Carlos Reygadas’s 2002 movie Japón uses the three core ingredients from Ingmar Bergman’s cookbook, death, sex, and god. Death, and its attendant fear, provides the engine that drives everything. Sex is our attempt to distract ourselves and represents our attachment to the materiality of the mortal world. God is a doomed effort at assuaging our fear of death by praying to an absent and neglectful parent figure who requires a kind of hope and optimism many cannot muster. Both Reygadas and Bergman cover these three intertwined themes in similar ways but Japón is visually distinctive.
