Death in Mexico

Death, in person or parable, is never far away from life in Mexico. There the dead have their own day, and even public transport has papier mache skulls dangling from rearview mirrors, much as poker dice do north of the Rio Grande.

In Carlos Reygados's Japon (well, why not call a Mexican movie "Japan": didn't Terry Gilliam do an SF comedy called "Brazil"?) a silent, haggard man drives out of Mexico City's gridlock into the canyon and cactus country 100 kms north.

More skin and bone than even a sixtysomething should be, he carries artists' canvases. Perhaps, like Gauguin, he's set on recording the primitive life. But soon it's clear that painting is not his purpose. What is?

Ah, that's the enigma in a film that brazenly announces its commitment to the now unfashionable art-house style of Tarkovsky or Antonioni, a slow, measured, repetitive but mesmerising build-up that invites conjecture and contemplation but resists closure and explanation.

While other movies from Latin America behave like Mexican jumping beans, Reygados's revisionism is an unusually tranquillising experience.

The stranger (Alejandro Ferretis) finds lodging on a bare mountain with an Indian crone (Magdalena Flores), whose face is like a contoured map of a valley that's been there from the beginning of time. She's surprisingly comfortable with her guest, as if he's expected.

He finds the pull of life in the pueblo below, plus the rawly priapic coupling of a stallion and mare on the plain above, makes his spirits rise - not for nothing, perhaps, is the old woman called Ascension. Yet the effect of her easeful presence on the man's ragged sensibilities could equally suggest the embrace of mortality.

The film continually invites such interpretation; but, interesting though this is, it never quite authenticates its intentions.

The climactic sequence is a sex scene between the man and woman, both stark naked, he imposing himself on her droopy dugs and flinching frame, giving her instructions like a film director with a subservient but awkward star in front of the camera.

It's uncomfortable to watch, not just for the obvious reason. Stretching a non-professional player old enough to be a greatgrandmother to do a scene that would tax the modesty, never mind the elasticity, of a sex-kitten casts doubt on why and when Raygados, who started life as a lawyer with the UN, decided his debut feature film needed an element of voyeurism to turn its transcendentalism into box-office.