“The pure frank
sentiments we hold in our hearts are the only truthful sources of
art. “ (Caspar David Friedrich)
A few days after I have
seen this film, I already begin to forget how perplexed I was on that
day. It was the first time I felt confused after a film by Terrence
Malick. During the days after the screening, several moments of the
film came back to my mind unintentional like the film lives a life of
its own. I read three reviews, the beautiful ones by Richard Brody
and Patrick Tomassi and the more sceptical one by Matt Zoller Seitz.
Paradoxically it was the sceptical review by Zoller-Seitz which
inspired me to rethink the effect the film had on me. At the
beginning I felt much closer to the conclusion of Zoller Seitz than
to the other two rather enthusiastic reviews.
Compared with his two
previous films,, the shameless underrated masterpiece To the
Wonder and Knight of Cups, Song to Song has more
recognizable elements of what we call narration. It is the third film
Malick created without a proper screenplay. Strangely I felt in Song
to Song the lack of this very special intensity of these two
previous films, where the montage finally created in a magical way an
own gravitation field which brings all the often improvised elements
together. This recognizable triangle relationship between two
musicians played by Rooney Mara and Ryan Gosling and a rich and
powerful music producer (Michael Fassbinder) are in contrast with a
strange centrifugal force which makes every moment even more
fleeting, even a bit more fragmented than in Malick´s previous
films. On the first sight – there is everything what we know from
recent films by him, especially since his collaboration with this
wonderful Mexican cinematographer Emmanuel Luebzki: the pending
sliding movements which creates a choreography with the movements of
the acteurs that appears to me almost like Max Ophüls with a hand
held camera. There are also the famous over voices, an element which
is present in all films by Malick but much more refined and
cultivated since The Thin Red Line. This time it was often
difficult to me to distinguish the different over voices/characters
from each other. It was the Babel-effect or to talk with Jean Renoir
the problem that “every one has his reasons” how it is verbalized
in his La Regle du jeu. Literally I often had problems “to
get hold” on those fleeting moments. In other films by Malick there
were always several moments which immediately burnt into my memories.
But exactly in this moment
of doubt I had in this film, the film comes back in little pieces to
my memory like my brain was working like a ruminant. And with a delay
of some days the old excitement, the strong emotions I usually feel
for a film by Terrence Malick since The New World are back
again.
Even though the film takes
place in the music world of Austin / Texas, most of the excerpts of
live-concerts or recorded songs are as fragmented than anything else
in Malicks recent films. Sometimes the protagonists attend concerts
not from the grandstand but from a place they look sidewards to the
stage. As insiders they seem often less interested in the
performances than the audience mass. There is actually a link to
Malick´s previous film Knight Of Cups who takes place like
Song to Song on the other side of the entertainment industry
where the common audience has no access.
But even if Malick´s last
two films are dealing with artists who have to deal with a business
which buys and sells them - in their emotions, their memories their
grieve and their losses the acteurs are as lost and lonely like the
uprooted Pocahontas in The New World, the grieving mother in
The Tree of Life or the lost soul Marina in To the Wonder
– and finally very close to the rough, still non verbalized
emotions and thoughts we have when we attend a film screening.
Whenever I hear these over voice whispering, I almost can feel my own
silent ones. In of of the big themes in Malick´s work, the lostness
of most of his characters on their quest for identity, Malick seems
to have gone with Song to Song even a step further. The
collision between pain and grieve and the beauty of the world seems
to be a bit more pointed. Often in Song to Song, the
protagonists are indifferent to the beauty we see at the same moment
on the screen.
Especially the characters
who went through losses, grieve like the young soldiers in The
Thin Red Line, especially Pocahontas in The New World,
Mrs. O´ Brian in The Tree of Life or Marina in To the
Wonder are still able to see the beauty of the world. In Song
to Song we hear Rooney Mara´s voice telling: “I can´t bear to
see the birds, because I saw them with you.” Obviously these words
are leaded to her lover but it also implies, that she sees the world
from a different perspective than us, the audience. The majestic view
of a flying flock of birds we could often share in our imaginations
with the protagonists in other films by Malick but not with Rooney
Mara and other characters in Song to Song. They literally see
a different film than we do. When we learn relatively quick the greed
and aggressive possessive manner of the music producer (one of
Malick´s most diabolic characters) Mara and Gosling seem to be
helpless exposed to his manipulations.
There remains in me a
feeling of discomfort with the film but it is very close to a film
from another favorite director of mine which I admire but which also
scares and distressed me in revealing a disconnected modern
civilization, Yasujiro Ozu´s dark Tokyo Boshoku (Tokyo
Twilight).
Jean Renoir wrote in his
autobiography once about his India-experiences that he was “deeply
moved how the Indians tried to touch him”. Terrence Malick is like
Jean Renoir a filmmaker who celebrates the tangible and visible
matter of the world and us are made of. And the spiritual and
religious aspects are no contradiction at all. They are an
interpretation of the world we can share or not. They seem to belong
together as two aspects of the world, the nature like it is and how
people try with or without success to deal with it.
The kind Malick´s
characters try to touch the loved ones but also the world around them
is very close to that what must have moved Renoir so much during his
India-experiences. In Song to Song they try it desperate and
often without avail like in no other film by Malick. They literally
try to get with their hands hold in this world and sometimes they
fail. But at all, emotions, mental conditions in a film by Terrence
Malick are always revealed through bodies, movements, glimpse, sounds
and an intensive exploration of the facets of human faces - very
close to the films by Ingmar Bergman, Ritwik Ghatak and Carl Theodor
Dreyer. Malick´s cinema is a big veneration for the matter of the
world and the matter, cinema is made of as well.
I said it often and I say
it again: the accusation Malick´s films from up to The Tree of
Life are esoteric or simple religious propaganda is not only
unfair but even poor nonsense and it is finally a big embarrassment
of quite a big part of film criticism.
“Property, it´s all
about property” (Sean Penn in The Thin Red Line)
And yes, even though a
marginalia but always evident, Malicks films are not at all isolated
from the social reality or social history of the world: Exploitation
of human labour in Days of Heaven, war as the decline of human
civilization in The Thin Red Line, the aggressive British
imperialism to conquer new markets in The New World, the
illusion in and the failure of the American way of Life in The
Tree of Life, the evidence of hardship in
Bartlesville/ Oklahoma in To the Wonder. In Knight of Cups
and Song to Song there are signs of a certain cynicism of the
rich and powerful, especially in how these films reveal the
exploitation of the female body. Most evident in the nearly
Stroheim-like character played by Michael Fassbinder whose manner
finally leads to the suicide of his wife played by Nathalie Portmann,
an unusual harsh explosion of tragedy in this film.
It is very fashionable, it
is trendy, cool and catchpenny to ridicule the more recent films by
Terrence Malick. That became recently a sport in mainstream criticism
and even worse in blind and ideological motivated criticism. But it
ignores or even defrauds the rich diversity Terrence Malick has given
to recent world cinema.
And yes, I have forgotten
that there was as well a moment which moved me very deeply and which
is enough motivation to see this film again: it is the short but
weighty presence of Rock-singer Patti Smith. It is a moment hardly a
minute long but strong enough to be remembered until my very end and
which is also a precise image for the poetry of Terrence Malick.
Patti Smith talks with Rooney Mara and just this dialog between a
real and a fictive person, the port between fiction and documentary
alone is amazing. The elder singer tells about her late husbands,
that she still will wear his ring because he was the love of her
life. The younger woman tells her about her unhappy sex affair with
this producer. And suddenly this little dialog turns into something
like a confession from woman to woman and Patti Smith becomes an non
denominational spiritual advisor which is often reserved for male
priests. How the hands of these women touch each other, how Smith
comforts the young disturbed woman and how she finally touches her
cheeks, is a high concentration of Malick´s poetry and compassion.
This moment comes always back to my mind, again and again - and
there is nothing I can do about it. It reminds me in this strong and
heartbreaking moment from The Tree of Life when this wonderful
big black lady comforts the mourning Jessica Chastain with her huge
hands. In these seconds the films reveal the whole beauty of the
cinema of Terrence Malick itself. These two scenes tell me all what I
love in the films by Terrence Malick, for what I have no words.
Rüdiger Tomczak
Remarks:
The mentioned reviews:
A Prayer for Ryan Gosling (Patrick Tomassi
Review by Matt Zoller Seitz at Rogerebert.com
Thank you for such an intelligent and wise commentary. Malick always creates high art.
ReplyDelete