Knight Of Cups (Terrence Malick, 2015) : USA

Reviewed by Nathan Pécout. Viewed at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, at the Arlington Theatre.

«People do not like films, they like stories.» I think this statement sums up my experience with Terrence Malick’s last piece of experimentation, Knight Of Cups. I never saw that many people leaving a movie theater, and, unlike Roger Durling, I got extremely annoyed when I heard “This is the worst movie I have ever seen !” I agree, there is almost no narrative structure, the story stays at the same point, and there are almost no dialogues. But despite this, the film is an outstanding cinema experience.

First of all, the film is wonderful to watch, just to watch : Malick offers a filtered mise-en-scène, switching from as-far-as-the-eye-can-see landscapes to luxurious interiors, from long shots to cameras focusing on Christian Bale’s body. But these pleasant visions are blurred, blurred by some kind of haze, coming from Christian Bale’s character, who delivers a minimalist but accurate acting performance, and that haze darkens his mind. This mise-en-scène, alongside the tortuous movements of the camera, sets perfectly the atmosphere of the film : we are watching the mystical tale of a man who lost himself in the superficial pleasures of life, forgetting what he came here for at first. We witness a wandering, a man lost in the mundane world of Los Angeles, looking for “the pearl”. Is it a woman ? He goes from a superficial relationship to another. A place to stay ? He moves from an expensively decorated house to the next one. None of those gives him the satisfaction he is desesperately running after. But is he still willing to find it ? He doesn’t really seem to try to change his situation, and nothing that happens to him moves him, even a pair of robbers assaulting him in his own house.

In addition of the absence of a narrative structure, the film’s form is extremely confusing. We have no marks of time or space, and the mostly external sound plus the dialogues sounding like distant voices being constantly overwhelmed by the barely more audible voice-over do not help to locate ourselves or the characters through the film. Bale is straying in his memories, like Malick in his writing, we don’t know what event comes after which one. The character embodies the author, who can’t find himself and suffocates (water is an important motif throughout the whole film, we can count many underwater shots) in a pointless, valueless world, too rich to even remember why it is where it is now.

Knight Of Cups is stamped with Malick’s philosophising and questioning of the life, similarly but in a completely different environment than The Thin Red Line (Terrence Malick, 1998), and follows Malick’s two previous feature films Tree Of Life (2011) and To The Wonder (2012) in their experimental approaches, reaching a peak in Malick’s auteur style. His next work will tell us if he can go even further, or move in to a completely opposite direction.

«People do not like films.» If you do, don’t hesitate. I was skeptical after watching The Thin Red Line, the first of Malick’s film I saw, his philosophy hadn’t reached me that much. But this one convinced me.

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Published:
02.18.16 / 12pm
Category:
Films, Santa Barbara Film Festival 2016