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Battle In Heaven
 
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Battle In Heaven (2004)

Starring: Marcos Hernández, Anapola Mushkadiz Director: Carlos Reygadas Rating: Unrated Format: DVD
3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)

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Product Details

  • Actors: Marcos Hernández, Anapola Mushkadiz, Bertha Ruiz, Rosalinda Ramirez, Brenda Angulo
  • Directors: Carlos Reygadas
  • Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DTS Surround Sound, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
  • Language: Spanish (Dolby Digital 5.1), Spanish (DTS 5.1)
  • Subtitles: English
  • Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  • Aspect Ratio: 1.77:1
  • Number of discs: 1
  • Rating: Unrated
  • Studio: Mantarraya
  • DVD Release Date: May 9, 2006
  • Run Time: 98 minutes
  • Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
  • ASIN: B000EZ8ZRG
  • Amazon.com Sales Rank: #48,450 in Movies & TV (See Bestsellers in Movies & TV)
  • For more information about "Battle In Heaven" visit the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

Special Features

  • Interview with director Carlos Reygadas and actress Anapola Mushkadiz
  • Clips from Carlos Reygadas’ first film Japon

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

Battle In Heaven, Carlos Reygadas’ follow-up to Japón, opens with a controversial oral sex scene involving beauty, Ana (Anapola Mushkadiz), and the beast, Marcos (Marcos Hernández). Marcos is Ana’s chauffeur, who has kidnapped and accidentally killed a baby. Ana, a general’s daughter by day and a prostitute by night, confides in Marcos and performs sexual favors for him in order to persuade him to turn himself in. She is too young, however, to understand Marcos’s confused mental state, and her sensitive position with him puts her in peril. Set in Mexico City, this tragic drama is as much about failed intimacy as it is about Mexican class structure, as Ana and Marcos attempt to bridge the class gap. A few explicit sex scenes show Marcos in bed with Ana or his wife (Bertha Ruiz), thus garnering it reviews that compare it to The Brown Bunny. In fact, the slow pacing and artsy, self-consciously composed shots do remind one of The Brown Bunny, in that both films are initially interesting but grow dull as their plots take forever to unfold. An intriguing plot is buried under seemingly eternal panoramic shots of the city, painfully slow conversation between characters, and constant close-ups of Marcos’ face that are meant to capture his angst but only deter narrative. Nevertheless, this film’s merit is based in its experimental energy, and any director who follows up a graphic sex scene with a cut to the waving of the country’s flag (in this case Mexico’s) has my respect. --Trinie Dalton


Product Description

Marcos (Marcos Hernandez) is the middle-aged chauffeur of Ana (Anapola Mushkadiz), daughter of a Mexican general who amuses herself by working as a prostitute in a high-end brothel. Marcos and his wife (Berta Ruiz) have kidnapped a baby for ransom but it went tragically wrong when the infant died. When he confesses his guilt to Ana, a bond of secrecy consecrated by the flesh unites them. As the police draw closer, she urges him to turn himself in but instead he seeks redemption from a higher power.

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19 Reviews
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 (9)
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Average Customer Review
3.3 out of 5 stars (19 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

 
50 of 61 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars gives "art films" a bad name, January 28, 2007
Apparently people just aren't much into "faking it" anymore, even when it comes to sex in the movies. The Mexican film, "Battle in Heaven," opens with a graphic scene of a young woman performing oral sex on the main character - and we can clearly see that this is not a simulation (it's also not much of a stimulation given the man involved). I don't know if the various hardcore scenes were actually included in the movie when it played theatrically in the United States in 2006. But they are certainly in the video, and those easily offended by such activity had best be forewarned.

For me, the sex scenes themselves are not the problem. It is the movie as a whole that I object to. For "Battle in Heaven" is a pretentious, arty contrivance that seems to be operating under the assumption - quite rightly perhaps, since the movie ended up on quite a large number of ten best lists last year - that it can earn points with the critical intelligentsia if it can just manage to bore its audience into a state of complete catatonia.

It tells the desultory and languid tale of an overweight, middle-aged chauffeur who wanders in a zombie-like daze around Mexico City wracked with guilt over the fact that he and his wife recently kidnapped a child who ended up dying under their care. During the course of the film, Marcos (Marcos Hernandez) is able to shake himself out of his stupor long enough to have sex with his wife, sex with his boss' daughter and sex with himself while watching a soccer game. The movie is all about the struggle that is being perpetually waged within the Mexican soul between sex and temptation on the one hand and piety, guilt and the obsessive need for redemption on the other. And while this theme is certainly a valid one and is actually developed to some extent in the closing scenes of the drama, the movie itself is far too inert, far too easily sidetracked, and far too underdeveloped to capture our interest.
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19 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars a crude, sobering and disturbing look at present day Mexico City......, August 5, 2008
In BATALLA EN EL CIELO, we are presented with an unflinchingly gritty glimpse into the lives of three individuals struggling with double lives, sexual and social identity in a world that is alternately cruel and nihilistic. Marco (Marcos Hernandez) drives Ana (Anapola Mushkadiz), the wealthy daughter of an influential family. They also confide in one another their deepest and most disturbing secrets. Marco and his wife have kidnapped a young child they are holding for ransom. Ana moonlights as a prostitute, as an escape from her mundane and pampered existence. The two of them have also engaged in trysts kept in secret from their families and the rest of the world. (Which are graphically depicted in the film in a style that can be described as anything but dignified.)

For me, the title of this film, alone, is a great paradox that is left to us audience members to ponder. Is this reference intended to be biblical or cautionary? Just what is it that the characters are battling in heaven? Is it a crisis of consciousness? Are they questioning their own morality (or lack thereof) in the face of relentless alienation? Particularly, for me, the character of the (at times) catatonic Marco is at once pathetic, as he blankly gazes into the distance, as well as poignant. You can hardly call him the "hero" of this story. He is more like the hapless anti-hero. It wasn't so much that I hated him, but, throughout the course of the movie, it was a rare occasion that I felt any connection with him at all, much less the acts that he commits. They are presented as incidental episodes (be they sexual or violent acts). It was very hard for me to form any connection with him or with Ana, nor with any of the other characters in the film.

BATTLE IN HEAVEN has been criticized and earned censorship as well as praise. This is due to the graphic nature of the sex scenes, as well as what has been perceived as an exploitative look at Mexico City and the nature of its people. We see scenes of soccer matches juxtaposed with soldiers doing their militaristic marches, as well as people engaging in detached sexual activity (maybe the better word for this is soul-less).
This is not a film I can easily recommend as a good introduction to Mexican cinema because it unfortunately left me cold and without a sense of any really deep emotion at all nor any deeper insight into the culture that is depicted in it.
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17 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars World of Reygadas, April 5, 2006
This is Carlos Reygada's second film, and his camera is ceaselessly searching. It investigates the transient murmuring of marching pilgrims, explores the ephemeral traffic of subway corridors, and paces itself to curiously follow the cadence of early morning flag raising ceremonies. It orbits around and inhabits the environment of Marcos, a protagonist so firmly planted to the earth that his crushing personal conflict is barely perceptable on his flaccid expression. Reygadas is desperate to discover the transcendence inaccessible to Marcos, whose only worldly absolve from his sense of shame is to be enveloped by something pure and beautiful - something that obsesses and corrupts him. It is one of the most impressive aesthetic feats in recent filmmaking: every scene (especially the gas station & soccer game sequences) is emotionally engaging. Ignore cries of "pornography" from detractors: there have been plenty of recent films to feature graphic sexual scenes, but Battle in Heaven is a incisive character study, not an empty exercise in exploitation.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

2.0 out of 5 stars Characters lacked viewer sympathy.
I was interested in viewing the movie because of a newspaper review. I could not find a place to rent the movie in my area of
Whittier, California so I finally decided to... Read more
Published 28 days ago by James A. Halbert

1.0 out of 5 stars Total Zero
This is the worst film I've ever seen. Pretentious, stupid, pointless. Full of absurd scenes with no meaning and no relation with the plot (plot, which plot???). Read more
Published 18 months ago by J. Rodrigo Buitron

1.0 out of 5 stars Really Really Bad
This film had no idea what it wanted to be. It is disjointed and utterly awful. Even the sex scenes were awful. I bought it and simply tossed into the trash after one viewing.
Published 20 months ago by Harold A. Fretheim

5.0 out of 5 stars Unique and Shocking
From the open shot to the closing, the movie is shocking, in your face, and never dull. The sight of two grossly overweight people making love was new to film viewing. Read more
Published 21 months ago by Ebony Reviewer

3.0 out of 5 stars about this title of DVDfilm/movie 'battle in heaven'
This film is all about Ana (general's daughter) whose chauffer could not resist to sexual urge end up having sex with Ana which she later also slept with her boyfriend. Read more
Published 24 months ago by Ang Poon Kah

2.0 out of 5 stars QUE ES?
This is one of those movies that tries too hard to be artsy and substitues content, with close ups of the lead actors face. I was bored to tears in about five minutes. Read more
Published on December 3, 2007 by Christopher F. Williams

5.0 out of 5 stars Oddly Powerful
At first I was going to give this movie one star. It seemed to be just a mashup of obvious thematic studies: Sin and redemption; conflict between old/new in Mexico;... Read more
Published on August 10, 2007 by Anon

1.0 out of 5 stars Depressing ...
Extreme close-ups, long stills, brutality and subtle story-telling aren't always the necessary ingredients of an art movie. The ordinary need not be ugly and bizarre. Read more
Published on May 17, 2007 by Sharad Yadav

2.0 out of 5 stars [2.5]--You got to see it to believe it.
This film was surly something. The opening and closing scene of this film insures that it would had never been play at a multi-plex near you. Read more
Published on March 5, 2007 by Jenny J.J.I.

5.0 out of 5 stars A great uncompromised film
After Japon, Battle in Heaven. The rural life and the urban one. Extremely impressive work.
Published on January 3, 2007 by Victor Ruano

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