FILMS OF THE MONTH 58 | Sight&Sound | August 2017 Reviewed by Henry K. Miller Spoiler alert: this review reveals a plot twist The last two or three Terrence Malick films – it’s hard to keep up nowadays – have been dreadful. Song to Song, produced immediately after Knight of Cups (2015), is the same but different. Aiming for the heavens, lifted by its charismatic stars, it gets airborne for a while, but soon enough falls to earth in a heap, joining its predecessors. Not that it’s remotely earthy, though, which is perhaps at the heart of the matter. It’s a kind of boy-meets-girl story. At a music- biz party in Austin, Texas, aspiring musician Faye (Rooney Mara) meets somewhat more established musician BV (Ryan Gosling); but she is already sleeping with their large-living host, Cook (Michael Fassbender), an impresario, and doesn’t stop. (Apart from Faye, none of the characters is audibly named in the film.) Things become more complicated when Cook signs BV, but it is not until a pause in Faye’s affair with Cook that she and BV part ways. Cook, meanwhile, marries Rhonda (Natalie Portman), a waitress and sometime teacher, but won’t stop sort of life she wanted to lead at the outset: “Any experience was better than no experience.” Shot, like all of Malick’s features since The New World (2005), by Emmanuel Lubezki, the film manifests an equivalent desire, to capture life in the moment. And in order to capture as much life as possible, the camera is seemingly always in motion, with the widest possible field of vision. All the same, it’s a boy-meets-girl story. The camera has always to be in motion in this particular room or that, ‘capturing’ what has been staged and performed for it, or at least allowed for, within this surprisingly ordinary narrative frame. When it works, in the film’s first half, it’s for very old-fashioned reasons. Mara and Gosling have chemistry; Ben Affleck and Olga Kurylenko, in To the Wonder, had none. What Malick demands from his actors these days is a form of improvised mime which few can pull off convincingly; Affleck and Kurylenko certainly couldn’t, affecting clinches, poses and gestures that no one has ever made – or, to put it another way, if we are to understand them as stylised, that conveyed no inner life. Life caught in the moment isn’t an aesthetic to be taken literally; nor is Mahler’s oft- cited proposition that the symphony should be like the world, and embrace everything – Mahler being one of Malick’s soundtrack selections. Some greater organisation is called for, and two hours of pseudo-life being caught pseudo-unawares is too womanising, and Rhonda eventually dies of an overdose. Faye, who earns her living working for an estate agent and walking dogs, tumbles into a relationship with a client, Zoey (Bérénice Marlohe), then tumbles out again; ditto for BV and his new flame Amanda (Cate Blanchett). Eventually Faye is counselled by Patti Smith, playing herself, to return to BV, which she does; and off into the sunset – or at least the magic hour that precedes it, this being Malick – they walk. Of course, the tale is not the same as the telling, and Song to Song is not linear but, as its title suggests, somewhere between episodic and circular, with flashbacks or flash-forwards that are not always immediately identifiable as such. It is narrated, slightly more conventionally than Malick’s most recent features, mostly by Faye, mostly in retrospect, and it is punctuated by scenes shot at a music festival – or festivals, also contributing to the film’s deliberate temporal uncertainty. Sound is untethered from image, or vice versa. Dialogue – and there is more of this than in Knight of Cups or To the Wonder (2012) – continues unbroken over jumps in location. Much of the music, however, is not so much untethered from image as irrelevant to it, arbitrarily drawn from one of Malick’s ‘Classical Moods’ CDs; he has no feeling for rock and dance. The title itself is a line from Faye’s narration, to “live from song to song” being the spontaneous Music of the heart: Rooney Mara, Michael Fassbender and Ryan Gosling in Terrence Malick’s insubstantial boy-meets-girl tale Song to Song USA 2015 Director: Terrence Malick