The last thing that a filmmaker wants to do is take his audience out of the moment on screen. The presence of bad acting, the off-putting sight of a boom mike or significant continuity errors instantly break the connection that the director has made with his viewers. I couldn’t watch Law & Order for about two seasons because Elizabeth Rohm’s performances were so bad that they made it readily apparent that the entire thing was staged for the camera.

With the advent of new CGI techniques and on-the-fly editing, the potential to avoid these aforementioned problems has been substantially reduced… providing you cast the 2004 or later model of Rohm. As these technical glitches have been being weeded out, another even more intrusive, divisive element has been gaining inroads: the static depiction of penetrative sex. Never has there been a better reminder that you are attempting to watch a fictional production than the presence of actual fellatio on screen.

This is a hot-button issue—the cinematic equivalent of gay marriage—and it is forever surprising to me to see otherwise clever, competent and original films that include graphic footage of women going down on men. A perfect case in point is writer/director Carlos Reygadas’ sophomore effort, Battle in Heaven (and director Patrice Chereau’s film, Intimacy; read the article on Patrice Chereau). Opening and closing with two scenes of porn-caliber oral sex, the viewer is instantly transported into a debate about the ethics, morality and religious impact of the offending act; it’s a pretty hard endeavor to truly lose one’s self in a film that seems built to disorient its viewers. And with Battle in Heaven, this is a distinct shame because there are a lot of elements surrounding Reygadas’ movie that are well worth seeing.

The plot of Battle in Heaven is negligible; one doesn’t exactly exist and, even if one did, the point of the project has little to do with anything resembling a conventional narrative. Marcos Hernandez stars as Marcos, a driver for the beautiful daughter of a Mexican general who moonlights as a high-class call girl, Ana (Anapola Mushkadiz). Marcos and his wife kidnap a baby hoping to gain some ransom money from the situation, but the child dies instead. This is the launching point for Reygadas and his cast of non-professional actors.

Reygadas shot the majority of his feature on-location, often amongst hundreds of extras who had no idea that a movie was being filmed. This brings a great degree of immediacy and vibrancy to the project, as do his lengthy tracking shots. As a fan of filmmaking, these aspects of the production fascinated me; the quick, dry and severely understated nature of the film’s climactic stabbing scene is something that every action director in Hollywood could stand to emulate. The reality of the sequence is profoundly effecting.

But in the end for Battle in Heaven, both literally and figuratively, it all comes back to Mushkadiz’s blowjobs. No matter what innovative filmmaking techniques Reygadas used here or what fresh ideas he implemented—and he is inventive to say the least—it’s impossible to write (or think) about anything other than the actual sex that takes place over the course of the film. Whether this is because of the puritanical undercurrent sweeping through present day American society or some other confluence of factors is anybody’s guess. Unfortunately for Reygadas and the other directors who choose to include scenes of penetrative sex in their mainstream movies, it doesn’t really matter why this act upsets people, causes a media controversy and distracts viewers from the actual art of the project, it just does. And such is most definitely the case here.

jake lever