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Apr 26, 2019 Web Exclusive By Ed McMenamin

There’s a great film inside Carlos Reygadas’ Japón — but his celebrated 2002 directorial debut places ambitious pleasures alongside a tendency to mistake jagged ugliness for authenticity.

The film finds genuine human tragedy and meaning in an unnamed, middle-aged painter who leaves Mexico City for a remote canyon where he intends to kill himself. He walks with a cane and limp, and his face is cragged like the rock formations that line the green plateaus and mountainsides of his journey. His trip pauses unexpectedly when he asks to stay in an elderly woman’s barn near his purported destination.

The old, stone barn blocks the wind from the shack where the woman lives a simple, religious life. The woman, Ascen, cooks over an open flame, washes her clothes without running water. She has intelligent, weary eyes and a lonely widow’s impulse to please. Despite an early warning to the opposite effect, she quickly offers him cold tea when he returns from hikes, and checks on him before bed. The two develop a quiet bond. There are several heartbreaking moments late in the film that Reygadas’s characters earn, scenes which would have retained their profundity and resonance without his occasional poor judgement as a director.

From the brilliant opening sequence, when the camera follows expressway traffic from the city to smaller highways and eventually to a country road, Reygadas depicts his story by framing and shot selection. He understands cinema as a visual artform that is most effective at showing a story rather than telling it. Drama builds as the man comes close to suicide throughout the film—his gun gracefully betrays Chekhov’s rule —and as he becomes invested in Ascen’s life, attempting to defend her from a cruel nephew.

It’s refreshing in the way Reygadas places the emotional at the same level as the intellectual, purposefully failing to distinguish between the two, or possibly elevating the emotional above intellectual. The man in Japón, played by Alejandro Ferretis, achieves his new instinctual equilibrium when the natural environment cleanses him of the urban burdens that led to suicide as a seemingly rational solution. He literally tells Ascen, played by Magdelena Flores, in the film’s turning point, that his stay in her barn released repressed feelings. As a film inspired by Tarkovsky, Herzog and Bresson, it’s hardly anti-intellectual. But it allows the emotional journey of the characters to play out under the surface, related to the audience in a way films of this type often deliver direct philosophical debates.

Reygadas’ skill as a filmmaker is ultimately betrayed by an impulse to provoke or shock, especially in an unnecessary act between the two main characters. The scene sells both them and the audience short, and raises unflattering ideas about Reygadas’ attitudes towards the roles women play in the lives of men, intended or not. Japón is also somewhat notorious for the British Film Institute censoring scenes it considered showed animal cruelty. Reygadas’ defended Japón’s use of animals, saying he doesn’t show anything that is uncommon in the lives of hunters or farmers. Yet the film’s visual statements, ostensibly relating human nature to animal nature, are muddled at best. Maintaining, straight faced, that a critic can’t handle the truth also fails to address the actual complaint — replicating a certain reality at the expense of living things is not the same as capturing reality. At the cinema, ugliness is meaningless if it doesn’t say anything we don’t already know about his characters or a harsh world.

(www.criterion.com/films/28770-jap-n)

Follow Ed McMenamin on twitter at @EdMcMenamin.

Author rating: 7/10