No one ever looked to Carlos Reygadas for a clear picture and straight story, but this maverick Mexican director may have surpassed himself on Post Tenebras Lux, a congealed Jungian stew that went down to a chorus of boos at the Cannes film festival. Upping the ante still further, Reygadas has elected to shoot large portions of his film through a bevelled camera lens, which refracts his figures, doubles the image and leaves the screen's borders blurred. I have no doubt he is deliberately setting out to vex us.
What is he saying? What does he mean? The festival has been an ardent champion of this fiercely talented 40-year-old, who was nominated for the Palme d'Or for 2005's Battle in Heaven and scooped the jury prize for the mesmerising Silent Light back in 2007. And yet Post Tenebras Lux must surely count as a major misfire, at once undercooked and overheated as it stirs its fevered brew of dreams and memory, symbols and sex.
Juan (Adolfo Jiménez Castro) and Natalia (Nathalia Acevedo) are an artistic middle-class couple with two adorable toddlers and a big house in the mountains that is tended by a team of unruly rustic handymen who operate out of a corrugated-iron hut in the valley below. At one stage, Juan and Natalia jet off for an up-scale sex holiday in Europe, where the rooms in the bath-house are named after Hegel and Duchamp. At another Juan hits his dog so hard that the animal dies. He feels awful about this, though his wife is sanguine. "You're doing it less and less," she assures him.
Along the way Reygadas throws in some arresting images and haunting scenes, such as the daughter's dream of the waterlogged field, or the CGI Satan, red as a tandoori chicken, who comes to spook the son. There is no doubt the director is leading us somewhere, all the way to the deathbed, where the light finally breaks through. If only the route wasn't quite so rocky and circuitous. If only he'd take those damn beer glasses off the camera lens.
At its best, in glimmers, Post Tenebras Lux can be tender, touching and even oddly thrilling in its bold imagery and determination to take the path less travelled. But it's an opaque, unforthcoming, exasperating work all the same. Reygadas's occasional child's-eye perspectives, together with the unexplained cut-aways to rugby games at an English public school (the director himself was schooled in England) suggest the story may be at least partway-autobiographical, a working-through of personal issues. The effect, however, is like sitting down in front of a stash of bespoke home-movies (beach trip, family dinner, reader's-wife erotica) shown out of sequence and with no context provided. Home movies, of course, are often out of focus too.
