From the April 2013 issue of Sight & Sound
Author: Tony Rayns
Arthouse film master Carlos Regaste takes a poetic journey deep into his inner darkness. -Tony Ryan Carlos Regast has become one of the most beloved/hateful directors in the contemporary cinema world with his three previous feature films. His previous works, though loosely plotted, are at least narrative-driven. This time, he puts everything open and honest in his fourth work, which uses very little narrative strategy. "Blooming Light"—the Latin title means "light after darkness"—can be found in Tarkovsky's "Mirror." The film is shot in the "academy ratio" (ie 1.37:1 frame), which is very rare nowadays. It combines personal memory and fantasy, fragmented special effects and comments on social reality. It can be regarded as a poetic and hallucinatory rhapsody. . There is no limit to Carlos's tendency towards abstraction in it. Obviously, the same image collage in "Mirror" is not as offensive and destructive as "The Willows". For example, there are two scenes of British school rugby and free sex saunas in Europe. But on the other hand, Tarkovsky has also not experienced the life of a private school in Yorkshire and working as an EU lawyer in Brussels like Regast. The film focuses on Juan, the head of a family of four. If he can't be regarded as a substitute for the director, he must be the director's statement, conveying the creator's own confession, infatuation and fear. Affluent Juan takes his wife and children (played by the director's own son and daughter) to a new house he built himself in a remote rural village. Aside from the unavoidable embarrassment when dealing with locals, the family initially led a happy life. But two scenes at the beginning of the film already hint at a potential crisis. The first scene, a series of Steadicam shots, shows Root, a little girl, treading water on the grass, as dusk falls with thunderous thunder. She is surrounded by many animals, all of them larger than her. We'll know later that this is Root's dream, but the unease conveyed in it seems to be an ominous prophecy for the future.
In the second scene, the Juan family is visited by demons at night. It appears as a glowing red monster with horns and an arrow-shaped tail. It carries a toolbox. Only Juan's son Eleazar saw it. It can also be speculated that Eleazar's dream, along with that of his sister, conveyed a similar fear to his father. This fear seems not to be unfounded, and Juan violently beats one of their dogs before admitting he is addicted to pornographic images on the internet. In the sauna, Juan watched his wife and other people group sex scenes (in Duchamp's room) and can find the corresponding in real life, when Juan showed his lust to his wife at the sink, and then it turned into an accusation of his wife's frigidity . In short, there was something wrong with Juan's brain.
In the end, Juan was lying in bed before he died, his wife playing and singing Neil Young's "It's a Dream." Juan confesses to his recent "morbidity" and indulges in an ecstatic childhood memory. While the entire film is shrouded in a sort of immediate purgatory, the world naturally presents itself in a mysterious and terrifying aspect. A backward and remote community of a group of elderly drug addicts who have been ravaged by alcoholism, crime, vile malice and ultimately murder and suicide, and a spiritually polluted land. On which the family is betrayed by the absent or mad head of the family.
Regast's creative presentation of purgatory goes beyond his experimental images in "The Heaven and Earth" and "Silent Light", and escapes the bleak situation of "Battle of Heaven". In order to make sense of the imaginative and ambiguous tone and expression of The Willows, you may have to compare it to its distant cousin: a film that Carlos must have heard of, David Larcher's Mare's Tail, long forgotten The British independent film, also derived from the autobiography and the two impulses to try and cross the border. Like Larcher, Carlos is tired of reason, storytelling, and providing psychological explanations. But he did not ignore the happiness and pain of worldly relationships, such as family gatherings at Christmas or a trip to the seaside. The most provocative element of the film is the football game, which is suddenly inserted in the middle and end of the film. The two rugby scenes are extremely unusual—visually, linguistically, etc.—giving this Mexican smother a wake-up call. They chanted for something long forgotten in this fallen Garden of Eden: unity.
View more about Post Tenebras Lux reviews
