I'm a little surprised that people are still throwing hissy fits over The New World (toward which I, like Hoberman, remain an agnostic), so I thought I'd give a holler to -- and perhaps get this blog to start talking about -- Carlos Reygadas' grotesque, mesmerizing Battle In Heaven, which is so far the best film of the year. Since Bruno Dumont has abandoned his discomfitting Christian vision, Reygadas has seemingly picked it up, creating flesh-tormented passion plays of erotic and thanatotic intensity out of unforgettable compositions and enviornments. And this while hypersensitizing perception through unique plays on sound and image. I see now that the film has left the City -- I can't wait for it to return sometime, even though it might very well in some future fever dream.

Them's fightin' words, mjr. Though it is nice to see someone take the opposite approach to New World on this blog (as you must know, we're all Matt Zoller Seitz-esque New World acolytes), I have to take extreme exception to even mentioning Battle in Heaven in the same breath.

Though I find Reygadas's formal mastery rather dazzling, I find his overall project very suspect. We had a few very praiseworthy pieces on the film in indieWIRE (http://www.indiewire.com/movies/2006/02/head_trip_carlo.html) a couple weeks back, so don't take my POV as representative of all RS, but Reygadas's forthrightly grotesque and childishly provocative vision of Mexico's underclass strikes me as more than a bit disingenuous. This is not to deny the sheer brilliance of the film in narrative and visual schematics. I'm not convinced that the film is as ideologically questionable as my sour stomach tells me it is, but I have remained, using your and Hoberman's words, an agnostic when it comes to this one. I think there's so much here that's good, but the stuff that's bad (the blow job in heaven wraparound, the dead-flesh hippo sex, the jacking off to the soccer game) just seems like embarrassingly juvenile provocation.

It's pretty obvious that this is a film about class in contemporary Mexico City, so what are we supposed to come away with? Certainly the concluding apocalytpic Catholic imagery is strong, but at that point, Reygadas's distancing camera techniques and audience prodding gambits have so thoroughly dehumanized its main character that he becomes nothing more than a bespectacled cipher. The sound/image work is indeed enthralling, yet unlike in Dumont, it serves to bring you farther and farther away from these alien beings, with their rotund, scrutinized bodies, as opposed to closer to an understanding.

I don't know if Reygadas is as good, but it seems to me he's working in the tradition of Bresson and Dumont (I know the former's a lofty name to throw out there, but hold on), keeping on the outside of his non-professional actors while exploring their inner worlds through purely filmic means. The sound/image work isn't just enthralling in this regard, but rather an aesthetic conveyance of Marcos' subjectivity, something Siegrid Alnoy attempted but failed to put forth in She's One of Us. You're right, Battle In Heaven's Christianity remains more fully developed than its take on class stratification, but I disagree with the charges of "juvenile provocation" and "disingenuous[ness]." Grotesque bodies and sex are obviously central to the "transcendence of the flesh" theme that has so far dominated Reygadas' two films -- imagine Battle In Heaven without the images you mention and it simply doesn't work. Besides, the blowjob prologue is simply stunning and beautiful. And I certainly wasn't embarrassed by it.