apparently very slow!

It's odd to see such deliberate photography in the mold of Ozu, with the still camera and the offscreen activity now and then, and to realize how difficult it is to pull that off. Only because it doesn't quite work here. It becomes an affectation, even so that the curvature of the widescreen (and anamorphic, I think) photography becomes a distraction. The approach, however, makes for a very quiet movie, viscerally, and because of that it penetrates the characters and gets to some moving issues.

It's a deeply felt story, for sure, and that was enough to make me want to watch it. But there were times when I felt like I was sitting it out through conviction. It almost forced you to feel sad, and to share the loneliness of these country folk who struggle on their farms not to survive, but to understand love and meaning. Heavy stuff, and laid out with amazing seriousness. And also shown in clear, appreciative views.

You will get the feeling sometimes that there ought to be someone out in this forlorn landscape who is happy, and who has some sense of quick wit. But apparently not! It's a despondent experience, and that actually is what I liked about it. But I'm not sure it is enough, this drawn out sadness alone, with lots of ambient droning sounds (very vivid) overwhelms the apparent "plot" of a love that isn't appropriate.

Is it good? I think some people will totally love it. I'd recommend it for those who want to really lose themselves in another world, in realistic and un adorned terms, a world that is unspectacular on the surface, and very probing and beautiful within.

About what it takes to be truly alive

[howard.schumann · 9/10 · 8 June 2008]

Set in the austere Mennonite community of northern Mexico, Carlos Reygadas' Silent Light is not about suffering and sin but about the enormous power of compassion and what it takes to be truly alive. Filmed in consultation with the Mennonites, a Christian sect of European descent who speak Plautdietsch, a German dialect, the film is paced very slowly, almost excruciatingly so, but its meditative pace allows those with patience to enter the interior lives of the characters in a way that is normally not possible in cinema. With outstanding performances by non-professional actors that reminds us of Bresson and Tarkovsky, the film's physical beauty brings poetry to ordinary events such as machines harvesting crops, the milking of cows, and the faces of children having their hair shampooed.

Johan (Cornelio Wall), a father of five young children, is involved in a love triangle that has made him remorseful and uncertain of God's approval. Torn between his wife Esther (Miriam Toews) and his lover Marianne (Maria Pankratz), he openly confesses his adulterous behavior to his wife as he entertains thoughts of abandoning his family. In obvious pain, Johan sits alone at the kitchen table and weeps after Esther and the children have gone out following the morning ritual of breakfast and silent prayer, but his remorse does not prevent him from continuing to meet and have sex with Marianne. After Johan goes to a garage to pick up a crankshaft for his tractor, he tells his friend Zacarius (Jacobo Klassen) about his affair, then, when a familiar song comes on the radio, turns up the volume and sings along in an outburst of sudden joy while driving his truck in circles.

Later, he stops by his parent's farm to tell his father about his affair, explaining that he has told Esther about Marianne. His father, a preacher, hints that the devil may be responsible but also admits that he once also had an affair with a woman other than his mother. In one of the warmest scenes of the film, Johan and Esther take the children bathing in a nearby pond, a gesture of love that made his infidelity all the harder for Esther to bear. When they are driving alone in a ferocious rainstorm, she complains of chest pains and has to get out of the car and walk to a nearby tree, in obvious discomfort.

A long and quiet film, Silent Light, touches on some profound themes but keeps its emotional distance. Because there is little emphasis on religious beliefs or the real nature of his emotional and spiritual crisis, the film's final homage to Carl Dreyer is not placed in a context where it can achieve either radiance or power and comes off as a second hand copy. Yet though Silent Light doesn't quite overcome its inertia and reach the heights, its visual beauty is consoling and at times overwhelming. An exquisite six-minute tracking shot frames the film, an opening and closing sequence that attempts to connect our mundane lives to the ineffable beauty of the universe. As the illuminated stars slowly give way to sunlight and we are caressed by the ambient sounds of nature, we sense the light slowly beginning to illuminate our planet as we move into a new age, long forecasted in Hopi and Mayan tradition.

Slow and slightly bewildering, but visually superb.

[Robert_Woodward · 7/10 · 13 January 2008]

The six-minute opening shot of Silent Light depicts the starry night sky giving way, slowly but relentlessly, to the nascent light of the early morning sun. This shot could in itself serve as a captivating short film but in its particular context it serves most obviously to set the overall pace for this film by the Mexican director Carlos Reygadas: slow.

The cast of Silent Light consists primarily of non-actors drawn from the Menonite religious community in which the film is set. Their fine performances create a believable and frequently captivating world for the viewer. We are given insights into the day-to-day lives of the family as the story slowly develops in stages, grimly charting the inexorable demise of the relationship between husband Johan and wife Esther.

Around the stark central narrative there are some charming scenes and some superb camera work. Even the scenes where the children playing in the pond are all-too-aware of the presence of the camera carry a certain fascination. Having said that there are too many shots where the camera lingers to seemingly little effect, except to make the viewer feel distinctly uncomfortable (as one other reviewer has pointed out, there is something rather unnerving about the kissing scene involving Johan and Marianne).

I also feel compelled to add that there is a rather bizarre twist at the end of what would otherwise be a straightforward and powerful story. For me this threw into some confusion the preceding two hours of film and left the story hanging on an oddly unsatisfactory note. Despite the slow pacing and somewhat bewildering ending this is a strong, distinctive piece of film-making and I would recommend that it be viewed in a cinema rather than on the small screen so as to get the best of some superb camera-work.

Helps you going out of your fantasy bubble...

[dasevilengel · 9/10 · 28 April 2008]

As a Mexican, I forget that this country is formed not only by cities'and country inhabitants. There is an almost infinite number of variables between those to macro worlds. A movie like this helps you remember how diverse and rich human race is, and that you are surrounded by so many different types of individuals, but it's just that you don't want to look carefully. This movie is really art cinema, and it was great for me watching this kind of production in a commercial location. From the moment of the initial sequence -that resembles the long scenes in Russian movies and theater- I knew that what I was about to witness was a display of delightful movie making. This one is definitely not for the average movie goer that wants to see explosions all over the place and easy to understand plots. No, definitely not. But If you are one of those, I strongly encourage you to see it, but do that with an open mind, knowing that it will be an extremely hard to digest film. And sometimes, you need to sacrifice something in order to enjoy the worthy things in life. And with the closing sequence, parallel to the opening one, I felt I paid to watch a real movie, and believe me, that does not happen often to me.

Truly captures the life of Mennonites

[christina-maitin · 7/10 · 14 December 2008]

My comments on this film might be very different as the others. Having been raised as a Mennonite I could understand the majority of what was being said without subtitles. With that in mind I can honestly say that this film is very true to the nature of Mennonite life. Real actors would not have been able to portray the culture this well. The movie is slow paced and very quiet. Everything from the clothing to the speech were realistic. The long silences between speech was a little frustrating but non the less true to reality. Johan's struggle between his love for Ester and Marianne brought a human nature element to the film but I was a disappointed by his father's reaction to it. As a preacher he should not have said he would stand with Johan if he choose to leave Ester. Mennonite faith does not allow divorce. Ester knew about the adultery and yet stayed with Johan through all her pain because she was bound to him in faith. Only in dying could she find peace. This film was wonderfully done however it was slow and not everyone would be able to appreciate the thought and dedication it must have taken to make it as accurate as it was. If you are not Mennonite there are elements to this film you might not understand, such as the hymn at Ester's funeral, sung without music, yet one I have heard many times before. The one thing that really disappointed me was the fact that the speech was not accurately subtitled and at times whole sentences where omitted and meanings where completely different. I wish the movie would be re-translated. This film is best viewed knowing that it is not an exciting thriller, but a glimpse into a culture that is rare and slowly going extinct. And of that, this movie does an extremely good job.

Powerful and Beautiful: Reygadas triumphs again.

[bersarhin · 8/10 · 16 November 2007]

With Stellet Licht, Mexican director Carlos Reygadas follows a different path from his previous films. Reygadas tells a very simple and age-old story: the choice of a man between two women. However, it's his unique vision of life what makes this film stand out from the hundreds of films made with this subject matter.

A contained and wonderful Cornelio Wall delivers a range of feelings, resting almost entirely in his expressive eyes. His excellent performance fits perfectly with the quiet and slow pace of the film. The rest of the cast is also great, with really natural performances throughout the film.

The cinematography and editing are also gorgeous, developing an unique pace and look to the film that would have bored in any other film. While the pace of the film is extremely slow, the audience gets used to it, preventing boredom from affecting the viewers, as it normally occurs with other slowly-paced films.

The film happens in the secluded Menonite settlement of the beautiful state of Chihuahua, introducing us to a world completely different from ours, but the universal feeling of the story makes us realize that, regardless of the differences between different groups of people, we are all similar.

Concealed Unconcealment

[chaos-rampant · 22 November 2013]

I urge readers to watch this.

The story is touching and human. A family man who is seized by a new inexplicable love that tells him the old love, what he used to think as love, was merely peace and habit, and yet he can't be sure. Is the new one merely passion? Does he have a right to betray the trust? Deny himself happiness? It is the most profoundly troubling question that I imagine can arise in a lifetime.

The film is merely one possible outcome, how making a choice can upset the whole universe, the question itself is much more difficult and deep. If you're 18 the gravity of it might not register, you still have second and third chances ahead of you. But after a certain age, I imagine it becomes entirely cosmic, entirely about choosing the last person you're going to know and love.

My only quibble about this is the stifled Germanic presence all through the film. I'm talking about the deliberately inexpressive faces, pauses and careful poses, people arranged in symmetries around objects, none of which is artful in my world. Well art can be anything so it is not that so much as choosing the world you're going to live in and I'll have none of that stylized pouting in my home, suffering can never be an aesthetic.

Yet in this hard shell there is a softly pounding heart of beauty.

One is how this harsh German presence is softened by the afterglow of a sweeter sun and rolling Mexican landscape, which is where the film takes place. Mellowed in this way it brings to the fore a quality I admire in Protestants: simple lives, joy in austerity and nonattachment. Though it came from historical necessity, it's still the closest thing to Zen we've known in Europe.

The other thing is even simpler yet that much more beautiful. The film is shot in long quiet sweeps of ordinary nothing, those who keep in touch know I am frequently vexed by this technique because it so often becomes merely about style instead of sculpted insight, a garment worn a certain way.

Transcendent vision in film, which is at its most powerful, is about unconcealing a fuller sense of world, broader horizons. It cannot be a proclamation of love but a gesture that embodies what it means to; words are just too easy and cheap, whereas the visible action is itself the commitment.

Here we have something that is elegant and simple in just the right measure.

In the story we have new love that extends from the old, a new feeling, new beginnings one after the other, not always the one desired or anticipated.

All through the film we have a dozen or so subtle metaphors about just this feeling of unconcealing a new world, of reaching an end which is only the start of the next landscape.

My favorite are the following two. A combine threshes a wheatfield, a violent, clustered image of uprooting, only to arrive at the end of the field at an open horizon of fields. And even greater, during the river scene, the man and soon-to-be betrayed wife embrace as their children wash below, still close, their bodies leave the frame and we're left for several lingering moments in the hazy unfocused space of their absence, only for the camera to slowly find and focus on a blossoming flower.

Breathtaking!

So when she departs in the end and miraculously comes to again, it the same inner blossom from nothing, call it a sense of the mother still being in the world. The world does not end so long as we keep this anticipation of presence, fields to see after this one, new people to love, never bogged down by loss. The hazy landscape of seeming nothingness already contains the flower, in that scene it is neither there as we don't see it nor not there as it is there to be found, and this all has its meditative sense.

I'm glad for this film. From now on, whenever it happens that I have to try and illustrate the Buddhist notion of emptiness, or shunyata, I will reach for this one scene.

Something to meditate upon.

Trusting your audience

[MOscarbradley · 7/10 · 15 April 2008]

Carlos Reygadas obviously trusts himself and his audience. Why else would he make a funereally slow movie set in an environment alien to almost everyone, with virtually no plot to speak of and with a cast of non-professional actors? Depending on your point of view, "Silent Light" is either a masterpiece of great social, psychological and theological importance or a load of pseudo-intellectual twaddle. Like me you may, of course, sit on the fence, unprepared to jump either way until you see it a second time; that's if you can bring yourself to sit through this painfully slow film a second time.

Best, for starters, that you know as little as possible about the ending and the comparisons made with a great past classic of the cinema, the title of which will surely give away the ending here, to anyone who has seen it. In drawing those comparisons Reygadas is setting himself up for a fall; after all, the film in question is hardly likely to pop up either at your local multiplex or on television anytime soon and unless you have sought out the DVD or read the numerous reviews and essays written about it, you are unlikely to know the 'punch-line'. So, you may say, the Reygadas film deserves to be judged purely on its merits, though again, if you are used to more conventional narratives you may wonder what, if any, its merits are.

It opens with a completely black screen, an image held long enough for you to realize that what you are seeing is a landscape at night. Slowly, (like so much in the film), light ascends on this landscape until we realize we are witnessing the start of a new day. Reygadas then introduces us to a family at prayer and the sense of a community becomes palatable. What follows is straightforward indeed. The film's central character is a deeply religious man with a wife and family, a pillar of his community who happens to be in love with another woman and who has been carrying on an affair with her and with his wife's knowledge. Neither he nor the woman see this as 'wrong' but rather as part of God's 'plan' for them. Initially his wife, too, seems to have accepted the situation although in time we see her acceptance as a front to hide her pain.

This is film stripped bare of all drama or melodrama. Reygadas seems less interested in what the characters say to each other or even in what they do as in what they feel and think. No-one on screen acts in any conventional sense of the term. Rather we observe them going through the motions; (the emotions?). Reygadas is like a psychologist clinically observing their behavior and he observes it at an intolerable length. Shots are held for an eternity even when there is 'nothing' on screen or nothing which we may feel advances 'the plot'. (The film runs for over two hours; if he had held those shots for a shorter period we might have got through it all in half the time).

His reasons, apparently, for this emphasis on inactivity is to give the audience time to get to know the people on screen, to take in the landscape and to understand the character's relationships to it and to each other and since he deals in powerful emotions such an approach can surely only be to the film's advantage? Partly, but he also risks boring us and I did find myself shifting uncomfortably in my seat.

There is no denying that the ending and the scenes leading up to it are extremely powerful, particularly since we have been so removed from the characters up to then. This explosion of feeling comes as something of a shock and even if you still guess the outcome it will, nevertheless, pull you up short, (it transgresses 'reality'). Only the most serious film-makers can get away with something like this. Whether you think Reygadas gets away with it or is sufficiently 'serious' a film-maker is a matter of individual judgment. But as I have said, Reygadas obviously trusts himself and his audience and maybe that's enough.

Makes Brown Bunny look like a film

[velkjent · 1/10 · 8 September 2008]

I always viewed Jet Li's The One as the single worst film in my lifetime, but I now have to reconsider. When the woman who introduced the film said it was in the vein of Tarkowsky I got interested. Not many films are made these days with that kind of poetic nature and visual invention. Then the film started. With a sunrise. The biggest cliché in cinema? Not when you stretch it for six minutes. It is then supposed to be poetic. Then we meet the dullest family in the history of cinema, accompanied by the steady rhythm of a clock. A cliché? Yes, but you see, this is different because it stretches the dullness and boredom to the extremely painful level, which made me relate to the man when he appeared to commit suicide. But in the end he just turned off the clock. This is symbolism, because like all modern festival art films, this movie is about regret, the need to turn time back, God and bladibla. The lead character is supposedly torn because he has found a woman who makes him feel the way he felt for his wife when he was younger, as if he was at one with nature. Cue eternal shots of fields, trees, the usual. When we meet him and his lover together, there is nothing to suggest even a remote sense of passion, as their dry tongues interlock for en eternity against poetic lens flare while the actors mechanically eat each other as if it was a meal their grandma had cooked and they just didn't have the heart to turn down. But only after he has explained the nature of their relationship in quasi-philosophical terms to his friend, who works as a mechanic, which means we have to watch them fix a car for about ten minutes in a traveling shot that reminds me of the first year of film school. For most of the rest of the movie the guy wanders around, looks at the sun, the snow and so on, and has the same discussion with a group of dispassionate confidantes. I won't spoil the blatantly obvious "story"-developments (they generally happen about an hour after they would in a Movie of the Week), but suffice to say it ends with a sunset that dares you not to scream at the screen. At least The One didn't think it was a Bergman movie. And I suddenly realized why cinema is seen as dying right now. For the most part we only have two alternatives. Mindless but well paced entertainment, and fortune-cookie philosophy 101 homework movies determined to show "exotic people" as if anyone who leads a different life than most of us are passionless, empty-eyed people "at one" with nature. As an alternative I'd recommend a long train ride, where you spend most of the time looking at the passing scenery and how the light hits it, while once in a while glancing at at the faces of people who wish it was over all ready. Don't bring a book. It will be too much like living.

Surrender to the veracity and have your vitals pulped.

[greymumster · 10/10 · 13 March 2008]

I am officially senior this year and I have seen a lot of movies, but I doubt if I will ever see a better one than this. I find it hard to analyse why it is so amazingly magic and captivating. I'll try not to bore you, as I have done to all my friends who haven't seen it. I think the ambient sound-designed soundtrack and the restrained, poignant and profound dialogue are the most revelatory aspects of the films construction. Indeed I can't think of another film comparable for emotional clout using such economic material. Although I share the filmmakers disappointment that his film is not embraced by a larger audience, I was lucky enough to see this movie in an all but empty cinema in London and joyfully, tearfully and emotionally sucked in every molecule off the screen and surrendered to its visceral magic. It could be twice as long, I don't care it was utterly beautiful. It felt totally authentic, real and relevant to me. There were admittedly, a lot of personal resonances for me in there. I had just been on a mature gap to a rural part of Australia visually similar to Mexico and most of the time I was driving around in my ute in torrential rain or baking sun. No telly, no adverts, no phones and no urban pressure....bloody delicious. Some of my ancestors were Mennonites so I am very sympathico to their lifestyle ethos. Anyone who has been in such a love-triangle will recognise the veracity of the plot. I was totally blown away back in my own time during it and revisited Stellar Licht for weeks and weeks after wards. I would love to watch again but I think it needs the big screen.

Tarantino in a pious farm house

[sprengerguido · 7/10 · 27 May 2009]

I'm putting this a bit sharper than the film deserves. Many people have written wonderful things about it film, and I agree: It is a treasure. Still... still... I have a problem. A problem I already had with Reygadas' first feature, "Japón". Reygadas, I think, is still struggling to find his own voice. He is working in the tradition of philosophical parables of the likes of Tarkovsky or Dreyer, but he combines this austere and perfectionist style with an empathy and enthusiasm for everything that happens in front of his camera which is almost documentary-like. He clearly loves the things his camera can see, the buildings, the machines, the everyday events. If he manages to get these two strands of his film-making into perfect synthesis, he will produce masterpieces. Yet, right now, there's a problem. At the end of this film, he does something which is extremely risky, in terms of philosophy and storytelling, and you have to be very sure of yourself to pull it off convincingly. Unfortunately, Reygadas makes it look like a rip-off. When Marianne enters the room where Esther is laid in state, there is a shot that made me think immediately: "Hey, this looks like Dreyer's 'The Word'". And then, the same thing as in "The Word" happens... Sure, it's also different, and the meaning is somewhat different, too. Still: If you immerse the viewer into the unique world of your film, as this one does, you don't want him, just near the climax, to think of a different movie. If you still struggle to find your aesthetic standing, don't burden your movie with the memories of an unsurpassable masterpiece. As I said, the same thing in "Japón" - that film is strewn with references to Tarkovsky (you can see them here, too, but they are less obtrusive). So, as good as "Stellet Licht" is, the Tarantinoing of its ending almost killed it for me. Reygadas has masterpieces in him - he just needs to stop referencing his masters; or he has to turn ironic. (This is the way Jarmusch gets things done; but would that be good for Reygadas? I think not.)

Silent Light and Ordet's Light

[TravelerThruKalpas · 4/10 · 12 February 2009]

Michael Ondaatje once said that there is a limit to what films can do in getting below the surface of things. This might well be said of Silent Light. On first reflection it seems a mystery how this film, the third by Carlos Reygadas, actually manages to work some magic on the viewer without recourse to establishing conventional feelings for its characters. There is no script here which allows a way of rendering people in any depth whatsoever; dialogue is spare, relaying information in brief clusters of signifying words. "This is the last time... Peace -- is stronger than love... Poor Esther," a character says after lovemaking. The very fact that dialogue relays information stiltedly, instead of communicating in a more natural way, is a stylistic attenuation which doesn't build a convincing case for itself in the course of the film, though eventually a bare minimum of dialogue does enable us to discern the basic dilemma here: the issues a married man faces in keeping a mistress (or not) in a specific sectarian community.

On the other hand, within this economy there is a vital sense of how light affects appearances -- all the varying qualities of light as that which in themselves might generate emotion. But that this happens to the extent which is fulfilling as an experience, as many critics seem to think, is questionable. Here, characters function as IMAGES of people -- rather than AS fully-dimensional people -- just as trees and landscapes function in most films as images of trees and landscapes, that is, without further requirements. There is a kind of purity resulting in all of this, and it's as if a mystery of the generic (not archetype) is revealed: as if each image appears as a pure template -- of itself: this IS the image of trees in a field at dusk, this IS the image of a woman sitting across from a man in a passenger seat of a car, this IS the image of a man alone at a table crying... There is a self-consciousness at play in the sensitivity of the cinematographic light, and thus a heightened sense of physical presence. And the performances by non-professionals are rendered in a way which recalls Bresson, but with a more pronounced distancing. Yet at the same time, and unlike Bresson, the characters just don't register as fully inhabiting a world. (Which begs the question: just because human beings merely "show up" in a film, can they qualify as "characters"?)

Having said all that, I wonder what connection Mr. Reygadas estimated for his project with respect to Carl Theodor Dreyer's film Ordet, which appears the intentional factor in making his own, largely according to the conjunction of the same main event (a miracle) in both films. Silent Light is actually only a very slight homage to Ordet (shared miracle notwithstanding) for all the supposed similarities many critics have wished to concoct between the films. It seems hard to reasonably qualify Reygadas's re-approach to this "miracle of faith" (not to reveal it here), which one had no trouble accepting from Dreyer, who was a man of deeply religious sensibility -- a sensibility generally and notably absent in Reygadas, a crucial point which leaves the comparison of both men itself wanting.

A rather important omission in general from the critical assessments of the film, is the remembrance that in making Ordet, Dreyer did adapt a play -- through which the matter of revealing the inner states and spiritual conditions of the characters depend on words and the nuances of meaning in language; we are communicative, expressive beings (urban or rural), after all. One of Dreyer's supreme gifts was to compliment the emotional weave of the ongoing verbal exchange between characters with visual compositions and lighting, illuminating what was outside of the spoken. This perfectly complimentary method (one even more refined in his last film, Gertrud, also based on a play) -- between word and image -- exemplifies the interdependence out of which the meaning of his work arises.

In contrast, Reygadas favors the laconic approach of images over words, and has difficulty producing the same depth of total response from the viewer. If he did indeed intend to seek out the inner lives of his characters, albeit in a way apart from language, he hasn't achieved much more than a surface of imagistic mystique, wherein things tend to signify only themselves (as "templates") without deeper resonance. On balance, however, it is notable that there is a distancing due to the subtle stylistic effects one can feel even when watching Dreyer's film; a feeling of being at a remove from the events unfolding, even while one senses being suspended in a spiritual dimension, yet in the end, one which still somehow feels like *real* everyday life. This unusual effect also seems to be present in Silent Light.

Interestingly, when the miracle of the former film appears here, it is not a moving event in and of itself; and yet paradoxically, it effectively becomes such -- due to the exquisitely clear, lucid visual presentation: the transference, of the technical qualities of modulated light, upon subjects, into a "miraculous appearance," is total. The face of the smiling or crying one is the the face illuminated and transfigured by this light -- the entire process of which is ostensibly the real subject of Reygadas's film.

But in Dreyer's cinema, the mutually dependent transference of meaning between words and images will always account for a more deeply satisfying experience, far beyond mere technical control of the medium. Next to Ordet, Silent Light will seem ever more slight the more critics try to inflate tenuous connections between the two. One is even tempted to apply Mahler's dictum that "interesting is easy, beautiful is difficult." Apropos of the ravishing images Reygadas conjures, however, one might go further here and say that the beautiful truly appears easy, but nonetheless a deeper, more rewarding interest lies elsewhere.

Excellent film, a touching work of art

[cargs_2000 · 8/10 · 9 November 2007]

It is a very good film. This is contemplation cinema, with beautiful landscapes and really touching scenes. Although the argument isn't an innovative one, the context and the way the director captures its work empowers the story and succeeds in maintaining viewers attention despite the long shots that often makes the spectator to run out of patience, to get distracted or bored. Innovative context. The first movie about Mexican mennonites (40 000)in their own language (plautietsch)played by real mennonites that aren't real actors. It shows in an honest way their life style in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua, how they live almost without interacting with Spanish speaking mexicans. Up to now, definitely Carlos Reygadas best film. I'm not saying that everybody would enjoy this film, but to me it is an excellent movie and I broadly recommend it. Its awards are richly deserved. "Stellet Licht" is a work of art.

Don't.... just don't

[buddychrist_wolfie · 27 August 2008]

The photo isn't bad, nothing amazing but worth the recognition. That's all the movie's got. It's a ten minute story that wouldn't have been all that great anyway, only it's stretched out over two hours.

I agree not everything needs to hold the rhythm of the MTV generation but I am convinced that everything on screen needs a purpose. I hear it is meant to show "how slowly life moves" in the Mennonite society but there are a thousand ways to show that without turning the movie into this pretentious mental masturbation.

Most of the elements don't do nearly enough to move the story along, nor do they tell us anything significant about the characters who feel superficial and simple. The father is the only character with a little depth. I hope all you fellow writers out there know what a deadly sin that is.

All in all it feels like a pathetic attempt from Reygadas to declare himself a genius, just like his other movies. If you really have nothing better to do, go ahead and watch it. Personally I wish I had spent the time poking my eyeballs instead.

Static and silence

[paul2001sw-1 · 7/10 · 18 January 2009]

A film about a snow-covered area of Mexico inhabited by emotionally reticent German-speakers promises some surprises; and we get our first when the film begins with ten whole minutes without a single word of dialogue or any discernible action, before the first line (a simple "Amen") is uttered. With the opening sequences out the way, thing start to happens, but at a slow pace, and with many long scenes filmed with static cameras that reminded me of Terrence Davies' Liverpool trilogy, although those films were nowhere near as still as this one. At its worst, the result could be dismissed as a long film about agriculture; but at is best, the slow pace pays dividends, as the audience learns how to react to the minutiae of the characters' lives. For example, there's one scene, where we wait for a truck to reverse, that takes about 10 seconds, but in taking these ten seconds (which would have been cut in almost any other film), the poignancy of the moment is captured in a way would have been lost if the blank space had been edited out. But I didn't completely understand the ambiguous ending and during the final (again silent) five minutes, I regrew my impatience with the film. There's some brilliance on display here, but also some self-indulgence, albeit in highly understated form. But it's worth watching in either case, as an unsentimental but emotionally moving portrait of a community not many people elsewhere in the world know too much about.

Art confuses itself with life, if only you open your arms to it.

[admiral_andrews · 9/10 · 10 June 2008]

There are two ways of making a movie genius. One way is you make it an exciting storytelling, with lots of twists, surprises and well placed moments of tension turned to gold by great acting and tasteful camera angles and lighting.

The other way is this.

People will say this movie is boring. It is. They will say it drags itself. It does.

But while it does, it becomes painstakingly realistic. An average Joe doesn't spend his life fighting terrorists and being tossed around by the explosions he can't avoid, and while an average Joe can have a war land on his head or a ship sink under his feet, the really unlucky Joe will spend his life trying to make a living with no real chances of a worldwide tragedy turning him into a martyr or a hero.

"Stellet Licht" doesn't feed you the story. The key to deciphering this movie is that you must notice most shots are in a sort of "point of view" mode that keeps telling you "this could be you. What would you think right now? What would you do?".

And while it doesn't feed you everything, actions and dialogues, no matter how simple they sound at first are deeply meaningful and provide amazing food for thought. Marshall MacLuhan once described movies as "hot" media, demanding attention to find the meaning while leaving little space for your own participation as most is fed to you. A movie like "The Preadator" is hot; it doesn't immerse you as much as it attacks your senses of hearing and seeing.

In "Stellet Licht" while visuals and sound are of crucial importance in the beauty of the shots, the movie keeps a constant dialogue with the viewer and it's this viewer who ends up making a great part of the movie. This would be the definition of a "cool" media. In the end, everybody will have seen this movie differently and it will be a very intimate experience if only you lay the popcorn's aside and think about what is being shown to you.

Watch it with your significant other and you will realize there is so much to talk about, unlike with many other movies that leave you with trivialities and little more. So "Stellet Licht" is more than amazing story telling, it's what a dear friend of mine calls art: something that intertwines and confuses itself with real life.

If not for everybody, certainly not for those who expect a movie to spoon feed them and are not willing to incorporate and reinterpret the experience, but for those who are willing to think and discuss some of the strong subjects of this movie, "Stellet Licht" is a not just a movie, but an enlightening experience.

"Silent Light" is long, and boring. But that is also the beauty of it.

[grantgadbois · 7/10 · 13 July 2017]

"Silent Light" is long, and boring. But that is also the beauty of it. Reygadas creates this long narrative in order to capture the real feeling of the characters' lives. It's slow, and quiet, and creates for a similarly themed story. This is a hindrance, and a strength. Although it is not wholly entertaining, it is meaningful and impactful. Reygadas succeeds in painting the picture, representing the lives' of these Mennonites accurately and naturally. It might not keep the audience on the edge of their seats, but it does deserve their attention. It's landscapes are beautiful and its cinematography is equally visually interesting. And it's content is thought-provoking by exposing the viewer to an environment most of us are vastly unfamiliar with. Although it may not intrigue most film-goers, it is a well made film, and a humbling story.

A man caught in between

[drazen-n · 8/10 · 28 August 2007]

The movie is about a father of a big family living on a remote farm, in old fashioned way. He falls in love for another woman and is caught in between love and respect. I think it was both very interesting and unusual in the same time. I didn't know anything about it when I watched it, except that it's 140 minutes long :) Yeah, the movie grows very slowly and you have to be very patient while watching it. Some parts contain very little communication, and other are very Lynch-like. Some stuff that you would consider unimportant are carried out into details in the movie. The music and the scenery shots were beautiful, and the acting was good. It was an unique experience and I hope you'll know what I think about after you see it.

Often appealing and always eye opening drama delivered through this desperately exclusive lens of the high art.

[johnnyboyz · 7/10 · 8 March 2012]

Silent Light is a painfully authentic film, but rest assured that is a compliment. When two characters, much later on, share the two front seats of the interior of an automobile one of them outlines just how much the pair of them being together in this particular space once meant, and how that is now destroyed because of the actions the person to whom this individual speaks recently undertook. A few minutes later, although feeling like a lifetime, the vehicle must pull over and that victimised party must fall out to the side of the road only to suffer a large heart attack. It is a happening doctors cannot explain, but deep down those in-the-know realise it was more than likely some sort of broken heart.

The film is one made by that of a director we picture spending his spare time shredding neatly bounded publications therein containing page after page after page of hints and tips which happens to sport "The Rules of Filmmaking" on the cover. We picture someone stewing over which proverbial line they are to next cross; which set of filmmaking principals they are to next smash, and pondering over how long a static shot of a roadside building in the lonely deserts of wherever need-be to simultaneously maintain a sense of the 'high art' in progress as well as to maintain rhythm in relation to what's unfolding: namely, the slow and strenuous capitulation of a marriage. Rest assured, if the results upon going to these places are things such as Silent Light – who's to complain?

Set on and around a farm, as well as its neighbouring rural zones, Mexican director Carlos Reygadas tells a fairly conventional story fairly unconventionally. It involves a large family, containing a husband and father as well as his wife; his exterior lover as well as his friends whom pop in and out of his life every now and again. The film is a far cry from any other sort of story of strife in the household and behind-the-significant-other's-back shenanigans that I have ever seen; certainly, it makes Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut look positively mainstream in its depiction of a family unit falling away at the seams out of ill-judged feelings more broadly linked to sexual escapades and the temptations or following through of marital infidelities. In describing the film as one in which extended takes of what is commonly labelled as "the mundane" or "the everyday" as well as a piece which enjoys its flicking from what appears to be the Spanish language to something known as Lower Saxon, one does the film a disservice. True, any filmmaker opening his film with what is something like an eleven minute unbroken shot of a sunrise is asking for people to sit up and take notice before arriving at a conclusion which might very well be closer to derogatory than complimentary, but it doesn't take us long for Reygadas to strike us as a director in it for the artistic integrity moreover multiplex audience response through their queueing to see it a second time.

The film's sunrise eventually sheds light on a series of fields making up that of a farm located in the rural Mexican outback, a farm belonging to a man named Johan (Wall) whom lives there with his eight children and wife Esther (Toews). Cutting to the farmhouse on this bright day and at this early time, we observe a family clearly at odds with one another; pained expressions throughout the breakfast table and a real lack of communication present. They pray, inferring religious beliefs, and the whole opening plays out to a series of bleats and moans by that of the farmyard livestock syncing up with what you expect to hear, although at the same time lending substantial weight to just peppering proceedings with this uncanny overtune of ugly sounds. After everyone else vacates the room, and both Johan and Ester have confessed their love to one another in a dry tone, we observe Johan break down and weep to himself. Something is most certainly not right.

These things are confirmed when Johan takes a trip out to see a mechanic and close friend of his, a man who hears Johan admit to marital infidelities with a girl named Marianne (Pankratz) but additionally reiterate that he is unhappy where he is and that Marianne is "the girl for him". Marianne is a girl younger and, we feel, more carefree than Johan's wife. Reygadas constructs their chosen lifestyle meticulously and draws us into it equally so. When they meet, it is amidst the lonely motels backing on to main roads taking people to and from this desolate and isolated rural community. When we cut away from the pair of them, they are in the process of embracing and we do so to a pair of chalets perched in unity and looking symmetrical, thus suggesting a working bond or two people sharing a plateau. Reygadas' applies a similar technique, in his distancing the screen content from Johan's embrace with another significant other, when we observe a zooming in on two flowers as the man and his wife hug during a day out at a spring with their children. The flowers this time are asymmetrical, in that one is open in bloom and one is shut. The composition of the flowers is easy on the eye, but there is something wrong with it; things do not sync up such is where they are in their marriage compared to Johan's situation with Mariane. For sure, the film is not all smug symbolism along these lines; moreover, it is a precise and engaging film which grows on the viewer with each passing scene. We ease ourselves into the applied approach and go with it, coming out at the end feeling all of shaken; cleansed and moved.

Reygadas's Fails To Overcome His Influences Again

[cwarne_uk · 4/10 · 14 August 2008]

It's a sign of the ignorance of most professional film critics that few of them seem to have noticed that this film is a blatant rip off of Dreyer's 1955 film "Ordet" (with a little of the earlier "Day Of Wrath" thrown in). "Ordet" is a film that for most viewers moves quite slowly, next to "Silent Light" it feels like a Jason Bourne film though. There are some beautiful images and the non-professional cast do very well. None of this can save the film from it's leaden pace. What moments have heightened emotion tend to be lost in the whole stodginess of proceedings. Spelling out Johan's dilemma so blatantly and so early on is a curious piece of exposition that does not fit in this kind of film - Reygadas should have showed us this instead he tells us (the film is certainly long enough to have done this). It does not help that Reygadas cannot generate the sense of transcendence that Dreyer achieved in "Ordet". What was an intensely spiritual moment in that film seems like cynical sleight-of-hand here. While it is encouraging that younger filmmakers have actually seen films by a neglected master like Dreyer, there is though a world of difference between imitation and influence. Reygadas's first film was Tarkovsky lite, now Dreyer lite. The suspicion must be that he does not have an independent voice.

Just the best movie i have seen... four times already

[leogalicia · 10/10 · 15 January 2008]

This is not a movie for the 300/spider man/transformers fan base. And i don't mean it in an offensive way, but if you are a fan of fast cuts and non stop action this is probably not the movie for you. Silent light is build of less than 10 scenes total, each one lasting from 5 to 15 minutes and scarce to not dialog and music. And here is where Silent light success lies, being thematically so simple it achieves so much with such rudimentary tools. A conventional story told in an unconventional way. The lack of dialog and music is compensated with environmental sounds and natural light, the lack of action is compensated with the inspection of open landscapes and the close ups of expressive faces. Each one of the fragments of this movie is mesmerizing and of increasing beauty. After seen the sunrise of the opening sequence you wonder how can Reygadas match that shot next. But he does, the children bathing in the pond, Johan singing to a radio song while driving his truck, Esther crying in the rain and the funeral scene are all on itself some of the best shorts ever made. Pure cinematographic ecstasis and the stuff that all movies should at least partially hold. Paraphrasing another reviewer fan "movies are the corpse that Reygadas kiss is bringing back to life". If this is not why the word poetry was made for, then what is it?

An extramarital love affair that befalls and embarrasses the two lovers

[frankde-jong · 7/10 · 6 April 2022]

I saw "Stellet licht" as a complement to "Witness" (1985, Peter Weir). "Witness" takes place in the Amish community and "Stellet licht" in a Mennonieten community in Northern Mexico. In "Witness" an outsider causes commotion in the community, in "Stellet licht" the source of the tension comes from within the community in the form of an extramarital love.

This source of tension is depicted very graphically in a long scene about a car ride of the married couple. Clouds as dark as in "Take shelter" (2011, Jeff Nichols) are gathering above the car, while inside the car man and woman are sitting stiffly side by side. The woman reminisces about the time she laid her head on the man's shoulder during a car ride.

The extramarital love gnaws at the man's conscience. He didn't go for it willingly, it happened to him. In this respect the film resembles "Sunrise" (1927, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau). In "Sunrise" however the mistress is a real femme fatale and man eater. In "Stellet licht" on the other hand the mistress is just as embarrassed with the love affair as the man.

One can even say that in "Stellet licht" the woman and the mistress are not competitors but fellow sufferers. A fact that is highlighted during the resurrection of the woman, a scene hat is clearly a film quote from "Ordet" (1955, Carl Theodor Dreyer).

Oh please!

[thomas-360 · 1/10 · 23 July 2009]

All the guys who tell me how great that film is, you gotta be kidding me.

This film is boring and badly executed, without any premise or purpose except for being "art". It mocks the work of generations of artists involved in film-making, be it directors, writers, cutters, performers or whatever. It actually mocks the term "motion picture" itself, as the only thing more absent than motion is a story:

A bunch of non-professional "actors" (calling them that is actually an insult to every half gifted actor who ever lived) sit around, doing nothing but eating cereals or bathing or some other uninteresting stuff, and the director tries to cover up the fact that he has absolutely no story to tell by zooming in on his protagonists' less attractive body parts whenever possible. You can almost hear the guys in Cannes go "Ey, it's got a three minute shot of the pimples on an ugly woman's nose - it's gotta be art!"

As for the "insights" on the Mennonites - I didn't get any, except perhaps that they seem to be the most boring people on the face of the Earth - and that they make bad actors.

And the ending? I'd call it laughable, but I actually felt more like crying. It does, like the film as a whole, insult the viewer's intelligence in a manner that actually made me gasp.

First (and up till now, only) movie where I ever demanded my money back. As did, for that matter, at least half the audience.