Battle in Heaven at TIFF

Here's a film that is the sort of thing that will scare newbie festival audiences away from the Toronto International Film Festival for the rest of their natural lives. It's a foreign art film that will (somewhat unfairly) remind viewers who are not used to this sort of thing of every single joke and cliche they have ever heard about foreign art films. It's very long, very slow, quite impenetrable, minimal on plot, difficult to follow, and filled to the brim with extremely graphic sex, which is then so utterly deconstructed by the filmmakers that it can't even be seen as erotic or enjoyable. Battle in Heaven is the kind of art film that The Simpsons warns you away from.

The story concerns Marcos (Marcos Hernández), a deplorable sad sack Mexican driver who can't even muster up the cheer to crack a smile while he is being fellated by his nubile, 20-year-old charge. She is Ana (Anapola Mushkadiz), the bored daughter of a general who, with her friends, has created an upscale whorehouse which they call "the boutique," out of nothing more than seeming apathy for their mundane lives. Ana takes Marcos to the boutique early in the picture, where he refuses the ministrations of a Mexican beauty, preferring instead to spend time with Ana. He is sexually obsessed with her, and confides in Ana that he and his wife have kidnapped a baby who has since died. She advises repentance.

If I'm making any of this sound lurid or titillating, let me assure you that it is not. In a film like this, I often wonder if the script can be more than a dozen pages in length, as very little actually happens in Battle in Heaven. The things that do happen are milked for the extremes of running time. There are minute-plus shots of characters walking across great distances of space; there is an extended sequence of Marcos masturbating to a football game on television. When Marcos and Ana finally consummate (noticeably, he begins to become more passionately involved in the sex, but is warned away by Ana, who prefers him to lie absolutely still beneath her while she services him), the camera leaves the bedroom and tracks 360 degrees around the Mexico City skyline for a full three minutes, before returning to Marcos and Ana's bed. Battle in Heaven is graphic in its depiction of sex; Ana dismounts from Marcos and director Carlos Reygadas holds on a two-shot of their genitals, his erection fading, her vagina pristine. These are the sorts of aggressive, transgressive chances that art cinema can take, but without a great deal of experience with films like this, it would be difficult for any audience to know what to make of it.

I cannot deny that I found Battle in Heaven frequently intriguing, though deplorable, if only because the principal character is so unanimously loathsome and worthless. Visually, it is one of the ugliest pictures I have seen in a long time. Only a sequence atop the mountains above Mexico City has any pictorial beauty; everything else is mundane, brutal, and uninspired. The film's use of graphic sex is interesting from a formal perspective but does not seem to be in service of the story that the film is telling.

I have to admire the trick that the festival programmers pulled, however, to get bums in the seats; they published a big, beautiful photograph of Ana's breasts in the festival guide, and thus guaranteed their audience. Battle in Heaven sold out long before regular tickets even went on sale; sadly, the majority of the people who came to see it will doubtlessly walk away mystified by what they were meant to interpret from the film, which is neither erotic nor entertaining. It's art, all right... although what it is in service of remains a mystery.