Excerpt freom B+N located HERE

This film is probably better than most new releases so far this year - but I believe the world's film critics are clutching at straws if they believe Reygadas to be bringing fresh food to the table. "As miraculous as it is moving... sincerely inspirational" says David Parkinson of Empire, "An astonishingly confident debut... sheer audacity and originality" says Derek Malcolm of the Guardian. Not so say I. Coming to this film without having seen Tarkovsky would probably be quite an interesting experience. On the other hand, if you're familiar with Tarkovsky's work it's possible to see right through this transparent debut of badly lifted chops from 32 year old Mexican Reygadas. It is a film concerned more with style than substance. Shot on 16mm with a special anamorphic lens (in similar fashion to Gaspar Noe's I STAND ALONE) the film inelegantly wavers between jerky shoulder shots and Vadim Yusov-style tracking shots. Throughout the film Reygadas uses devastatingly beautiful J. S. Bach (the same piece used in Tarkovsky's THE SACRIFICE is used prominently here) to try and up the emotional level. The problem being - it all feels false. We see a man who has travelled to a remote canyon to kill himself (he announces it right away at the start to the first person he meets) - Reygadas hanging the whole film on it. The man stays with an elderly woman, they don't get on very well, they start to get on better, the man asks the (70+ year old) woman for sex, she obliges and it feels extremely gratuitous and pointless for all concerned. In the 45 minute documentary on the disc, Reygadas smugly suggests that the elderly non-professional actress shows signs of true pleasure during this scene (as if this was the crux of his achievement!) It was about here that I began to dislike Reygadas and his surface fascinations. For me, the film fatally lacked any aesthetic, emotional, or writerly rigour. From the start, I really wanted to like it but I just could not - many things jarred with me. The camerawork, internal rhythms, editing, acting didn't gel like it does in the director's stated favourite films (ORDET, Bresson, Tarkovsky, Dreyer, Kiarostami, and Ozu). Whenever I saw a flicker of cohesion, peripheral non-actors would gurn at the camera and laugh like so often happens in my least favourite Pasolini. Many will enjoy the locations and the music but I fear they may feel shortchanged afterwards. Unfortunately, Reygadas is not the master he is touted as being.