Palme d'Or entry is a let-down

If you make a successful first film, it's often hard to fashion a second that trumps your initial ace. The praise of critics often leads in the wrong direction.

Carlos Reygadas, the Mexican director of the justly praised Japon, had Battle In Heaven, his second, booed at his Cannes press showing. It is one of the strangest movies in this year's competition, starting and ending with sex scenes that rival anything in Michael Winterbottom's Nine Songs. The central character is a fat, middleaged Mexican who is the chauffeur for an army general but who, to augment his income, indulges in various criminal activities. He and his wife

have kidnapped a baby for ransom money but an accident has caused the child to die and guilt urges him to give himself up to the police.

Meanwhile, he visits the young daughter of the general for whom he works, who apparently prostitutes herself for pleasure. And he decides to go in a pilgrimage on his knees towards the holy Basilica in honour of the Lady of Guadalupe. This way God may forgive his sins.

Reygadas's film is not a realist study. It seems to exist partly in the filmmaker's imagination as its actors stare into the camera with no expression on their faces, whether indulging in sex or contemplating the world they have made for themselves. It isn't so much the magic realism once so beloved of the Latin-American cinema as a kind of stony-faced approximation of characters whose fate is preordained.

Reygadas is undoubtedly a filmmaker who can make such images count in the mind. But his film allows us few clues about its protagonists and, though it often looks impressive, has an alienating lack of substance behind it. In short, he is trying to be too clever by half and ends up seeming merely pretentious. If there are scenes in the film that stick in the mind's eye, there is also a sense that this strange landscape is populated by puppets rather than people.