Ryan Gosling and Rooney Mara on the set
Director Terrence Malick and Rooney Mara on the set
Director Terrence Malick and Natalie Portman on the set
Director Terrence Malick and Ryan Gosling on the set
Director Terrence Malick
SONG TO SONG C
USA (129 mi) 2017
‘Scope d: Terrence Malick Official
site
The woods had
vanished; the earth was a waste of shadow.
No sound broke the silence of the wintry landscape. No cock crowed; no smoke rose; no train
moved. A man without a self, I
said. A heavy body leaning on a
gate. A dead man. With dispassionate despair, with entire
disillusionment, I surveyed the dust dance; my life, my friends’ lives, and
those fabulous presences, men with brooms, women writing, the willow tree by
the river—clouds and phantoms made of dust too, of dust that changed, as clouds
lose and gain and take gold or red and lose their summits and billow this way
and that, mutable, vain. I, carrying a
notebook, making phrases, had recorded mere changes; a shadow. I had been sedulous to take note of shadows. How can I proceed now, I said, without a
self, weightless and visionless, through a world weightless, without illusion?
—The Waves, by
Virginia Woolf, 1931, THE WAVES - Project
Gutenberg Australia
Filmed back to back with Knight
of Cups (2015), essentially the same film in a different context, arguably
the least successful film over the course of his career, where, above all
others, it has an air of pretension about it, showing no artistic growth, as
it’s covering the exact same territory as his previous film, where too much of
the same thing has dulled the senses in Malick films, continuing in a similar
abstract, non-narrative stylization, where this is the only Malick film that
actually felt painful to watch, as actors are constantly forced to
spontaneously perform in front of the camera, to improvise and supposedly be
interesting, yet it becomes excruciatingly painful to watch, as shooting without
a script, it seems more like screen test shots, loose reflections of differing
personalities captured before a camera, where they are playing out moods
instead of developing characters. Over
the course of two hours, the professional limits of these actors are exposed,
as their attempts at spontaneity become repetitive, where instead of a
liberating experience, they feel more and more boxed in by their own human
limitations, falling instead of flying, where it actually becomes uncomfortable
to watch after a while, as they feebly resort to many of the same gestures and
acting techniques over and over again.
While Malick continually resorts to a mosaic of impressionistic moments,
finding beauty in the moment, where throughout the duration he is constantly
changing the focus of attention, adding a stream-of-conscious narrative that is
driven by fleeting images accompanied by haunting interior monologues that do
form a more recognizable storyline, the truth is that our distanced
unfamiliarity with the same characters and cinematic techniques do not grow or
evolve over time, where this feels more like an exercise in futility, with
viewers continually forced to beat their heads against a wall in protest. Shot in Austin during the 2012 Austin City
Limits Music Festival, there is a thread of indie music that plays throughout,
along with cameos from rock icons Patti Smith, Iggy Pop, Johnny Rotten, and
members of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, where the normally reclusive director
conducted a Q & A interview along with actor Michael Fassbender hosted by
resident director Richard Linklater following a screening just a few weeks ago
at the SXSW Film Festival, Michael
Fassbender & Terrence Malick talk about "Song To Song" at the
SXSW (Austin, Texas) (31:38), and while nothing earthshaking is revealed,
it is one of the few public interviews Malick has ever granted.
This would have to be considered the Malick “Museum period,”
as the director, through ace cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki in their fifth
consecutive collaboration since The New
World (2005), continually shoots extravagant, museum-like dwellings with
glass floor-to-ceiling windows, looking completely immaculate, like super
luxury accommodations featured in Architectural
Digest magazine, set in beautiful locations with elaborate outdoor
fountains or in this case, elegant infinity pools overlooking Lake Travis or
the Colorado River, which both converge in Austin, where nothing is ever out of
place, resembling an intoxicating, dreamlike image of unlimited wealth, where
this is as far from a working class environment as one could find, inhabited by
the so-called beautiful people who control the industry. But instead of a scathing satire on Los
Angeles and the Hollywood movie industry, consumed in artifice and
superficiality, this is described as an experimental romantic drama filled with
music, originally entitled Weightless
from the Virginia Woolf passage, yet despite the title and the outdoor rock
music setting, the film is not really about the music festival, though as Malick
put it, “You can’t live in Austin and escape the music,” serving only as a
backdrop for a larger story about the fleeting connectivity of our lives, shown
through a series of random moments, as one character (Rooney Mara) puts it,
“living moment to moment, song to song, kiss to kiss,” which may explain why so
many different songs and locations are used in the film, where what’s shown
onscreen are only brief fragments of a much larger picture that remains unseen,
that each viewer must imagine for themselves, where perhaps a common theme
heard throughout is the Delta blues song, “Rollin’ and Tumblin’,” Elmore James - Rollin' and
Tumblin' - YouTube (2:27).
Well, I rolled and I tumbled, cried
the whole night long
Well, I woke up this mornin’, didn’t know right from wrong
Well, I woke up this mornin’, didn’t know right from wrong
Featuring a cavalcade of stars, including Michael
Fassbender, Ryan Gosling, Natalie Portman, Rooney Mara, Cate Blanchett, Holly
Hunter, and a strange appearance from Val Kilmer, where three women are Academy
Award winners, the film doesn’t really have a story, and isn’t meant to, as
there was never any guarantee any of the scenes would be used, with Malick
filming them continuously, even when they weren’t acting, in keeping with his
theme of spontaneity, with many not making the final cut, including Christian
Bale, Benicio del Toro, Trevante Rhodes, Haley Bennett and others, including
music groups Arcade Fire and Iron & Wine.
The film basically follows people on the periphery of the industry, Faye
(Rooney Mara), herself a budding songwriter, seen early on having a JULES AND
JIM (1962) style flirtatious relationship with two men, BV (Ryan Gosling), an
up and coming songwriter and musician that she meets at a party, and Cook (Michael
Fassbender), a wealthy record producer that is trying to sign him. In Malick’s experimental phase, one never
needs to buy into the religion or philosophy being discussed onscreen, as
that’s all part of the transitional process “on becoming,” where artistically
one delves under the surface to explore as much as they can to better
understand the changing world around us, and who better than this director to
help guide us through an inquisitive existential journey? But that feeling of Malick euphoria or exhilaration
is never achieved in this film, feeling more like masochistic indulgence, as
one never believes in the actual romance, and any dialogue that does exist is
simplistically awkward and trivial, as what’s missing are the essential
ingredients of a healthy relationship.
While Faye is seduced by them both, a relative novice in the music
industry, “I tell myself any experience is better than no experience. I wanted to live. Sing my song,” this
romantic interplay quickly moves from a free-wheeling innocence to one of more
serious consequences, yet there’s no underlying credibility that it’s ever
about love, as the emotional currency is money and power, as personified by
Cook, who is something of a snake of a human being, who’s personal mantra
becomes, “The world wants to be deceived,” where there’s not a shred of
commitment or even relationship connectivity, as there’s never an extended
conversation, the kind of thing relationships actually need to sustain
themselves, instead it’s shown as a flurry of brief moments, like walking in on
the tail end of a conversation, where much of the film is reduced to
recognizable sound bites. This simply
can’t replace the real thing, so what we see is a cheap imitation, where the
vacuous emotional distance between characters is more evident than ever, where
the personal discomfort associated with watching the film actually feeds into
this perception.
Near the end of the film, like something you might find in a
Jarmusch film, Faye reads aloud a passage from William Blake’s poem The Divine Image from Songs of Innocence and of Experience,
1789:
For Mercy has a human heart
Pity, a human face:
And Love, the human form divine,
And Peace, the human dress.
Pity, a human face:
And Love, the human form divine,
And Peace, the human dress.
It must be said that Malick as a director doesn’t do romance well. While DAYS OF HEAVEN (1978) is in a class by itself, with a scintillatingly radiant Brooke Adams and a ruggedly handsome, young Richard Gere providing the thrust of the love story, BADLANDS (1973), The New World (2005), and To the Wonder (2012) may be his next best romantic efforts and in each instance love quickly collapses, as it simply has no foundation. The same might be said for Kubrick, by the way, as both men are simply too ponderous, where their expertise is in exploring the stratosphere of thought and personal perception, where they are much better in visualizing the transcendence of the universe and the emotional chasms between people. As she did in Knight of Cups (2015), the introduction of Natalie Portman as Rhonda sends the film into a downward trajectory. A working class kindergarten teacher earning extra money waitressing, Cook decides to plant his hooks into her, dazzling her with the opulence of his home, making her his pet project, devoting all his time and energy in a larger-than-life courtship, finally convincing her to marry him, where we see glimpses of Holly Hunter as her more grounded but financially struggling mother, seemingly less impressed with Cook’s dazzling showmanship, even after he buys her a new home, where it’s all an act, a charade, as he soon makes a mockery of the marriage. Consumed by three-way sexual trysts, stringing his wife along for the ride, even including prostitutes, becoming a sleazy portrait of Sodom and Gomorrah, he shows no regard whatsoever for the demoralizing effect this has on his wife, thinking only of himself, while she feels humiliated and ashamed. Cook pulls the same con act on BV, making behind-the-back maneuvers that undermine his legitimacy, as he’s a conniving liar who will openly deceive you to your face, never showing an ounce of remorse. While there’s an interesting connection to struggling parents, Faye’s father (Brady Coleman), ostracized from his own family, basically encourages her not to make the same mistakes that he made, while BV’s mother (Linda Emond) speaks out of turn, causing irreparable damage to an existing affair he’s having with Amanda (Cate Blanchett). In fact, everyone sleeps around, with Faye having a girl-on-girl fling with the French-accented Zoey, Bérénice Marlohe, a James Bond girl in SKYFALL (2012), while BV has unfinished business with a former girlfriend Lykke (Swedish singer and fashion model Lykke Li), where personal betrayal becomes routine. While there are side trips to Mexico, with a few days shot in the Yucatán, mulling around outdoor street scenes including food vendors, revealing a stark poverty in the daily lives of locals, each seems so willing to throw away their youth in the prime of their lives, finding it gone in the blink of an eye. A montage of small moments, there’s really no compelling character in the bunch, so when they run astray, like Icarus flying too closely to the sun, there’s no real sense of tragedy or a feeling like something important has been lost, as there was not much of a connection to begin with. One has to say it — this is downright average, on par with the rest of the bad movies.
No comments:
Post a Comment