Showing posts with label Knight of Cups. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Knight of Cups. Show all posts

Wednesday 23 August 2017

Song to Song : Much better made than Knight of Cups, but still well-made tedium

This is a reaction, by accretion, to Terrence Malick's latest, Song to Song (2017)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


23 August


This is a reaction, by accretion, to Terrence Malick's latest, Song to Song (2017)











His being an auteur, Terrence Malick can, of course, interpret that to mean doing what he wants - desiring, as his characters* grandiosely emptily do, 'to be free', and / or 'to set others free' (sc. delude themselves, and / or screw others over, in the name of Freedom).

If Malick chooses, he can have us infer (and maybe agree) that he is painting with light, and that we are redundantly seeking a narrative (which he does not actually have, and so cannot deny us) - until he then gives us one, of sorts, but only once he has had his way with our mind, with his fractured slices**.

[...]



Film-references :

* Hideous Kinky (1998)

* Jules et Jim (1962)

* La grande bellezza (The Great Beauty [but #UCFF prefers 'Immense Beauty' as a title]) (2013)

* On the Road (2012)

* The Last Station (2009)

* The Master (2012)

* The Neon Demon (2016)




Interlude ~ Irreverent parody No. 1 :


The travel of Song to Song is from deliberately momentary snatches of the past - which have been blanked out by the actors, in confused guilt and shame at having been paid to arse around implausibly on camera - to healing (and, of course, the pay-cheque).

However, this only comes through expressionless (and barely cleansing ?) confessional utterances, spoken to God knows whom (an on-line diary, via voice-recognition ? or a very professionally indulgent therapist ?). Thus, if just as implausibly, they become reconnected with good, honest, Tolstoyan toil on - dare one say so ? - the soil that they had spurned.


In essence, the road's shown to be tough, but (for actors, at least) healing for careworn hedonism can be won by lost wild-child rockers-in-their-heads stars of screen !



Other references :

* Friends and Crocodiles

* The Diamond as Big as The Ritz ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

* The Lost Ones [Le dépeupler] ~ Samuel Beckettt


End-notes :

* If we may rightly call them that... Gosling, though perhaps never heard called that, is credited as 'BV' = boundlessly vacant, as Gosling usually does / is, or boulevard verdure ?

** Naturally, Woody Allen and Charlotte Rampling (as Dorrie) did this with far greater impact in Stardust Memories (1980).




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)