Working with non-professional actors can be a gamble at times because, well...they can’t always act and don’t always posses the skills to convey different emotions or transform in to the character that the story requires. Sure there's exceptions and there are directors out there who have the power to create a world where not being able to traditionally act can work (like the deadpan/almost emotionless world of Robert Bresson) but for the most part it’s a role of the dice. Non-professional teenage actors have been the safest bet in recent years with films like; George Washington, Fish Tank (the lead actress only), Elephant (although it did feature Matt Malloy & Sam Bottoms) and Paranoid Park because these films pretty much just require our lead teenage actors to essentially be themselves (this doesn’t mean that these movies aren’t great, btw). But I can’t think of too many films with non-professional adult actors that have really worked in the last decade outside of a few exceptions. One of those exceptions would have to be the Tarkovsky-influenced work of Carlos Reygadas who somehow managed to get everyday people who have never stepped in front of a camera to cry, murder and have real sex in his first two films (Japon & Battle In Heaven). With his third film; 'Silent Light', he took the use of non-professional actors to another level by using a demographic of people who you'd least expect (Mennonites) and made a film about love, adultery, spirituality and self reflection. Let’s be honest...adultery, spirituality, love, etc aren’t exactly the kinda things that pop in your head when you think of Mennonites. On television and in film they're painted as emotionless people who do nothing but work and fear god. But Carlos Reygadas tried to dispel that myth with Silent Light: the story about a family man ("Johan") who's torn between his wife; "Marianne" and the woman he's been having an affair with ("Esther"). I know the idea of cheating Mennonites may have you scratching your head, but at the same time...why not? We've already seen plenty of films about adultery where the husband who's too busy with work or having an affair with another woman pushes his wife away forcing her to be with another man, or the other scenario where we see the mean, bitchy wife who doesn’t appreciate her husband causing him to look for love somewhere else. Why not put a new spin on the genre by incorporating non-professional actors, religion, faith, spirituality and a BLATANT sympathetic look at the adulterers (which may not sit well with people who have been cheated on in the past).
One noticeable thing that Carlos Reygadas did this time around was draw influence from a director outside of just Andrei Tarkovsky. Don’t get me wrong, the slow, numbing pace and atmosphere of Silent Light is the same as Japon and Battle In Heaven and it has its share of Tarkovsky influenced moments...
'Nostalghia' - Tarkovsky 'Silent Light'-Reygadas
but its biggest influence would have to be Carl Theodore Dreyer's Ordet (specifically the funeral scene at the end)...
'Ordet' - Dreyer 'Silent Light' - Reygadas
Silent Light also bears a striking resemblance to Chantal Ackerman's work in both pacing and imagery. The scene in the beginning where Johan sits at the dinner table and breaks down is right outta the beginning and opening scene of Ackerman's Jeanne Deilman...
Neither Johan or Esther are made out to be bad. They come off as two people who can’t fight their love for each other even if it means destroying Johan's family. Johan and Marianne are probably two of the most complicated & complex characters Carlos Reygadas has ever come up with. There are plenty of films out there where a religious figure (usually some sexually repressed priest) has the hots for some pretty young thing, but it’s also presented as a sin and those characters look to god for help to make these urges go away. But In Silent Light, Johan not only looks to god, but he also goes to his religious father for advice about what woman he should be with. And to Johan's surprise the advice he gets is somewhat unexpected. Although I obviously recognize that what Johan is doing to his wife is dead wrong, I never find myself going; "oh this guy is a scumbag!" like I would do to other cheating male characters. I feel like I should, but I can never bring myself to think that about him like that. There's even a scene where Johan has the nerve to try and get Marianne to look at Esther's point of view about all of this (pretty ballsy for a man to try and get his wife to see things from the perspective of the woman who’s cheating with her husband). And this has nothing to do with me being a man and automatically wanting to sympathize with the male lead. Through the actor’s performance I genuinely believe he's a man who can’t fight love. Marianne's approach to this ordeal is a strange combination of passive aggressive, compliant, hurt with a touch of taking the high road. From the start of the film she's well aware that her husband has been unfaithful to her but her stance in the matter is being quiet and letting him decide who he wants to be with. It’s the kind of performance that will have people debating and arguing forever. Is she just another weak housewife character that essentially allows her husband to be with another woman or is her character a strong saint of a woman who's being the "bigger person" in all of this? That remains to be seen by the end of the film. Johan & Marianne's children are also an interesting element to the story because these naive, cute, innocent-looking children whose presence is felt all throughout the film has no idea of the intense drama that’s going on between their parents (the opening scene where the family has breakfast together highlights this). A lot of the hype around Silent Light came from Martin Scorsese’s praise of the film. Say what you will about Marty as a director these days but his love for (good) cinema hasn’t seem to have left him. Normally I'm not a fan of big name directors like Scorsese giving a co-sign to a smaller, art house film that they had nothing to do with because they're name becomes more synonymous with the film than the person actually responsible for it (similar to how Quentin Tarantino always seems to co-sign a film that has Asian people in it). But that didn’t happen with Scorsese and Carlos Reygadas. What it did do was give this film, which is easily one of the best films of the last decade, the push that it needed because otherwise it may have fallen in to that film festival circuit/one week run at a local art house cinema category.
