Post Tenebras Lux (18)
Directed by Carlo Reygadas
Thursday 21 March 2013
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EmailThe Mexican director Carlos Reygadas always makes idiosyncratic, poetic and provocative films and Post Tenebras Lux - Light After Darkness - starts with a strange sequence of events.
In the Mexican countryside, a violent thunderstorm is in progress. Dogs are going wild, a child is calling for her mother, a red devil appears and a solitary man is pulling his head off.
The virtually incomprehensible plot revolves around a wealthy couple with two kids, who live in the back of nowhere surrounded by a rural community of a much lower class.
Reygadas, whose previous films show little interest in conventional narrative, melts the past and future of the family into a timeless, dream-like dimension.
Highly atmospheric, it's a film which has a different take on the troubles, neuroses and contradictions of Mexican society.
Unsurprisingly it won Reygadas the prize for best director at the Cannes festival last year.
Its message is encapsulated in one of Tolstoy's statements quoted in the film that all the pleasures from the accumulation of material possessions could be equalled by giving them up.
Enlightenment is possible even in dark times, Reygadas seems to suggest
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