Movie a Day Blog seems to have charted an adventurous course through foreign language independent cinema this summer, one challenging, thought-provoking, and sometimes head-scratching movie after another.

    The latest is BATTLE IN HEAVEN by the Mexican provocateur Carlos Reygadas, whose most recent film, POST TENEBRAS LUX (2012) made my 20 Best List for that year. Reygadas doesn’t give a damn for narrative storytelling, so if a linear beginning, middle and end appeal to you, he is not your guy.

    BATTLE is a little less fractured than TENEBRAS, but not by much. It focuses on Marcos, the paunchy, middle-aged chauffeur for a largely unseen general stationed in Mexico City, and his daughter Ana, who is a sex addict and performs as a prostitute, just for the hell of it, it seems.

    Reygadas seems to be consumed with the idea of sex in and on our lives, and it’s been central to both films of his that I’ve seen. Eventually Ana’s clientele comes to include Marcos himself, who has to be pushed into the act, and never seems to enjoy it. He never seems to enjoy much, which makes more sense when we meet his wife (never given a name), played by the striking-looking Bertha Ruiz.

    Shaped like a fat tostada, and wielding an arresting gaze, Ruiz seems to be the nasty mastermind behind  the couple’s criminal activities, including a baby kidnaping gone bad when the infant accidentally dies; all these events happen off-screen. This B plot subsists just below the surface, but it seems to motivate most of the characters’ actions, which inevitably spiral downward.

    Marcos Hernandez delivers an ultra-realistic performance as his namesake, a symbol of the Mexican/Indian-influenced lower class, there just to serve the whims, however outrageous, of the Mexican elite, symbolized by Anapola Mushkadiz as Ana, who is as beautiful and exotic as her name.

    Nothing good is in store for this disparate group of Mexico City residents, always surrounded by marching soldiers on parade, and indeed, only tragedy results. The subtext may be pure Marxism (put upon enough, the masses will revolt), but Reygadas, with supreme irony, has his lead character turn to religion, and ends the movie with a bloody pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint Guadalupe.

    Reygadas does not have the visual verve of his more celebrated countrymen Alfonso Cuaron and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, but he also has made no attempt to sell out to Hollywood. He’s got a distinct aesthetic, and he seems unlikely to apologize for it. I’ll be moving the next Reygadas film I’ll be watching, his first feature JAPAN (2002), up higher in my Netflix queue.