The New Cinema of Mexico marches on with Carlos Reygadas’s Japón ( " Japan " ), which is at the Brattle this weekend, May 9 through 11, but don’t anticipate an audience-chummy film in the vein of Amores perros or Y tu mamá también. This extremely demanding, often accomplished first feature comes from a 32-year-old filmmaker who, as he has explained in interviews, moved from girls and soccer at age 16 to being obsessed by the cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky.

Japón demonstrates Reygadas’s ode of allegiance to uncompromising, spiritually mesmerized European masters, and more than anyone else, I believe, to Robert Bresson and his grim, minimalist, Hell-on-Earth brand of Catholicism (note Reygadas’s use of Bresson’s favored piece of music, Bach’s St. Matthew Passion). But there’s some Luis Buñuel, too, in the unsentimentalized, grotesque peasant cast. And the almost endless final shot, with the camera whirling round and around the characters, reminds me of the concluding moments of Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes.

Here’s the tale: an unnamed, fading, weather-beaten Man (Alejandro Ferretis, who has the fried, melancholy demeanor of today’s Al Pacino) picks his way through rural, non-tourist Mexico in search of a tiny village at the bottom of a canyon where he can rest for a bit, compose himself, and then commit suicide. He goes down, down, down, but after reaching the crude town, he retreats and goes up a bit (directions are very symbolic), climbing to a house on the edge of the canyon where he can rent a bed. He will sleep in the barn of an aging, arthritic woman whose name is Ascen (Magdalena Flores). Ascen: ascent, ascension!

Ascen is one with the angels, a person who is as humble as she is naturally charitable. Slowly, the Man, who is not religious, seems to discover some crack of hope from the company of this pious old lady, whose meager home is pasted with pictures of Jesus. Meanwhile, each time he tries to shoot himself, he lacks the will. Lying on his cot (it was the bed of Ascen’s husband), he has eerie sexual dreams, and they involve Ascen. Ascen? We see her kiss an image of the Messiah smack on the mouth. Can her Christianity also resuscitate the Man through a sacrificial act of fornication?

Buñuel was an atheist, Bresson a devout believer, but both made cinema in which the do-gooders of the earth are defeated and crushed every time by the rabble. Reygadas sets up Ascen as his Buñuel/Bresson sacrificial lamb, and all her kindness can’t deter the slovenly, drunken, heathen villagers from knocking down her house. But is God watching? The filled-with-dead-bodies last shot of the movie can be read, I think, as the Lord taking his mighty revenge. For a split second, the Heavens reveal themselves: how Bressonian!

And the title, Japón? Its meaning is never revealed. It’s the ultimate mystery in this most cryptic and yet compelling of Mexican movies.

THE MOST BIZARRE INTERVIEW I have ever conducted? There’s no contest: it was in July 1990, my attempted conversation with the then-septuagenarian Paul Brennan, a Bible peddler in the Maysles Brothers’ 1969 documentary masterpiece, Salesman (it screens at the Brattle this Tuesday, May 13, on a bill with Grey Gardens). I knew that Brennan was infirm when the interview was arranged, that I would talk to him at the Mattapan Chronic Disease Hospital. Nobody warned me that the Jamaica Plain resident — bedridden, tortured by rheumatoid arthritis — was barely there, and a few months from dying.

In the course of scouting their documentary, the Maysles came upon Brennan, a Willy-Loman-as-Barry-Fitzgerald selling illustrated Bibles through screen doors via colorful blasts of Irish-American oratory and blarney. They filmed him and three co-employees of the marginally reputable Mid-American Bible Company going house to house through Catholic and blue-collar Boston and Miami.

In the summer of 1990, Salesman played on PBS’s P.O.V. Until that screening, nobody in the Mattapan hospital knew about Brennan’s movie past. " This is fascinating, " a nurse told me. " We don’t have many celebrities at Mattapan Chronic. " I was led to a bed where a frail old man lay in a haze. Even one-word answers were hard for Brennan, who faded in and out as I spoon-fed him questions. I got nothing about Salesman, though he wheezed that he’d been in a theatrical production of The Way of All Flesh. Other plays? " I don’t remember. "

" To me, Salesman is a movie about failure, " his ex-wife, Lilian Brennan, told me on the phone afterward. Although she’d divorced him decades ago because of his alcoholism, she sent a note about the Salesman TV screening to his ward, where it was taped up: " Paul would like to watch the film. Please turn it on for him. "

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com