MOVIE REVIEW

Mexican filmmaker Carlos Reygadas rewards the intrepid viewer with a sensual, stunning experience.

By Kevin Thomas, Special to The Times

For "Battle in Heaven," as he did with his acclaimed debut feature "Japón," boldly idiosyncratic Mexican filmmaker Carlos Reygadas asks audiences to plunge headlong into his chaotic vision of the world, no questions asked but complete trust required. Not everyone is going to be willing or able to take this leap of faith, but those who do go along with Reygadas may well feel they have come away having undergone a stunning revelatory experience.

"Battle in Heaven" opens with a scene of graphic sex between a beautiful young woman, Ana (Anapola Mushkadiz), and Marcos (Marcos Hernández), a swarthy middle-aged man with a substantial potbelly. Eschewing exposition and backing into his story in elliptical, fragmented fashion, Reygadas gradually reveals that for 15 years Marcos has worked as a chauffeur for Ana's father, a general in charge of the elaborate daily military ceremony of raising and lowering an immense Mexican flag at the Zócalo, the central square of Mexico City and symbolic heart of the country. Marcos has been Ana's chauffeur since her childhood, and she has entrusted him with the secret of her double life. In an apparent act of defiance of her wealthy family, Ana has become a prostitute, a profession she pursues with considerable enthusiasm.

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Marcos in turn has decided to entrust Ana with a terrible secret. Under the implicit dominating influence of his wife (Bertha Ruiz), a singularly homely woman of much girth, he has joined her in a foolish, despicable scheme to make some quick money that has gone disastrously awry. Marcos is so wracked with guilt that to cheer him up Ana takes him to the upscale brothel where she works and sets him up with a fellow prostitute. But ultimately he declares he wants to be only with Ana.

This potentially most melodramatic of situations becomes for Reygadas a point of departure to evoke life in contemporary Mexico City, which half a century ago was a beautiful, gracious metropolis of only about a million people that has exploded into a megalopolis with a population of 20 million overlaid with a complex grid of freeways. Many of the scenes in the film could just as easily have been shot in Los Angeles. At every turn, Reygadas evokes the impersonal, dehumanizing quality of modern urban life.

Ana at first is taken aback by Marcos' request but acquiesces out of compassion, with a probable mixture of curiosity and daring. They unleash in each other, however, an unexpected passion, which deepens Marcos' guilt and conflict, with Ana quietly telling Marcos that he must turn himself into the police, which is the last thing his wife, who loves him with a possessive intensity, wants him to do. Not surprisingly, Marcos finds himself spiraling further out of control and craving redemption ever more deeply.

There is much that is bravura in Reygadas' style, including a 360-degree pan from Ana and Marcos lying side by side on the bed in her airy, chic apartment to outside her window wall and back to the couple. Worthy of Antonioni, this shot has the effect of establishing their place — their connection to each other — in the universe, even if it is only momentary. "Battle in Heaven" is a romantic tragedy, in which Marcos assumes Ana has fallen in love with him as deeply as he has with her. Beyond this Reygadas reveals what is so depressingly universal about today's Mexico City only to peel it away and discover what is eternal and distinctly Mexican: the proud, pompous flag ceremony and, more important, the unchanging transcendent power and significance of the Virgin of Guadalupe. With such groundbreaking films as "Amores Perros" and "Y tu Mamá También" and these of Carlos Reygadas, it's pretty clear that the renaissance of the Mexican cinema is for real.

'Battle in Heaven'

MPAA rating: Unrated

Times guidelines: Graphic sex, adult themes

A Tartan Films/Palisades Pictures release. Writer-director Carlos Reygadas. Cinematographer Diego Martínez Vignatti. Editors Adoración G. Elipe, Benjamin Mirguet, Reygadas, Nicolas Schmerkin. Running time: 1 hour, 34 minutes.

Exclusively at the Sunset 5, 8000 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood, (323) 848-3500.