Godard, Resnais, Antonioni, Pasolini, a bit of Almodovar and Lynch: imagine them all as influences in a single piece of cinema, and tell me that the combination would not have sunk any cinematic work nine fathoms deep; yet director Julian Hernandez proves unsinkable with the culmination of his sexual trilogy: "Raging Sun, Raging Sky" is a triumph of visionary will.
"Raging Sun, raging Sky" is a serious sexual epic, with Kieri, Tari, Ryo and Tatei its main protagonists. Tari meets Tatei and they make love does not even schematically render the beginning of the film: Hernandez establishes an affectuous labyrinth of camera traveling depicting the meeting and the lovemaking. Tatei speaks and informs us on an inner knowledge she has: Ryo is yet to meet a lover that will shake his life, and like an apparition she extracts herself from the room.
Resnais' influence, though articulated in Hernandez's previous feature "Broken Sky", here becomes more prominent and elaborately integrated in the film: one instantly recalls "Last Year in Marienbad"'s proceedings: the incantatory, obsessive, recurrent tone of the narrative voice over is here in a nutshell phrase, "the lover witnesses the loved one through water." We do not know who enunciates this phrase, yet its recurrence has an otherworldly yet physical effect and affect beyond Resnais' abstraction.
Add to this one of the most extravagant amorous triangulations, perhaps the film's greatest achievement, and we will be able to appreciate what the film actually contemplates.
It is crucial here to pinpoint Tari's presence and role in the amorous triangle. Exit Tatei and the film begins to meander in the sexual gratifications of porn cinemas, public toilets and dark rooms where Kieri, Ryo and Tari search their interest: there is no graphic depiction of the proceedings, neither celebration, nor condemnation, only an, I'd say, Antonioni-informed sense of alienation interlaced with a somewhat uneasy, and yet not critical, lustfulness. It is here that Tari begins a kind of infatuation and indecisiveness considering which one of the two boys - Ryo or Kieri? - he will follow and choose. It is bizarrely (and as I will claim, retroactively) comic, how he fails to really interest any of the two.
But if that was all, it would just be meager. What Hernandez also, and subtly so, does is to make Tari stand for the audience: take Tari off and Ryo's and Keri's love story would become unrepresentable, or regressing to a series of realistically portrayed failed encounters. One of the things that stays best in memory after the film ends is Tari's gracious anxiety when shifting from one direction to the other as Ryo and Kieri take opposite paths. It is here the film establishes what I would call the opposite of tragic irony, for then and there we somehow know that Kieri and Ryo will end up together.
And they do so soon, but not for long: the film shifts gears, puts on some absinthe-colored cavernous greens and rusty reds and heads for the desert of the passion: I have not encountered so late in a film, that is in the last third, such a change, and the film's title then appearing, to a sulfurous effect.
Kieri must take back his lover who lies captive by Tari. This part is for me the odd part of the film, who should not work, and yet does: Kieri walks and climbs, wakes with or without his earthly crust yet and again, as if to demonstrate he is the earthly element in love perhaps, but with a flat demeanor as if he had entered on the sleep side. And it is here that I missed Pasolini's amateur actors, especially in the "1001 Nights" and the scene with the Djin (the flying in the cave reads like referring to the Djin's flying in the earlier film), where his actors exemplified a hardship, a physicality lacking in Kieri's marching barefoot. This is the only point in the film that I found esthetically wounded; it is as if Jorge Becerra had rarely put his feet on non-urban soil. In the following scene, after Ryo is rescued, we can see Guillermo Villegas is more physical in such surroundings.
Tatei appearing now like Heaven's Heart, Tari easily dispensed comes I think from Pasolini's manual, mythological film-making: clumsy yet with a dream's jumps and cuts, and rough as in an oral tradition. And where it seems to come to a halt, with its dragging Romeo and Juliet variation of lovers awake, the film comes to its most astonishing leap. The struggle we have witnessed so far is something Tari saw in the water: the wandering vision of Ryo underwater and of the love-through-water phrase comes to this strong point, which makes Tari something of a god-like creature, or at least endowed with a vision/witnessing that enables him to withdraw from the scene for the two lovers to be finally graced by love.
Or is it so? Here Hernandez resorts to something Lynch first exploited in "Mulholland Drive": consecutive shifts-disappearances of persons for the uncanny effect that it is us after all who are watching all this. Tari disappears, and in the exact same place, with camera gliding the same way, Kieri appears and finally joins his lover in the bed. The camera starts receding out of the window and we catch Tari sitting with a sad expression in the room (perhaps deploring his omni-voyance?), and, what is the strangest thing of them all, Tatei/Heaven's Heart enjoying the breeze on the balcony, as if in the front of this odd, fantastic family. Is she the synthesis of the film's themes on love and loss? A somewhat Jungian symbol? I do not think so. It is here that Almodovar, who made possible the fact of film-makers like Hernandez working today, imperceptibly informs with irony the situation. But here the irony, with its colorful absurdity like Tatei's dress, has heavenly implications.
Enter the pop tune.
"Raging Sun, raging Sky" is a serious sexual epic, with Kieri, Tari, Ryo and Tatei its main protagonists. Tari meets Tatei and they make love does not even schematically render the beginning of the film: Hernandez establishes an affectuous labyrinth of camera traveling depicting the meeting and the lovemaking. Tatei speaks and informs us on an inner knowledge she has: Ryo is yet to meet a lover that will shake his life, and like an apparition she extracts herself from the room.
Resnais' influence, though articulated in Hernandez's previous feature "Broken Sky", here becomes more prominent and elaborately integrated in the film: one instantly recalls "Last Year in Marienbad"'s proceedings: the incantatory, obsessive, recurrent tone of the narrative voice over is here in a nutshell phrase, "the lover witnesses the loved one through water." We do not know who enunciates this phrase, yet its recurrence has an otherworldly yet physical effect and affect beyond Resnais' abstraction.
Add to this one of the most extravagant amorous triangulations, perhaps the film's greatest achievement, and we will be able to appreciate what the film actually contemplates.
It is crucial here to pinpoint Tari's presence and role in the amorous triangle. Exit Tatei and the film begins to meander in the sexual gratifications of porn cinemas, public toilets and dark rooms where Kieri, Ryo and Tari search their interest: there is no graphic depiction of the proceedings, neither celebration, nor condemnation, only an, I'd say, Antonioni-informed sense of alienation interlaced with a somewhat uneasy, and yet not critical, lustfulness. It is here that Tari begins a kind of infatuation and indecisiveness considering which one of the two boys - Ryo or Kieri? - he will follow and choose. It is bizarrely (and as I will claim, retroactively) comic, how he fails to really interest any of the two.
But if that was all, it would just be meager. What Hernandez also, and subtly so, does is to make Tari stand for the audience: take Tari off and Ryo's and Keri's love story would become unrepresentable, or regressing to a series of realistically portrayed failed encounters. One of the things that stays best in memory after the film ends is Tari's gracious anxiety when shifting from one direction to the other as Ryo and Kieri take opposite paths. It is here the film establishes what I would call the opposite of tragic irony, for then and there we somehow know that Kieri and Ryo will end up together.
And they do so soon, but not for long: the film shifts gears, puts on some absinthe-colored cavernous greens and rusty reds and heads for the desert of the passion: I have not encountered so late in a film, that is in the last third, such a change, and the film's title then appearing, to a sulfurous effect.
Kieri must take back his lover who lies captive by Tari. This part is for me the odd part of the film, who should not work, and yet does: Kieri walks and climbs, wakes with or without his earthly crust yet and again, as if to demonstrate he is the earthly element in love perhaps, but with a flat demeanor as if he had entered on the sleep side. And it is here that I missed Pasolini's amateur actors, especially in the "1001 Nights" and the scene with the Djin (the flying in the cave reads like referring to the Djin's flying in the earlier film), where his actors exemplified a hardship, a physicality lacking in Kieri's marching barefoot. This is the only point in the film that I found esthetically wounded; it is as if Jorge Becerra had rarely put his feet on non-urban soil. In the following scene, after Ryo is rescued, we can see Guillermo Villegas is more physical in such surroundings.
Tatei appearing now like Heaven's Heart, Tari easily dispensed comes I think from Pasolini's manual, mythological film-making: clumsy yet with a dream's jumps and cuts, and rough as in an oral tradition. And where it seems to come to a halt, with its dragging Romeo and Juliet variation of lovers awake, the film comes to its most astonishing leap. The struggle we have witnessed so far is something Tari saw in the water: the wandering vision of Ryo underwater and of the love-through-water phrase comes to this strong point, which makes Tari something of a god-like creature, or at least endowed with a vision/witnessing that enables him to withdraw from the scene for the two lovers to be finally graced by love.
Or is it so? Here Hernandez resorts to something Lynch first exploited in "Mulholland Drive": consecutive shifts-disappearances of persons for the uncanny effect that it is us after all who are watching all this. Tari disappears, and in the exact same place, with camera gliding the same way, Kieri appears and finally joins his lover in the bed. The camera starts receding out of the window and we catch Tari sitting with a sad expression in the room (perhaps deploring his omni-voyance?), and, what is the strangest thing of them all, Tatei/Heaven's Heart enjoying the breeze on the balcony, as if in the front of this odd, fantastic family. Is she the synthesis of the film's themes on love and loss? A somewhat Jungian symbol? I do not think so. It is here that Almodovar, who made possible the fact of film-makers like Hernandez working today, imperceptibly informs with irony the situation. But here the irony, with its colorful absurdity like Tatei's dress, has heavenly implications.
Enter the pop tune.