Review of Knight of Cups (2015) by Jane L — 08 Mar 2016

The long awaited new visual epic, by Terrence Malick, finally hits the screens and as some of you may have heard, the film has divided the critics and alienated a few purists along the way. A solid director with a unique and magnificent body of work encompassing masterpieces such as: Days Of Heaven (1978), Badlands (1973), The Thin Red Line (1998), The New World (2005), and The Tree of Life (2011), Malick seems to have accelerated his working rhythm and delivered the very underwhelming (in my opinion): To the Wonder (2012).

That film suddenly made me question the choices made by Malick regarding his narrative form in prose rather than verse, thinking he had reached the limits of his own creation. With this new film though, I have been transcended by a wave of pure majesty and came to realize, when a master decides to explore the artistic medium of cinema, rewrite the rules to reach absolute purity, one is forced to be in awe in regard of such incredible quest.

To some of us, I would like to remind you that films are an artistic form of expression. Do we ask a painting to make sense? To be linear? Do we ask poetry to be logic? Do we ask from songs to all sound the same? Then why think that films must be contrived by their own stories instead of being visual ventures, architectures built to the glory of a man's journey on earth? Knight of Cups is a film that will divide undoubtedly, Malick has chosen to return to a very raw form of cinematic language, probably inspired by the French New Wave of the swinging 60?s, using a narrative form very close to what Alejandro Jodorowsky, Sergei Parajanov, Seijun Suzuki or Jean-Luc Godard were doing once upon a time, trying to revolutionize the concept of film making itself.

Often offering to their audiences transcending experiences based on a visual structures rather than narrative ones, these men were the pioneers of modern cinema and the video clip industry owe them everything.

It seems today's audience has forgotten the multitude ways and support to tell and share stories. With this new film , it is essential to understand how the images added to the music and combined with a thorough editing process, achieve a result of absolute visual poetry, where everything is combined into a single dreamy vision.

This philosophical and metaphysical way to treat images to construct a story may be unfathomable for many audience viewers used to a more logic and traditional type of linearity. If you allow yourself to breathe, open your senses a little while you relax in your seat, maybe you will understand better the beauty of simplicity through a series of phantasmagoric images, playing like a moving medieval tapestry threaded with modernity but delivering a message as old as the world.

This film made me think of a person who's reflecting on his/her life, opening a long lost love letter urging for self acceptance and forgiveness of past faults. The film felt like the quest of every human being on their journey towards whatever it is they wish to achieve during their lifetime.

We are flawed creatures, imperfect and fragile, egotistical and doomed by our own blindness but there is hope all around, we just need to see. By choosing to shoot the story like a student film, by returning to a very pure way of making a movie, freed from the archetypes that rule the mainstream box office these days, Malick has crafted a film that defy time and logic.

With the help of his genius cinematographer, Emmanuel "El Chivo" Lubezki, we are offered a journey into the mind of a very smart individual sharing with us his interpretation of a modern fairy tale shot in high definition and scored like a minstrel's swan song.

This is not a film for everyone and I understand how this type of cinema can rebuke some viewers, in my eyes though, this is exactly what cinema should be, enigmatic, transcendent and bodacious.