Friday, March 31, 2017

Song to Song

Watching Song to Song is like explaining an old romantic relationship to a new friend. You would certainly start at the beginning – how you met, how long it took to fall in love. And then you may suddenly jump to the end – the fighting, the apathy. Beginning to end, back to back. As you kept talking, your narrative might gradually shift to highlights – the highs, the lows, the vacations, the fights. In real life, stories of such personal importance are rarely told in order. We shape our own narrative to make things more compelling. It’s a challenging concept for film, but one that clearly interests director Terrence Malick.

I understand the frustration many have with Malick’s style. His films are poetic puzzles in motion. Putting a jigsaw puzzle together is challenging; doing so while the pieces are floating is damn near impossible. But once you complete that moving puzzle, the reward is even greater.

Many of Malick’s films contain seemingly conventional plots – criminals on the run, men in war, coming-of-age in Texas, love gained and love lost. Yet they are told in ways we aren’t used to seeing, specifically as it relates to the convention of time. Time is a construct. Man invented numbers, dates, orders, months. We follow time, because the structure of life dictates it. But in storytelling, it’s possible for time to be obscured. Time always goes in order, but memory doesn’t have to.
Song to Song is about two fledgling musicians (Rooney Mara and Ryan Gosling) who meet in and around the Austin music scene and quickly fall in love. The woman’s successful boss (Michael Fassbender) is around as well. The boss and the woman used to sleep together, and have since cooled down, but the boss’s rich, jealous entitlement complicates the lives of everyone he meets. A split occurs, and each of the three people begin dating someone new. The new relationships (to the likes of Natalie Portman, Cate Blanchett, Lykke Li and others) are intertwined with good and bad memories the original three shared together. The result is an emotional mosaic of love, loss, acceptance and pain.

Everyone in the film is uniformly excellent, even if their performances are presented in a tangled manner. Fassbender’s quiet, resentful rage bursts through Malick’s fractured narrative, proving again that the actor is one of the best we have. And Lykke Li (a talented singer making her mainstream film debut) carries herself with a confident vulnerability that is utterly arresting. You can always count on a Malick film to look great, and Song to Song is no exception. Shot by Emmanuel Lubezki (perhaps film’s greatest living cinematographer), Song to Song is captured with wide angles and fisheye shots, leaving nothing out of the frame, while making us curious what’s around the corner.
Malick’s most recent narrative films, To the Wonder, Knight of Cups and Song to Song, were all made without scripts, and you can tell. There is very little on-screen dialogue in the films (though more in Song to Song than the other two combined), and no linear narrative. Malick always shoots hours and hours of footage, then spends years editing them into a film. It seems, though, that the films in this unofficially trilogy have been completely found in editing, resulting in breathtaking, unconventional experiments that torment some and inspire others.

I appreciate Malick’s style. It challenges me. It forces me to look at love and life and hell and pain in new ways. Few films have the ability to do that. Regarding Song to Song, I simply ask that the next time you’re telling someone a story, be aware of how you’re telling it. Where do you begin and where do you end? Did you forget something? Maybe you’re already done, but open it back up to add something new. It was really important, so you put it in. That’s Song to Song. It isn’t wrong, it’s just the way some stories are told. A-

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16 comments:

  1. I do want to see this as I'm a Malick fanboy. It's not likely I'll see it in the theaters due to location issues but I hope to see it on DVD soon.

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    1. I hope you're able to see it soon too. Can't wait to hear your thoughts on it.

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  2. Glad you enjoyed it! As a music fan, I'm especially interested in that the story revolves around musicians. The cinematography sounds great based on your review. Looking forward to seeing it myself on the biggest screen possible!

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    1. Hope you can see it soon too! It was so cool to see a Malick flick set in the music scene.

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  3. I'm sure I enjoyed reading this review more than I'd watching the movie if I ever see it. Mallick's style is just completely not for me (though I think Thin Red Line is an amazing film) but Fassbender is in it so I may see it some day

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    1. The Thin Red Line is kind of an enigma. Even people who don't ;ike Malick's style seem to like that one, which is great. Sadly, if you don't typically like his style, I doubt you'll like anything about Song to Song.

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  4. Your comment on how the last three Malick films were found in the editing room is interesting. I feel the same way about Lynch's Inland Empire. It's more about essence than structure. Less about narrative and more about abstract thought. In that way, Malick is willing to experiment in bold ways than not many filmmakers from that era (this is the same guy who did Badlands!) have done. In many ways, Malick's films are about memory or fleeting memory. It's a narration of thoughts (as you said, when are thoughts ever in order) as opposed to a narration of an actual story.

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    1. Yes, exactly. And of course some people aren't going to dig it. Totally understandably. I just appreciate the hell out of his style. It's watching movies in a completely new way.

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  5. I'll be honest, I do want to see this movie, because of the cast involved. But, I'm not a fan of Malick really whatsoever.

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    1. I hope you like what the cast "does" in it. Malick's style definitely comes first though. The cast is always secondary.

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  6. I wish I could love Malick the way you love Malick.

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  7. Glad to hear you liked it. It seems people are pretty devided on this one. It almost has a perfect 50% score on RT. Still, really looking forward to this.

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    1. Thanks man. I think people will always be divided when art is presented in a new way. I really dig Malick's style, but completely understand why others don't.

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  8. Nice review and nice background on your blog title. Does this mean we'll be seeing that elusive Bergman retrospective soon? ;)

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    1. Yes sir indeed it does! It has been a long long road. Realized I had to watch all of his films again, in order. So that's taking a bit of time, but I'm nearing then end and hope to have it up in a few weeks!

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