Great review. This is a honor for Reygadas to be compared to Bresson!
I thought the whitewashed scenes (brothel) could be imagined, as suggested by the slightly different cinematography. And there is no correlation made in the rest of the film to prove Ana actually did this, outside of Marcos' subjective mind.
What do you think?

Agreed, when Ana said that he could have anyone in the brothel but not her, that was it; he gets dressed, he goes away. She didn't seem touched enough by his confession to want to be intimate with him. It was the same with the fog scene in the farm where he keeps walking and stumbles into an arrangement of monument crosses; that was definitely more metaphoric than realistic.

I love this line: "In Reygadas' bracing portrait of Mexico's profoundly fractured and polarized--and perhaps irredeemable--society, human connection occurs not through the opacity of the soul but through the characters' disembodied rituals that serve as communion for unarticulated desire." I must revise my own post on the film to include that.

The suspicion that much of what we see in the film is the subjective workings of Marcos' mind is intriguing. I wish I could have posed that suspicion to Reygadas when he was here in residency at San Francisco's Center for the Arts.

The white-washing effect on Ana and Marcos' intimate encounters is interesting because it's not filmed the same way when they're just driving around. So in a sense, I can see that Reygadas may have been trying to illustrate a kind of symbolic "heaven" (in the controversial sequence) that structurally encapsulates (embraces?) Marcos' "hell" that we see in the rest of the film.

I must admit, I was a bit disappointed when Reygadas didn't accompany the film for that one screening at FCS, especially since he was already in the country for that residency. This just seemed like an especially juicy film to discuss.

Hi Acquarello,

sorry for dropping in quite late regarding this film comment but I only saw the film this past weekend. I was thinking along the lines of what Harry & you mentioned regarding the imagined sequences. For me, the slight difference in the first first and last scenes in the film were a key. Both are similar regarding the act but in the first scene Marcos is wearing glasses and in the last he is not. And he only smiles in the last scene. So does that mean that final scene is in heaven away from the earthly troubles that haunt Marcos?
While the first scene might be something he imagined during his daily routine life, when he does have time to ponder on things?

But what confuses matters slightly for me is the 360 degree camera shot during the sexual encounter between Ana and Marcos. The camera is outside the window looking into the room and is just starting to move to the left when suddenly Ana looks towards the window. I am still not sure if this was intended or she just happened to look toward the camera? The camera then goes on a spin, showing us the neighbourhood, before returning back to the room where Ana has finished her act and is resting on Marcos. The manner of this shot seemed to be too real, not something imagined. But when the camera starts moving up towards the roof and looking down upon Marcos and Ana, well that appears to have a dreamy feel.

Overall, I am still leaning towards that Marcos imagined all this with Ana, with the exception that the final scene takes places in heaven.

Having recently seen Silent Light as well, I find it interesting that film also starts and ends with a similar scene, although with a slight difference. Silent Light ends in a sequence in reverse order to the film's start (night to sunrise, sunrise to night) while Battle in Heaven has the same scene, minus the glasses. Which raises the possibility of the first scene being imagined in earth vs the final scene as being real in heaven?

Hi Sachin, thanks for your observations. Hmm...I'm going to have to take another look at that bookending sequence. I agree with you that the sexual encounter definitely seemed compartmentalized and "out of body", as in a dream, but I had thought that the opening and closing scenes were the same. I didn't pick up on the variations between the two scenes, so I always figured that they were the manifestation of the same dream. But you're right, the absence of the glasses does seem to suggest a "perfect" state (heaven) versus an idealized one (dream), which plays with the idea of reality.