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.
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.