If Reverse Shot isn’t going to stand up and fight for obscure debut features from Mexico, then who will? On the one hand, Carlos Reygadas’s Japon is the smart-ass know-it-all new kid in school—sure of itself and perhaps more than a little proud of its assimilation of post-New Wave Euro-art cinema’s greatest hits. You can’t help but wonder if it would take much more than a pinprick to deflate the whole thing and prove the emperor has no clothes. But when the results are as lush and exciting as this, why would you want to? Time, and a few more features might prove Reygadas a fluke, but was there another debut feature this year that tried to do so much, and succeeded so often, and in such a grand fashion? As the United States’ ailing cinephile culture continues to devote all its energies to promoting the cult of the (supposedly) perfect debut (Lynne Ramsay, David Gordon Green, Alejandro González Izárritu all stand as recent inductees) rather than allowing space for filmmakers to mature and grow into their art (isn’t it telling that Claire Denis and Oliver Assayas and are only starting to get their full due?) curiosities like Japon will continue to be left waiting at the box office, thus hurting the very individuals brave enough to bring them to theaters in the first place. Japon is awkward, beautiful, imperfect, wondrous, strange, distant, epic—how many stars do you give that? Split the difference at two-and-a-half and move on to surer ground. Tragic, but just because the current climate isn’t capable of handling a film like this, that doesn’t mean that you should miss it. Japon is a cinematic experience in the grandest sense, features the best closing shot of the year, perhaps its best cinematography, as well as a discomfort-inducing sex scene that Larry Clark couldn’t equal if he made 800 films. Not that he should try.
—JR