POST TENEBRAS LUX. Light after darkness. But as this film begins, we begin in lightness and fade into dark. It is sunset, and a cherub-faced, tottering toddler stumbles around in curious wonder after cows, horses and dogs. A hazy, dusk-drenched field afloat in mud and rainwater opens this latest offering from Mexican auteur Carlos Reygadas. As nightfall comes, joyful giggles become nervous, cries from the child to her mother become pleading and drenched in fear, and the tone is set for what promises at first to be an affecting viewing experience.
POST TENEBRAS LUX segues into the self-consciously bizarre and self-indulgently rhetorical…
POST TENEBRAS LUX includes many such sequences, following Reygadas’ own children – twins Rut and Eleazar – as their story unfolds with gentle intensity alongside their parents Juan and Natalia in the family home outside Mexico City. This is no linear narrative, however, as scenes of bizarre decadence in brothel-like turkish baths and tableaux of an English boys school rugby team are interspersed with meditative sequences of deforestation, or painful pictures of domestic disagreement. This intuitive format owes much to Russian director Tarkovsky’s semi-autobiographical MIRROR, and with its long tracking sequences and poetic cinematography (Reygadas used a lens with a bevelled edge to lend a beautifully hazy aesthetic to the work) it in some ways pays appropriate homage to the great master of art cinema. But where Tarkovsky’s films succeed in a poeticism which is unpretentious even in its exaggerated visual style, Reygadas’ POST TENEBRAS LUX segues into the self-consciously bizarre and self-indulgently rhetorical. The appearance, twice, of a glowing, cartoonish devil figure fails in its attempt at moral commentary and instead seems incongruent, shallow and contrived. Equally, mystic metaphors of retribution towards the end of the film undermine developments which could otherwise have been thought-provoking and human. However, these few ill-advised moments aside, POST TENEBRAS LUX succeeds in being in turn whimsical, frightening and moral – a combination which makes this beautiful film, on the whole, an experience worth having.
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