Feb
11
Batalla en el cielo
Posted by: Brian | February 11, 2009 | Comments Off on Batalla en el cielo
Overall, I did not like Batalla en el cielo. The fact that is it was almost a border line pornography film kind of helped with determining my opinion because it lacked dialogue and overall story telling; you didn’t really know what people were thinking or why they were acting the way they were. The movie mainly relied on the cinematography with the visual shots as there were many facial and body close-ups. It’s like the director wanted to put you in the persons place to see what one would see in real life. Like when Marcus would lose his glasses and all he saw was a blur, then the camera would become blurry. And when that would happen the focus was then on the audio as certain sounds would resonate louder than others, such as the clocks to possibly act as symbols to give clues or hidden meanings the filmmakers wanted to use. The director looks like he wanted to use a different style to maybe have a shock value to get audiences talking. With a lack of script you were focused on trying to read peoples body language and use the environment to help set the mood. In a way, the audience would be the one making up the storyline as they interpreted it themselves. This film, as a few films we have watched so far, has again centered mainly on a negative story from start to finish. It showed the misery of a couple living a miserable life when their kidnapping victim ends up dead. The constant close-ups of Marcus and his wife kind of made things eerie as it first gave an impression that they were desperate people, along with the long pauses of them staring at each other, kind of made things awkward as you weren’t sure what to make of it. It didn’t help advance the storyline as it didn’t help explain why they did the kidnapping or how the child died and kind of put us in a moment in their lives as we interrupted their misfortunes and watched their life unfold.
A few scenes that I did not quite understand were when Marcus ends up killing Ana. He leaves her place and walks into the hallway and pauses where he wets himself and then decides to walk back into her place and kills her. Because there is no reasoning why he did this one could only assume that maybe when she used the words when she was seeing him off, “you will always be in my heart” that maybe that angered him as that was the same thing his wife used and that his wife meant more to him than her and felt betrayed by the girl. Another possibility could be that when he said that he was going to turn himself in that he expected a better reaction from her, because it looked like she didn’t care much and sort of wanted him to leave the apartment quickly with not much concern.
