Song to Song

There is noth­ing in cin­e­ma that cur­rent­ly com­pares to the rad­i­cal five-film sym­phon­ic suite made by Ter­rence Mal­ick between 2011’s The Tree of Life and 2017’s Song to Song. Not Mar­vel. Not Fast and the Furi­ous. Not Saw. Not any­thing. Sure, these films aren’t for all tastes, and they’re not at all meant to be. And they do require the view­er to put con­ven­tion­al crit­i­cal fac­ul­ties on stand-by, like you would close your eyes and mouth and hold your nose as a giant wave crashed over your head. They are euphor­ic, active expe­ri­ences that demand a small adjust­ment of perspective.

Yet it also feels apt that the boys down at NASA light­ened the news cycle recent­ly by announc­ing that one of their Chilean tele­scopes had dis­cov­ered a new solar sys­tem. The dig­i­tal image of these new plan­ets, aligned like cos­mic Christ­mas tree baubles, kept enter­ing my mind while ingest­ing the aching­ly roman­tic rounde­lay, Song to Song. This set of films equate to a new fron­tier, one that we’ll prob­a­bly not reach or under­stand with­in our own lifetimes.

But what is it that makes them so extra­or­di­nary? The French direc­tor Bruno Dumont once said that he val­ues feel­ings that don’t cor­re­spond to obvi­ous screen dra­ma – tedi­um, list­less­ness, con­fu­sion, depres­sion. In a sim­i­lar way, Malick’s late work adopts this coun­ter­in­tu­itive approach to almost every aspect of the film­mak­ing process. He fore­grounds dif­fi­cult emo­tions, and realis­es them in bold, uncon­ven­tion­al ways.

Song to Song exem­pli­fies his unique and ultra-sen­su­al mode of mon­tage-based sto­ry­telling, where human char­ac­ters are con­stant­ly sub­merged in an end­less, glow­ing stream of con­scious­ness. Here, the eyes are not the only the win­dow to the soul – the twitch of the hand, a twist of the neck, the accel­er­at­ed breath­ing pat­tern can also offer vital signs of life. The eyes are less impor­tant that what those eyes are look­ing at, and who’s look­ing back.

Rooney Mara is Faye, a rud­der­less, whey-faced indie pop damsel who’s latched on to the arm of mephistophe­lian music pro­duc­er Cook (Michael Fass­ben­der). She sees this grin­ning lothario as a whiskey-soaked means to an end, work­ing as his ​“sec­re­tary” and daisy-chain­ing between stu­dios, soirees and rock fes­ti­vals. Glid­ing into her con­so­la­tion comes Ryan Gosling’s angu­lar singer-song­writer BV, and an instant con­nec­tion is forged. Their meet cute is a moment of screen bliss whose roman­tic lega­cy lingers through­out the film. They lit­er­al­ly, pur­pose­ful­ly bump into one anoth­er at a pool par­ty and she offers him the bud of her ear­phones. It comes across as the most nat­ur­al action imag­in­able, as two bored and beau­ti­ful fig­ures ran­dom­ly decide they want to be bored and beau­ti­ful together.

As with Malick’s pre­vi­ous nar­ra­tive fea­ture, Knight of Cups, this one also dances around a set of char­ac­ters whose per­son­al trau­mas leave them blind to the nat­ur­al beau­ty that sur­rounds them. There’s a bib­li­cal feel to this film in which lovers become so intwined with one anoth­er that they’re numbed to the ele­ments – the peach-hued Eden of Austin and its dust­bowl city lim­its. Even the dis­cov­ery of a fur­ry cater­pil­lar in a corn­field at dusk (where else!) becomes an excuse for the cou­ple to touch and paw one anoth­er. Watch­ing these scenes makes it appar­ent how few films ful­ly embrace the heavy por­tent of when skin brush­es on skin. This tac­tile ele­ment to human rela­tions seems so dif­fi­cult to cap­ture on film, but Mal­ick makes it the sub­ject of the entire enterprise.

Yet the pal­pa­ble excite­ment that comes with the rit­u­al of offi­cial­ly becom­ing boyfriend and girl­friend (or maybe even girl­friend and girl­friend) leads to a life of anx­i­ety, jeal­ousy and exis­ten­tial tur­moil. And this isn’t ren­dered through scenes of stock anger or the­atri­cal dis­plays of ire, but through the painful deci­sions the char­ac­ters make.

The film doesn’t give much time to flesh­ing out the details of pro­fes­sion­al life, instead plac­ing empha­sis on the pre­cious moments in between. Maybe Song to Song is Mal­ick exam­in­ing the fine dif­fer­ences between love and falling in love. Falling in love is a means to a mys­te­ri­ous end, while love itself is the end. The stim­uli of mod­ern life has con­spired to make us aware of this depress­ing fact.

It nev­er once feels like the film engages with any­thing as ephemer­al as pol­i­tics or social issues. It’s unwor­ried by the banal logis­tics of liv­ing, and as such, if feels unfair to engage the film on that lev­el. The cam­era is nat­u­ral­ly mag­ne­tised towards lithe female bod­ies much more than it is to men, and per­haps this deci­sion roots Malick’s erot­ic impuls­es into a more, shall we say, ​“clas­si­cal” sen­si­bil­i­ty. He nev­er depicts sex in the film, just the dry-hump­ing over­ture, and the becalmed, busi­nesslike con­clu­sion. He’s unself­con­scious about the fact that film is nat­u­ral­ly sub­jec­tive, and he is try­ing to use the image to depict bod­ies and land­scapes in dis­arm­ing and enchant­i­ng new ways.

At one point the film was called Weight­less in ref­er­ence to a scene in which Fass­ben­der and Gosling are seen float­ing around in a reduced-grav­i­ty air­craft as it dive­bombs towards earth. This could be read a sight­ly trite expres­sion of the feel­ing that comes with falling in love. But the title Song to Song is stronger, point­ing to the idea that life is a con­tin­u­ous, con­stant­ly-sur­pris­ing and tonal­ly promis­cu­ous mix­tape whose tracks some­times mag­i­cal­ly synch up with the sur­round­ings, but often give those sur­round­ings new mean­ing. Occa­sion­al­ly, the con­nec­tion is just down­right off.

In that sense the film is a decon­struct­ed musi­cal that’s loaded with all the rhap­sod­ic highs and lows asso­ci­at­ed with the genre. The actors work hard to make their char­ac­ters inscrutable but empa­thet­ic, espe­cial­ly the sad-eyed Mara and stone-faced Gosling. Mal­ick is look­ing to answer the big ques­tions by focus­ing on the small­est of nuances. He gets at things and makes break­throughs with­out ever real­ly push­ing. It’s a majes­tic and pro­found film in which human beings waltz with one anoth­er and occa­sion­al­ly swap partners.