#968: REYGADAS, Carlos: Japón (2002)
REYGADAS, Carlos (Mexico)
Japón [2002]
Spine #968
Blu-ray
The Booklet
Twenty-eight page booklet featuring an essay by novelist Valeria Luiselli, behind-the-scenes photographs, and a selection of Reygadas’s original storyboards.
Commentary
Japón [2002]
Spine #968
Blu-ray
In this preternaturally assured feature debut by Carlos Reygadas, a man (Alejandro Ferretis) travels from Mexico City to an isolated village to commit suicide; once there, however, he meets a pious elderly woman (Magdalena Flores) whose quiet humanity incites a reawakening of his desires. Recruiting a cast of nonactors and filming in sublime 16 mm CinemaScope, Reygadas explores the harsh beauty of the Mexican countryside with earthy tactility, conjuring a psychic landscape where religion mingles with sex, life coexists with death, and the animal and spiritual sides of human experience become indistinguishable. A work of soaring ambition and starting visual poetry, Japón is an existential journey through uncharted cinematic territory that established the singular voice of its director.
134 minutes
Color
2.0 Surround
in Spanish
2.88:1 aspect ratio
2.0 Surround
in Spanish
2.88:1 aspect ratio
Criterion Release 2019
Director/Writer
Carlos Reygadas was 31 when he wrote and directed Japón.
The Film
The Film
Sources list the aspect ratio as 2.66:1, rather than the above-stated 2.88:1.
Shot in 16mm, this ratio is the first thing one notices about the film — this thin slice of frame which Reygadas uses to great effect.
Confusing, bizarre and awesome, Japón is frustratingly hard to pin down. It seems that Reygadas wouldn’t have it any other way.
[The title is certainly misleading — the film has absolutely nothing to do with the country of Japan.]
The man (Alejandro Ferretis) leaves the big city to the strains of the end of Shostakovich’s Fifteenth Symphony. The other important music which accompanies his journey to a remote region of Mexico (Ayacatzintla) is Erbarme Dich from Bach’s St. Matthew Passion.
He intends to commit suicide in this faraway place. Along the way, Reygadas’ camera roves carefully, impatiently through the landscape. Sometimes it films disturbing images, and — depending on your point of view — even more disturbing scenes of “love-making.”
We are not told what happens to the man. In the final analysis, one might say the story is about the appropriation of stones from one place (the old lady [Magdalena Flores]’s) to another (her nephew, Juan Luis [Martín Serrano]’s) …
In the final minutes of the film, the camera shakily takes it all in with a continuous 360° pan of the apparent result of the stones’ journey. (The music here is Arvo Pärt’s Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten.)
A beautiful mess.
Film Rating (0-60):
51
The ExtrasThe Booklet
Twenty-eight page booklet featuring an essay by novelist Valeria Luiselli, behind-the-scenes photographs, and a selection of Reygadas’s original storyboards.
“In Japón, Reygadas filmed what seemed unfilmable, either because filmmakers didn’t think those landscapes — geographic and interior — were worthy of being documented, or simply because no one had dared to stop to look and listen well enough. Japón heralded the arrival of a new Mexican cinema — one that was neither navel-gazing nor made for export. It looks at the world with a kind of foreign gaze, inasmuch as it is full of perplexity. It doesn’t show, reveal, or impose a view but rather observes and inquires and transmits the way we take stances in the world beyond film. It transforms discomfort into a poetics and an ethics of viewing. It transfers responsibility from the maker to the observer, from the director to the audience. The question with Japón, as with the rest of Reygadas’s filmography, is not what it’s about but what the film does — to us, in the deepest of our emotional strata and our innermost neurological wirings.”
The storyboards are magnificent. The final scene:
None.
Conversation
Between Reygadas and filmmaker Amat Escalante.
Studied law, met Diego Martinez Vignotti (DP on Japón) … his favorite filmmakers: Herzog, Tarkovsky and Kiarostami!
Video diary
Shot by actor Ferretis during the film’s production.
Conversation
Between Reygadas and filmmaker Amat Escalante.
Studied law, met Diego Martinez Vignotti (DP on Japón) … his favorite filmmakers: Herzog, Tarkovsky and Kiarostami!
Video diary
Shot by actor Ferretis during the film’s production.
Only the last minute is interesting — first the scene is etched into a blank white frame, and then the camera slowly pans the landscape, accompanied by the final moments of an extremely slow and lethargic version of the end of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony. (Reygadas obviously loved Shostakovich.)
Deleted scene
A brilliant decision to cut this and replace it with the current ending.
Trailer
Extras Rating (0-40):
Deleted scene
A brilliant decision to cut this and replace it with the current ending.
Trailer
Extras Rating (0-40):
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