When I saw Battle in Heaven I had a temperature of 101
degrees, and, but for the unpleasantness that tends to accompany
that condition, I would recommend it to others as the best way into
a movie that already looks like a fever dream. The fever-hot young
Mexican director, Carlos Reygadas (Japon), confesses in
the press materials that “unfortunately, narrative is still a part
of cinema and I don’t know how to get around that.” Maybe not, but
he’s had a pretty good shot at getting around it. What he calls the
“pretext to make a film, a storyline, like a spinal cord to link
things together” is only hinted at in the succession of images he
parades in front of us, most designed to impress and some to
shock.
The “battle” part of the title is perhaps suggested by scenes of
an army unit marching up and down to the sound of an annoyingly
shrill bugle while a stupendously large Mexican flag is furled and
unfurled in front of us. The “heaven” part will have to remain a
surprise for those who — if there are any such — have nothing
better to do than watch the film, but it has only the most
tangential of relations to the battling part. I can also tell you
that it is not an idea of heaven that will recommend itself to most
Christian believers. Out of this lot of images we must do our best
to try to extract some kind of spinal cord-like storyline.
Marcos (Marcos Hernandez) and his wife (Bertha Ruiz) are
apparently among modern-day Mexico’s small-time kidnapping
entrepreneurs. Following the example of bigger and better organized
criminals who kidnap rich people and ask for large ransoms, they
kidnap poor people and ask for small ransoms. When even those prove
to be beyond the means of the families of their victims, they are
as ruthless as the big boys in killing them. Marcos and the missus
have just lost a baby, they say. They speak of the loss as if it
were their own, but it must be a kidnapped child. For some reason
not made clear, Marcos is having pangs of conscience and says he
will turn himself in to the police.
But first, Marcos, in civilian clothes, marches behind the
soldiers and the giant flag. His day job is as a driver for a
high-ranking general and his family. We never meet the general, but
his daughter, Ana (Anapola Mushkadiz), seems to be living a life of
wild sexual promiscuity that only Marcos knows about. That’s where
some of the shocking imagery comes in. The baby’s kidnapping and
death take place off-screen — whence this unwonted delicacy, I
wonder? — but the film begins and ends with an explicit act of
fellatio. The young and attractive Ana performs this Lewinskyian
service on the old and immensely fat Marcos with a tear crawling
down her cheek.
As Michael Winterbottom’s 9 Songs showed, you can still
get a certain amount of attention for a movie just by showing real,
as opposed to simulated, sex. If your artistic credentials are
strong enough — as Senor Reygadas’s apparently are — you can call
this art rather than pornography. It also helps that Marcos is so
fat and unattractive. “Movies about sex that concentrate on the
outside in order to excite us are pornographic,” says Carlos
Reygadas, “and I am absolutely not making pornography.” Well, he’s
got that right — unless you’re into the Big Butts school of
erotica. For Marcos also makes love to his wife, who is even fatter
than he is, and more of an anaphrodisiac of a movie sex scene I
hope you may never experience.
What, you may ask, have Porky and Petunia in rut to do with that
shadowy and unwanted narrative “pretext”? Something to do with
kidnapping, wasn’t it? Or the secret life of the general’s
daughter? Ah, there I’m afraid I cannot help you. Sometimes the
narrative pretext is more of a pretext than others. Is there
something about Marcos’s conscience we’re meant to understand? Or
perhaps his self-esteem? Surely not about heaven or battles, which
are both extremely far-fetched? I’m blowed if I know.
To put it bluntly, this is a confession of defeat. Instead of
being able to tell you what Senor Reygadas means to say in his
film, I am thrown back once again onto what he says in the press
materials. There he “objects strongly to the notion that any
explicit depiction of sex automatically knocks a movie out of the
realm of fiction into documentary: ‘Why would you not say the same
thing about a shot of someone eating a sandwich? Why should sex be
in a different category?’” Ah, that’s the kind of faux
profundity we used to hear back in the 1960s, before Senor Reygadas
was born. And anyone who has not spent his life in an ideological
hot-house knows the answer to that question. It is that sex
is different from eating a sandwich. Maybe it shouldn’t
be, but it is and always has been bound up with our socially
constructed but seemingly unavoidable sense of shame. It’s all very
well pretending that this doesn’t exist for the sake of a movie,
but the audience will know that it does exist. Therefore, it will
also know that if you show people engaged in sex acts in the movie
it’s only because of the movie.
Such tedious self-reference doesn’t bother the post-modern
film-maker because he assumes that his audience likes
fakery. Fakery is po mo film-making’s stock in trade. But Senor
Reygadas seems to aspire to something more high-brow and serious.
He looks back to the surrealists as his model and has a nice line
in surrealist-type patter about getting at larger truths with his
hyperreal images. Anyway I’m not buying it. There are a lot of
things that are larger than we are (most of us) used to in this
movie, but truth is not among them.
