Post Tenebras Lux

You can't accuse Carlos Reygardas of not providing good value in his 2012 film "Post Tenebras Lux." The movie is crammed with all sorts of exotic incidents: an eight-foot tall red demon with the head and horns of a bull and carrying a briefcase, explores a suburban home, a sadist beats a dog to death,there is a shooting and an orgy featuring acres of naked flesh, much of it elderly; we see a Christmas party, a gathering on a beach, a rugby game between Junior High school kids, and, as a kind of climax, a bad guy rips off his own head, a remarkable feat and, then, sprawls dead and headless in a meadow where his corpse is bathed in torrential rains. Lyrical shots of nature are interpolated with this subject matter and there seems to be a theme involving environmental despoliation -- in an early sequence, the guy who pulls off his own head uses a chain-saw to cut down trees and, just before he decapitates himself, this fellow experiences a vision of a gorgeous old-growth forest in the Sierra Madre under assault, trees toppling this way and that. It's impossible to decipher what these variegated episodes are supposed to mean -- at least, I couldn't decode the movie at all and remain unsure as to whether people bearing the same names but appearing in different sequences are supposed to represent the same characters or different folks confusingly named the same. In general, there is a kind of plot, albeit time-scrambled and elliptically narrated. Natalia and Juan are Mexican suburbanites living in a rural part of their country. They have two children, Eleazar and Rut --I suspect some Biblical precedent in those names but haven't researched those meanings. Natalia and Juan's marriage seems to be collapsing -- at one point, they have a long and bitter argument about anal sex and Juan has a couple of alarming propensities: he is an addict to on-line pornography and beats dogs to death. Although the scenes narrating the film's principle plot are dispersed throughout the film, an outline of a story emerges. Juan attends a meeting of the local AA, a conclave conducted in a tin shack, and confesses he is pornography addict. He meets Seven, the guy with the chainsaw cutting down the forest. Seven is a sort of small-time hoodlum, also unhappily married -- his wife and two kids live in a shack near Juan's nice place. (Seven and his wife seem to mirror in a squalid, and poverty-stricken way, the marital problems besetting Juan and Natalie.) Seven conducts a burglary at Juan's house and is surprised when Juan suddenly shows up (Natalie has forgotten something -- we're never told what -- at the house causing Juan to return from a road-trip with his wife and kids. Juan's fat servant, Jarro, a guy who stands by impassively while Juan is beating a puppy to death, is supposed to be watching the house but he's gorging himself with his diabetic mother at a buffet nearby -- Mexicans love buffets.) When Juan confronts Seven about the burglary, he gets shot and loses a lung. Juan survives but is an invalid. His wife serenades him by singing (out-of-tune and arythmically) a Neil Young song. Seven's wife leaves him. Juan, apparently, dies. Some alien force begins knocking down trees in the forest and, after his wife leaves him, abandoning their shack and taking the kids, Seven pulls off his own head. The demon reappears and Juan and Natalie's children wander around, both of their parent's mysteriously absent and, probably, dead. The film ends with footage of boys enthusiastically playing rugby, possibly a game between two private schools near Montreal. The movie has an extraordinary opening sequence -- a little girl alone wanders around in a flooded meadow full of cows and barking dogs and, in real time, the sun sets behind some green cliffs shaggy with tropical jungle. (The movie is shot in the landscape where "The Magnificent Seven" was filmed -- lush jungle, sudden downpours, and strangely-shaped eroded mountains.) One of the film's themes is endangerment -- the little girl seems obscurely endangered in the long, bravura opening shot; she ends up lost in total darkness among the big cows. Later, we see the two small children playing alone next to a raging sea and, at the end of the film, both children are playing by their house and babbling that their parents are dead. One lengthy sequence involves the camera pointlessly tracking a speeding motorcyle -- we expect the motorcyle to crash but it doesn't. The suspense is transferred, like referred pain it originates in some other kind of peril -- in fact, Juan is in his car following the motorcycle; he turns around to go back home to pick up something and gets shot. But I am rationalizing the film by this account -- there are many inserted scenes, for instance, the rugby game, that appear to be occurring in an entirely different place and time and the scenes of the Christmas party (upper-crust Mexicans discussing Chekhov and Tolstoy) have characters with the same names (Juan, Natalie, Rut, and Eleazar) but they appear to be different people. I have no way of accounting for the spectacular orgy and sex scenes -- this seems to involve Natalie and Juan as well, but, again, in some sort of dream or science-fiction setting: the orgy involves a sacrificial and ritualistic deflowering of Natalie in a steam-bath called the "Duchamp room" -- is this the "bride and the bachelors?" The characters had previously stumbled into another orgy in the "Hegel room' but were told to go elsewhere. The film bears some resemblance to Tarkovsky with sudden and inexplicable changes in weather, torrential downpours, and peculiar flooded landscapes. A stronger influence seems to me to be the films of Apichatpong Weeresethakul, the Filipino director, who specializes in discontinuous, multiple narratives in places inhabited by all sorts of weird and spectral beings. But I wasn't able to form even a hypothesis about what this movie is supposed to be about.