By Chuck Graham, TucsonStage.com
Friday night, November 9, Mexican filmmaker Carlos Reygadas, named Best Director at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, will be at the Loft Theater to accept the Loft Film Festival’s first ever Lee Marvin Maverick Award.
Starting the Maverick Award’s list of honorees with the ever-controversial Reygadas (“Silent Light”) sets high expectations. Reygadas is a brilliantly artistic maverick in every sense of the word.
To prove it he brings the Loft his newest film “Post tenebras lux (‘After Darkness, Light’).” Listening to Reygadas explain this film will be fascinating. Actually, he won’t explain it (that part is up to you) but he will be describing his work with enlightening insight.
Others have described “Post tenebras lux” as his “bravest, most innovative and visionary film,” and also “his most obtuse and challenging work yet” -- which could be another way of saying “It looks great, but I didn’t understand a thing.”
For sure we can say this film of imagination-stretching images is not for people who need a linear story line to keep their attention focused. There are a variety of linear if unrelated sequences within the film, most of them shot outdoors in rural areas of northern Mexico.
Though the sequences are general depictions of family farm life, everything has an edgy feel of the unexpected. Violence never seems far away, even when the scene looks peaceful.Obvious dream sequences are stirred in with blunt reality. Perhaps it is all metaphor, or an expression of the Buddhist belief that the word “reality” has no meaning.
What even the reluctant viewer will receive is a larger sense of life’s mysteries. The more we insist on believing in our material surroundings, the more we are just fooling ourselves.
“Post tenebras lux” screens in the Loft’s big theater at 7 p.m. Friday, November 9, 2012, with Carlos Reygadas in attendance.
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