Directed by: Carlos Reygadas
Distributed by: TBA
Written by Eric Zhu
65/100
A singularly depraved look at our techno-fascist present comes in the form of Carlos Reygadas’s aptly titled “Heil Jupiter!” Dedicated to Bela Tarr, this was the biggest mystery of NYFF, but any question as to why Reygadas, a certified A-List auteur, would world premiere his first feature in nearly a decade at NYFF’s experimental sidebar was dispensed rather quickly when, in the first 10 or so minutes, he takes his camera inside a character’s asshole, Sensory Ethnography Lab-style. This isn’t Reygadas, the Tarkovskian sage of “Silent Light,” but Reygadas, the go-for-broke provocateur of “Battle in Heaven.”
Frankly, I’m surprised a film like “Heil Jupiter!,” which would’ve been extreme in the heyday of the 2000s, can still be made. The only recent film that even comes close to this one’s purgatorial barrage of maximalist vulgarity is Radu Jude’s “Dracula,” but since this is Reygadas, his film is unabashedly sincere and stuffed with formal ideas so grandiose that sometimes the knee-jerk response is rejection. As for what the film is actually about, it opens on a stunning sequence of pure color, like blocks of paint dissolving in and out of each other, set to electronic music from Ela Minus. Eventually, we meet two couples swimming along a coastline, shot with the primality of early Dumont and with the rippled-edge effect Reygadas has been using in his recent features, now utilized for an entire 2.5-hour runtime. There’s some question of a threesome, but eventually Reygadas gives way to two separate couples engaging in tender, seaside homosexual lovemaking, shot in extreme close-up. In this opening stretch, there’s cannibalism involved with the women, a truly magnificent astral-plane detour through one of the men’s asses, and we see the women chastised by fellow members of their cave-dwelling community for pleasuring each other during a fireside dance ritual.
From there, with these four characters as the only connective tissue, the film jumps from one scenario to the next, each more startling than the last. One of the immediately proceeding sequences is shot like a police body-cam, as we’re tethered to the body of some sort of ICE Agent in Poland (presumably, the setting is a product of the film’s co-production financing). Remote-controlled by some AI system named DAPHNE, he’s tasked with tracking down one of the women from the opening scene, who is described as a “baby factory.” After her capture, she’s subjected to a deranged form of torture as the agents tie her to a construction crane and dunk her in the water while Polish families watch from the sidelines. Eventually, Reygadas cuts to the aerial thermal view, showing something like a target from the perspective of a satellite.
As opposed to his Mexico-specific response to racial and socioeconomic hierarchies in “Battle in Heaven,” Reygadas’s aims this time around are much broader, depicting an original sin, and its anxious, technologically-assisted punishments. The universality of Reygadas’ critique is evident in the dialogue of “Heil Jupiter!,” which is spoken entirely in an invented language, recorded in post so he could graft whatever subtitles he wanted onto the contents of the frame. He covers a lot of ground, and to rattle through just a few of the batshit scenes in the movie, “Heil Jupiter!” includes: a human-meat factory chock-full of holocaust imagery, live-pig birth at a veterinarian barn that loses power, CCTV footage of a trial where one of the women is accused of weed-assisted voodoo (with the final verdict censored), a trans woman who asks for potentially life-threatening breast enlargement and is then asked to undress after an earthquake strikes, and so on and so forth.
One of the more difficult aspects of “Heil Jupiter!” is that its tone is entirely unmodulated. It’s a sustained assault, diverse both formally and in its invention of new provocations. Although I initially disliked the film’s numbing, directionless shape, I ultimately came to begrudgingly respect, and maybe even love it. For one, Reygadas has always been a visual master, and this is a real collision of the sacred and the profane, filled with the sort of exciting, visionary experiments you can’t find anywhere else. Even if some of them are unsuccessful, is there any other auteur of his caliber willing to risk looking as stupid and nonsensical as he is? The film’s successes would never exist without its failures. Second, Reygadas simply makes every other filmmaker look tame in comparison. “Heil Jupiter!” isn’t a Cannes-approved political film a viewer can simply nod their head to and dismiss. It’s laughably outside of today’s industrial ecosystem, a film whose ludicrous, repulsive force is one of the only works in recent memory to match the odious spiritual decay of the present, precisely because it goes so far beyond the expectations for a tasteful movie. In the end, we’re sort of like the poor dog sled driver in the film’s final sequence, begging to be let off the ride, but nevertheless plunged into the heart of the mountain.
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