"El cielo divido" (Broken Sky, 2006) was written and directed by Julián Hernández, whose opaque film A Thousand Clouds of Peace Fence the Sky made the film festival/art cinema circuit in 2003. After the hyperkinetic, multi-storied films of Alejandro González Iñárritu (Amores Perros, 21 Grams, Babel), the films of Julián Hernández and Carlos Reygadas (Japón, Battle in Heaven) seem especially excruciatingly slow paced. Not a lot happens (and "Broken Sky" runs 140 minutes!) and it is not clear why what happens does happens or what it means or (sometimes) even what it is that has happened. If that has not cleared the room (of review readers), the movie is "about" the very gradual extinction of first love between two pouty young Mexican males with some faux-poetic, very ham-handed and portentous narration (intoned by Ortos Soyus, seemingly channeling Jean Cocteau), a lecture on Aristophanes, and a lengthy opening quotation from Marguerite Duras. And like Reygadas, Hernández is way too enamored with 360-degree pans... and very long takes and slow pans in addition to the 260-degree ones.

So why might anyone go to or last through the film? Enjoying gazing at handsome young Mexican males (including full frontal nudity) is one possible reason. The other (more respectable) reason is the sometimes outstanding cinematography of Alejandro Cantú in urban Mexico (the world's most populous city, though it seems rather empty in the movie, even the teeming UNAM campus does) and around Gerardo's bed (that is, inside the space where love faded away).

You need more about the plot than to know that love takes nearly two and a half hours of screen time to disintegrate? The film starts with one UNAM students, Gerardo (Miguel Ángel Hoppe) waiting for his boyfriend Jonás (Fernando Arroyo). Gerardo is so in love that it almost makes him seem cross-eyed when he looks at Jonás. They have some passionate (simulated and unconvincing to me) sex, and--for a time--cannot keep their hands off each other's body, but Jonás's passion cools. (As Carson McCullers famously wrote, there is always a lover and a beloved; Gerardo is the lover, Jonás the beloved).

The movie chronicles strains (faultlines) and Gerardo's eventual sorrow. Call me unsympathetic, but I don't see the dissolution as being tragic, let alone an epic heartbreak tragedy. The young men meet, etc. other ardent young men , Bruno and Sergio (Ignacio Pereda, Alejandro Rojo) and this is not anywhere close to being these youths' last shot at love.

Hernández seems to have strong affinities for Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Mysterious Object at Noon, Tropical Malady) slow and murky and underlit style and subject matter. Neither of these directors is very keen on dialogue. Hernández seems to have more elaborate choreography for the young men he films, and pours on the faux-French passion philosophy,

The film would be much better IMO if it were an hour shorter and the narration was thrown away. I'd keep the examination of the bodies and the city. And the mix of disco music, Mexican pop songs, and Dvorak is generally interesting.


© 2006, Stephen O. Murray






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