THE INHERENT DANGER in treading the line between pretentious and profound is that one misstep can send the whole thing plummeting into ponderousness. When a film does dare to venture into the murky waters of meditation and still ascend above the muck (and possibly above the collective audience's heads), however, the transcendental high is enough to leave one lightheaded for weeks. There is every reason to think that Mexican filmmaker Carlos Reygadas's opus Japón, an epic of enigmas and epiphanies that has as much to do with the land of the rising sun as Terry Gilliam's dystopic vision has to do with Brazil, would sink under its own weighty aspirations. It involves a nameless man (Alejandro Ferretis) who travels to a ragged village with the goal of ending his life. He stays with an octogenarian woman (Magdalena Flores) named Ascension, whom he falls in love with and who ultimately "saves" him. Nature, death, and redemption pervade every deliberately paced sequence and every grainy, sun-baked-to-sepia 'Scope shot. Yet Reygadas's debut will quiet even then loudest of doubters immediately; though he wears his pantheon influences on his sleeve (the matron's question, "Who do you like more: the Virgin Mary or God?," is pure Buñuel, and St. Tarkovsky hovers over the proceedings like a proud patron), Japón's hybrid vision of spiritual anodynes and apocalypses announces a distinctly individual cinema of contemplation. Reygadas's predilection for languid pans over the landscape and ambient sound cast a trancelike spell, and even shocking scenes of sex and death symbolism (those squeamish around copulating equines or full-frontal geriatrics may want to selectively shield their eyes) brim with poignancy. By the time the final tracking shot weightlessly glides through physical wreckage, the sensation isn't that the neophyte has dodged a bullet. It's closer to the swooning realization that a new master of antiquated art-filmmaking could very well be walking among us. (David Fear)