Stellet Licht

When the film started I remembered Terrence Malick’s “Tree of Life”. Those scenes from a silent rural area. You can hear the sounds of wild animals crying the song of liberty. Man, on the other side, is bound by traditions he invented to imprison himself. Johan is the father of the family in the film “Stellet Licht” and he is leading the praying. His wife Esther is following the prayer so religiously. Their children are obeying the rules. The younger the children are, the freer they are. The youngest was yawning. Yawning was the most realistic reaction to that Mennonite tradition. Sooner in the film we got the notion that Esther is that kind of a woman upon which stands a whole family. The woman who not only is a womb to receive the fertile atoms and let them be, but also, the woman who can crop. The woman who knows that her man is loving another woman.

Esther is a name that reminds me of another woman, Asmer, in that novel of Samir Nakkash named “Shlomo the Kurdish, Me, and Time”. Shlomo was a religious Jew who was spoiled enough to let his wife Asmer brings him that young woman he had a lust to. Esther, like Asmer, is a kind of woman who sacrifices and lives like a liver do.

Juhan develops a lust to Marianne. A beautiful name. A name similar to that of Marina in “To The Wonder” of Terrence Malick. A young wife who is loved in Malick’s move by a priest. In Carlos Reygadas’s movie, “Stellet Licht”, which means “Silent Light”, and talks in a strange language for me named PLAUTDIETSCH, Marrianne is little wise and says to Juhan after they practice sex for a while that: “Peace surpasses love.”

 While Esther bears a blue umbrella under the rain next to a tree that looks like having two thighs spread apart, Marianne doesn’t like to see the eye of the sun so she puts her hand to cover the sun. Why did Yalom name that book: “Starring at the Sun”? What truth did Marrian try to avoid? Is it simply that truth that love is under our voluntary control? Or something more deep, related to our existence, and death?

What I prefer is that Esther standing strong next to her children in the field, and that dark tree getting wetter and wetter under the rain after the sun has set.