Fires were started: Day of Wrath

Though her trial is held in sparely furnished quarters composed of shafts of light, passageways and the shadows of torture devices, rooms where pale, gloomy men in enormous ruffs bend over quills and candles, the execution of Herlofs Marte (Anna Svierkier) is conducted outdoors on the loveliest summer day, with the sun high in the sky and a children’s choir singing a tune to drown out her cries of agony. It is the 17th century in Denmark and the burning of a frightened old woman is no cause for spoiling the afternoon. Yet Herlofs’ words linger gravely with Reverend Absalon (Thorkild Roose), whose pretty, much younger, and so terribly unsatisfied wife Anne (Lisbeth Movin) has perhaps something of the witch in her, too. Even Martin (Preben Lerdorff Rye), the Reverend’s son from a previous wife, who’s in love and secretly trysting with Anne, can see it. There are fires in her eyes, he tells her.

Day of Wrath (1943) shares obvious affinities with Carl Theodor Dreyer’s earlier The Passion of Joan of Arc (28), but here the corruption of the oppressive, gynophobic patriarchy is a given, the condemned woman’s disposed of at the outset, and the real drama unfolds methodically through parallel storylines that weave together several characters carefully positioned at distinct points in the social geometry. The men are resigned to a fatalistic status quo, and even Martin can only think of death, or of how things will end, whenever he’s with his beloved, who he ravishes in the woods while his father worries indoors. The women however are all mutually opposed in their disparate bids for transcending a life so fraught with limitations. Anne leaps at any chance for fulfillment, sexual or otherwise, with Martin. Herlofs, who fears not spiritual perdition but mere death, opts for assuming the very role of demonic collaborator that she’s been assigned by the clergy, so as to at the very least put the fear of God into her persecutors. Absalon’s mother (Sigrid Neiiendam), so easy to loathe, is likewise simply taking the only route she deems prudent, one of pious rivalry and maternal martyrdom. She’s always had it out for Anne, and only waits for the ideal conditions to cut her down.

As the performances and camerawork align themselves to Dreyer’s mesmerizing, somewhat theatrical style, with dialogue that’s never more loaded with subtext that when it seems most direct, Day of Wrath moves forward with classical inevitability. Fates are declared, fears announced, weather forbids. The recurring image of an apple tree looms large, reminding us just how profoundly original sin burrows into such minds, and how the real source of anxiety here stems from repressed desires the women are blamed for simply representing. Everything that will come to pass is mapped out in the early scenes with great economy, yet watching how things come to pass offers much suspense, as well as a deeper kind of dread, and that certain pleasure we feel in witnessing something realized with such structural elegance. The interplay of the dictates of flesh and spirit create as bold a dynamic here as in Joan of Arc or Ordet (55), and like those films, Day of Wrath is an absolute masterpiece.

Silent Light: Carlos Reygadas introduces threads of classicism into his languid strategies, unearths something resonant, moving, miraculous

Set within a Plautdietsch-speaking Mennonite community in Chihuahua, Mexico, Silent Light feels at once otherworldly and very much grounded in the most basic of human experiences. It’s a film about the searing caprices of desire, focusing on a love triangle at the centre of which is outwardly cheerful farmer Johan (Cornelio Wall). Johan loves Esther (Manitoba novelist Miriam Toews), the woman with whom he’s built up his life, but Johan has fallen so deeply in love with Marianne (Maria Pankratz), convinced that she’s the one he truly, spiritually connects with. And the demands of the spirit are not to be underestimated here, as this is also a film about miracles, some of which are found in the alchemical interaction of film and nature, others in acts that defy nature's predetermined logic.

Writer/director Carlos Reygadas book-ended Battle in Heaven with ethereal sequences involving a teary-eyed, pretty, young, upper-class woman fellating a working class, older man whose corporeal girth functions as emotional armour. More than anything else in Reygadas’ small but potent filmography, these sequences earned him his reputation as contemporary Mexican cinema’s enfant terrible. How interesting then to see sequences of such a similar purpose—yet on the opposite end of the taste meter—book-ending Silent Light: long, elegant, unbroken scenes which move from a field of stars to Johan’s family’s fields and back again, once our story closes. It is as though Reygadas’ camera searched the galaxy for its subject and decided to land upon this humble terrain for a spell. The film’s special emphasis on the miraculous is, from the start, made through bearing witness to the glory of the everyday.

But back to Johan’s world, where all quotidian pleasures shrink as his inner torment grows, its shadow looming large enough that his suffering Esther can hardly help but notice. Johan needs to make a serious choice, yet while adulterers in the secular world might have it tough, the milieu in which he exists, has always existed, and has no desire to part from, is far more prescriptive than those most of us know. When Johan speaks of his dilemma in terms of destiny, a friend suggests that a brave man can make destiny with what he’s got. Yet is this bravery? To avoid conflict and heartbreak when a more fulfilling life promises eventual redemption?

Reygadas considers these questions through taking deep, languid pleasure in scenes of bucolic splendour, the one in which we see Johan’s kids swimming and bathing in a local watering hole being especially beautiful—and painful. Johan tries to compliment Esther on the way she scrubs her children and the unintended use of past tense makes the whole moment turn into one of quiet agony—which Reygadas turns away from to take in sumptuously blurry flowers. Yet for all this muted despair, emotions do gradually escalate to high drama, with music (from Jacques Brel!), attempted farewells, rash acts of violence amidst tempestuous weather, and an act of generosity so pure as to summon the mercy of something like a god, while invoking a famous scene from one of the great films of Carl Dreyer in an act of inspired and audacious homage.

Reygadas, it seems, only borrows from the best sources, but he utilizes his borrowings in such a way as to give us something entirely fresh, at once classical and organic, and surely one of the most striking and unusual films you’ll see this year.