The author's signature is placed from the first frames. Broad and emphatic. Mobile camera with wide focus optics. The predominance of indirect speech over direct speech. Luxury nature as a background for small intrigues and strong human experiences. And a sense of fate and doom hanging over a comfortable and seemingly safe world. No doubt-- Terence Malik with all his favorite tricks.
The dramatic plot is absolutely Chekhov. People eat, drink, meet, walk - at this time their fates are collapsing. Malik helps himself a lot. Interior monologues prevail over dialogue. It's easier. After all, saying behind-the-scenes: “I fell so low” is much easier to write than the same thought to pack in dialogues so that it sounds out of the forehead. Of course, Chekhov also has “My soul is like an expensive piano, the key to which is lost”, but it is still not “I fell so low”.
A love quadrangle with vectors in several directions: incidental affairs, relationships with parents and parallels with their fates unfolds against the background of a series of music festivals. Two male protagonists are directly related to show business. One is a producer, the other is an author. Professional jealousy and copyright will also appear on the periphery of the plot, but only as additional paint. Are there any good songs written by Ryan Gosling? To what extent do music festivals organized by the hero Fassbender meet the highest criteria of art? We don't know that. From music and festivals only tiny scraps, pieces, parts of a verse without a chorus. That's not the movie. About what?
On the eternal longing of the soul for what does not happen and is unlikely to happen. Kind of like love. Not really. Kind of jealousy. But not all the way. Kind of suffering. But without much depth. Meetings, breakups, choices, suspicions, creativity - all this Malik mixes in a cocktail, which has layers mixed. There are no clear boundaries between feelings and emotions. Joy and revelation mixed with bitterness and insecurity into one big gray lump. And all this lump rolls around the planet Earth, where everything is arranged according to the laws of beauty and harmony. Nature did everything, people ruined everything - Malik's favorite thought.
Life is unbearable. But this unbearableness is given by passions and intrigues that people themselves organize. Malik likes to look at "suffering" from space. From there, they seem absolutely dollish and trifling. In "Song to Song," for those who don't yet know this cosmic gaze too well, a hint is introduced into the middle of the film: a black and white quote from the film. I can't be sure of iron. It is likely that this is Stroheim’s “Avarice” (but perhaps not). In any case, the key: the century has passed, people still suffer from jealousy and money and something else elusive (most likely due to the lack of Higher meaning in all their throws). And somewhere in space is already flying a blue meteorite that can put an end to everything: good and bad, and suffering, and hopes and disappointments. About the fact that the world is fragile - Malik remembers in every frame.
The master of filming about the indefinable human condition “Something I want and what I don’t know”, Malik remained true to himself this time. Song to Song is about the same thing. And this emotion is clearly assimilated by the viewer already a minute to the 40th. The next 80 it repeats in new fabulous turns, like an endless chorus on a worn record. Closer to the final, the musician BV (the same Gosling) will start a conversation at the next party with the girl Faye (and maybe not Faye, but just like Faye) and the viewer will suddenly feel with amazement: yes, it was already at the beginning of the film - the same words, the same BV, the party was different, and maybe Faye is not Faye, and maybe this is her and this is a chorus game that is always the same, although the verses are different. At this point, a suspicion arises: what if the director is not such a demiurge of cosmic proportions? What if he's one of us? He wants something, but what does he not know?
The film chose to watch Ryan Gosling play in the melodrama, as before that I knew him mainly from works in the genre of crime and drama. And when I started watching, for some reason I did not pay attention to the author, but after 10 minutes it was clear to me that the director Terrence Malik, and the cameraman is Emmanuel Lubecki. I had already had a positive experience with the work of this director (the film “Tree of Life” is very dear to me), so I was ready for the visual language and had the appropriate attitude.
I think it’s really important to have the training and the mindset to watch Terrence Malick movies. If you have seen his famous works before and you did not like it, then it is better not to waste your time.
The film is made without a script, the actors are given a lot of freedom in action, thanks to which we can say that this film is not about any particular story of specific people - it is documenting reality in an exceptional form of visual poetry. It seems to me that for the over-sensing reflective person there are many moments that are dear to the heart, understandable, lived or experienced. The film tells about the maximalism and dramatization inherent in people in youth, and that is why at the end of the film, one older woman says very correct words to the main character, kindly calming her, urging her not to enmity with herself and hold on to the one she loves. As long as we are young and full of vitality, we always have the opportunity to change for the better, correct mistakes, learn to accept ourselves and others, but also grow up wiser. Wisdom and youth can coexist with each other.
That was my interpretation of what I saw. The director was about 70 years old at the time of production. I think he, as a man from his age, wanted to tell us something similar, but only with his unique visual language.
And Ryan Gosling played great, it was very unusual to see him at Terrence Malick. All the other main actors are also good, especially liked Rooney Mara.
7 out of 10
The film is a close interweaving of several stories. So close that the heroes are choking in them. The camera repeatedly cuts the distance, literally looking into the characters’ mouths, penetrating into the most secret corners of the soul. Every story is a confession. Personal - from the viewer at arm's length, feelings - at the fingertips. Like a full river, outwardly the narrative is calm and serene. In fact, there is a huge force in it, there, under the surface of the water. A power that can destroy people’s lives.
The most interesting is the character of Michael Fassbender - producer Cook. Genius? Quack? God? Snake tempter? The devil? How would he answer the following important questions for understanding history?
Keen-Or-Geek: What does a successful music producer who has everything want: fame, money?
- More than that. Feel it, taste it all. The whole world. Go beyond it. To go where no one has been before, to experience what no one has ever experienced. Experiment, search.
Keen-Or-Geek: Don't the musicians you work with want the same thing?
Some people want the same jacket as me, the same house, others want to be famous and make their parents proud. I think it's all nonsense. They lack ambition, they lack pride. I'm helping them change, find themselves.
Keen-Or-Geek: Are you giving them false hopes?
I am honest with them, but they are so blind and deaf that they don’t want to accept the truth. They don’t want to hear that it takes a lot of work to get things done, that sometimes you have to get your hands dirty. I know what I'm talking about. This is my world, and I'm the king. They have to trust me or it won’t work.
Keen-Or-Geek: And you don't demand anything from them in return?
- They can't give me anything. Who's helping who? All they have to do is do what they like, give everything, give everything to the music.
Keen-Or-Geek: - How do musicians feel about your 'experiments'?
Cook: - Strange, frightening, vicious, perverse. Everyone will decide for themselves what is right and what is not. For me, freedom is the only thing that is real in this world. Feeling free to fall. Weightlessness.
Keen-Or-Geek: What about love?
Cook: - (silent). . .
' Between us music' is another painting by Terrence Malick, the narrative of which consists in describing the feelings, emotions, states of the characters using long monologues, and not in telling a story based on the plot, action and denouement. However, if you have seen at least one Terrence Malick movie, you already know what we are talking about.
In general, if we talk about what the film is about, it is about three characters: the producer under the name Cook (Michael Fassbender), the texture under the name BV (Ryan Gosling) and the secretary Faye (Rooney Mara), between them there is one magical link - music. Joke, it's not exactly like that. The central character of all here is the girl Faye, who helps Cook with his work as a producer and more, then she meets another friend and assistant Cook - BV. From this point begins the long journey through inner revelations, experiences, endless dilemmas, which are wrapped in the desires of each hero to succeed in the world of music or in financial well-being?
Like the previous, and subsequent after this work of Malik, this picture is imbued with a slight melancholy, the search for the meaning of existence, the acquisition of self-sufficiency or patronage. In the end, the search for a point of compromise of the hero with the world in which he exists.
Visually, Malik is fine as always. Here, a handheld camera that follows the characters, watches them, giving the viewer to feel himself in the same environment in which the characters are located. All this is not surprising, because behind the lens of Emmanuel Lubecki.
And, I want to say, the immersion in the reality in which the characters are made absolutely incredible, if the characters are somewhere behind the scenes of the concert stage, then we see those incredibly large crowds of people behind the fences, and in the foreground we see artists and main characters who are also the perpetrators of the celebration. For me, it was a new experience of my role as a spectator when watching a film, now not me in the crowd, but the crowd in front of me, in a sense, I too become the author of all this.
It is worth talking about acting work, it is known that this picture was shot without a script, thereby Terrence interestingly works with actors, giving only the goal that they must achieve, and let the methods develop themselves, here they have complete freedom. And in turn, they can fool around, have fun, in general enjoy spending time on the screen, as long as it turns out naturally, in fact, it turns out, and if you are given the opportunity to sing yourself, play a musical instrument, then this is also available here.
To be honest, I don’t always pay attention to the soundtrack, except when it’s completely irrelevant, cutting the ear or vice versa, incredible, outstanding and you want to add it to your playlist. In this picture, I did not hear anything particularly interesting and outstanding, but, with its task, the musical accompaniment copes, in the scenes with the monologues of the characters sounds something melancholic, setting us in the right way, something muffled and less rhythmic, if you need maximum concentration, when the characters break off to the fullest we hear something very cheerful.
I am not a fan of Malik’s work, his film language, his narrative are not close to me. The endless experiences Terrence talks about through endless monologues are clearly not mine. I'm much closer to Röfn with his visual narrative. Frankly speaking, only a plate of food helps me from sleeping while watching his paintings.
If you want to watch a film for the sake of music, want to feel the dynamics, feel the adrenaline, then I advise you to go past this picture, this is a movie about people, about moments, music here is not in the foreground and not even in the second place.
Terrence Malik acts very strangely and very brazenly, inviting popular bands, famous performers to his picture, not allowing them to shine on stage. It looks like ridicule, trolling, if you will, when you see Iggy Pop sitting on the couch and talking about the stormy emotions that arise when listening to music.
So it turns out that between us is not music at all, but Terrence Malik, who said to this music: ' Move!'
Like the paintings by Terrence Malick I have seen before, ' Between Us Music' receives a neutral response from me, taking into account all its merits and subjective shortcomings.
.. . I thought we'd just have fun, live song by song, kiss by kiss.
Honestly, I had high hopes for this film, and there is an explanation. A talented cast (which is worth only one Natalie Portman), a contemplative philosopher director Terrence Malik, a promising title and an insanely beautiful and dynamic trailer that made you literally count the days before the Russian premiere. Unfortunately, the expectations were not met.
' Between us music' - allegedly romantic (rather down to earth) and very heavy film, which would seem to touch on many universal problems. Here is the eternal theme of fathers and children, a tragic love story (and rather dependence and shifting responsibility), human hypocrisy, the search for answers to complex questions, relations with power and money, a sea of temptations and passions, relationships of characters, the interweaving of fates. In general, quite easy, everyday film stories. However, when there is too much simple, it becomes unbearably difficult.
In my opinion, the gap in the film is the script, or rather its absence (according to rumors, in one of the interviews Ryan Gosling said that the text was not at all, and the actors improvised right on the set), which leads to complete static. On the screen, we see excerpts of memories, conversations, beautifully filmed segments of life, sketches, clever behind-the-scenes thoughts, anything but action. What's all this about? At some point, it becomes wildly boring, because the characters do not develop at all, and we, the audience, are forced to freeze at one point with them. Such a director's idea causes a feeling of devastation and oppression. Dialogues are monologues, as if spoken casually, on the move, suppress and evoke anguish.
It's worth noting the camera decisions that I think save the movie because the picture is really great. She's alive (and paradoxically, the image in the film becomes more alive than all the characters). The creators embodies the feeling of the audience’s involvement in their film world. As if you are there, together with the characters, feel everything that they feel, observe, evaluate, scold or praise, and sometimes to such an extent that it becomes awkward and even ashamed.
The film asks a lot of questions, especially at the beginning of the attention items so much that involuntarily begins to get lost in them, and, unfortunately, gives very few answers.
'Between us, music' - complex cinema - an experiment that is interesting as an experience, and for me, alas, was never understood.
It’s strange to say that a film called “Song to Song” or “Music Between Us” lacks...music. However, it is. In a film about a music producer and a gifted singer there is not a single song performed by the latter, there are no concerts, no fans, no torments of creativity - nothing that would make an artist an artist. It’s a movie about love, obviously, but it’s about abstract love, covering all sorts of people, and the fact that people are creative doesn’t matter. Does this movie have anything to do with life?
The lack of music in a film about a musician in the classical sense seems to be a paradoxical flaw, which is not so much upsetting as baffling. If the hero is talented, you expect to hear something in his performance, to see something in his path to success, but there are no songs in Between Us and no path to fame. It seems that the entire professional, and therefore creative, side of the life of the characters is not interesting to the author. But why in the title do you emphasize it? What's the music, what's the song? Of course, the selection of voiceover music is made very qualitatively, but this is somewhat not what you expect from a film with this name. Perhaps there is an allegory, and by "song" is meant the unit of life of a musician, it is like "day after day" for any other person, which would mean just life, but still such a name implies an accent that is not used and does not explain the film itself.
I think the title of the film is original, that Russian is the most poetic thing in this picture. The famous cameraman Emmanuel Lubetzky seems to have armed himself not with a professional video camera, but with an ordinary smartphone, so the style of shooting looks everyday, everyday, momentary. The camera shakes, shoots from somewhere you do not understand where, the angles amaze the imagination with their ordinaryity and randomness. It is as if the recorded life is caught in the frame by a casual witness, if not by the heroes themselves. It’s like it’s not a movie at all, but an episode of it, or even a program of “Myself the Director.” Of course, this is not about the cameraman, but about the director who chose such a visual language for his story, who sought desperate plausibility and authenticity.
Perhaps the actors were given the same task: to live in the frame, not to play, and this approach is two sides of the same coin. On the one hand, each of the actors is talented and masterful enough to be convincing in the momentary shooting, but on the other hand, each of them was doubly difficult to create convincing character images, rather than just go back and forth in this pseudo-amateur picture. In three words, characters are not created. Even the voiceover is not an assistant. Over-the-board text in large quantities is generally a bad sign, most often indicating directorial weakness and inability to convey their idea by other means. I don’t dare to question the professionalism of a director like Terrence Malik, but in this film, this theory looks close to the truth. It is impossible for actors to create complex images, reliable relationships, drama or melodrama. It turns out only a set of shots from life, but life does not add up from the frames, people do not work out, there is a desperate lack of integrity. Choosing an amateur scrapy style of shooting, episodic narration is very dangerous, because there may not be a stone flower, and no pearls of acting, such as Ryan Gosling, Rooney Mara, Natalie Portman and Michael Fassbender, will not save the situation, but will only be something like furniture, despite all their indisputable talents.
Somewhere, maybe here, I read that there was no script, and it feels very good. The script is a disaster. What the author wanted to say with his two-hour experiment, why did he shoot it at all? This is a film about love, obviously, but like everything in this picture, love is also kind of episodic. Here is an episode of dating, here is an episode of betrayal, then again acquaintance, here is happiness, for some reason despair, but all these plots are so weakly connected that you have to make considerable efforts not to lose the thread of events. And the author is interested only in these episodes, only relationships, only the reflection of the characters, transmitted, however, voiceover text more than the game, which is definitely bad. Everything is very protracted, often, tedious, it is not clear what history leads to, and whether there is history at all. What should heroes learn, what should they understand? Do they understand? On the screen sometimes there are strong emotions, however, do not catch. They are remembered only because of the fame of the actors who play them. They don't even really have names. If the names are called, it is only a couple of times, so it is difficult to remember the name of a character. It seems that the heroine of Rooney Mara was named only once, and Natalie Portman was not called at all, although I do not exclude that this is a mistake of our localization.
It's boring. The style of shooting is frankly tiresome. The lack of integrity of the plot prevents you to feel the heroes, and in general to interest. The lack of creativity in a film about creative people is baffling. If this movie is an experiment, I am the viewer who didn’t understand it. He didn't.
The life of muses. I started watching for Gosling and Fassbender. But I looked to the middle and got tired of empty scenes where the characters do not know what to do and where to go.
Now it is clear that the first part of the trilogy (“To a Miracle”) would be quite enough – this kind of video poetry (when you have Lubetzky and inspiration) can be shot endlessly. But, damn it, how beautiful, wise and simple! And everyone. About how at first you really want to become a star (or superman), and then you just want to be happy, and when you already agree to happiness is very tiny and like everyone else, you already have such beliefs ... and such a train ...
I think that for Hollywood stars who are honored to star in Malik, it is not only a matter of prestige, but above all – a professional challenge, because it is very difficult to play diversely without words. Best of all – I think – it was Bale in “Knight”, where he managed to play all the states of mind even without changing his face. In Song to Song, Rooney Mara almost did the same thing, and she was trying to say something with her eyes all the way through the film, and I ended up reading, I think, "If there's hell inside of you, what's the use of heaven around you?"
As a rule, at the beginning of each film there is a hint hint of its mood and content - a frame, or a musical motif, or the design of the credits, anything in principle. But sometimes the whole movie is one long hint, an invitation to talk, with no beginning and no end, and no more. However, it is not surprising, having in the directors and screenwriters Terence Malik – an unsurpassed master of omissions and mystery. Malik, as usual, aesthetically, experimenting with the camera and sound, hinting at something more than is practically inherent in each frame. An interesting technique is to tell a story on behalf of several characters, “get” under their skin, in their thoughts and feelings, and in fact – give them a camera in their hands to look at events from their own angle – yes, the idea is interesting, but in fact it somehow causes discomfort and rejection. Perhaps because the viewer is uncomfortable with the “narrators” themselves?
The plot is conditional as much as it is possible to blur the content of 2 hours of screen time. The relationship between the producer and his ward singer, the singer and his girlfriend, the girl and the producer, the girl and her new girlfriend, the producer and his girlfriend, and the new friend, and another friend, reflections on the purpose and betrayal, a few bright sunny angles, a few murky indistinct dialogues ... And I swear to the proprietary condescending look of Fassbinder, who brilliantly played the producer, this is the most clear and honest synopsis that you can squeeze out of this film! In fact, before the viewer unfolds an arbitrary series of shots filled with everyday scenes, voiced in the manner of a blog with everyday thoughts, slightly seasoned with vague moods - and that's it! The viewer first watches the movie, then looks at it, then tries to concentrate, gather, concentrate - all in vain, the meaning of what is happening slips out, is not amenable to comprehension, or even speaking. Moving pictures made from an uncomfortable, often beveled-low angle, replace each other, creating an ideal shape without content. And the voices of the characters, behind the scenes commenting on what is happening, but in fact only voicing the stream of consciousness with a claim to originality, naturally do not add clarity, but pronounce the uppermost truths - without preliminary conclusions, without specific consequences, without - everything.
Trying to somehow tie characters to specific types is doomed to the same failure as with the plot. Heroes Michael Fassbinder, Ryan Gosling and Rooney Mara are not typified, they are not positive and not negative, no matter how much you want to put on them the labels of “scumbag”, “good guy” and “foolish fool” respectively. Their essence is safely hidden under a cloud of empty words, superfluous glances and meaningless actions. The question is, do they have anything behind them? Maybe they're really not good or bad enough to matter; maybe they're just... dummy? The choice of actors, both main and secondary, is so impressive that it almost manages to beat the lack of a coherent script. Almost. Fassbinder with one eyebrow demonstrates all the centuries-old fatigue of old Europe, the refined intelligence of Gosling Pret, even when he is silent, and even when he begins to play and sing his own songs. Rooney Mara tries to look like a trembling laziness and at the same time an interesting woman. And not to say that it is unpleasant to look at them, except that... boring?
Malik focuses on the details of nature and life, presenting a person as a secondary detail of the interior, he speaks aloud eternal questions about fate and purpose in life, hoping that contemplation will lead to understanding, and the formulation of the question – to its fall. He seems to hope that the lack of clear and meaningful external information will cause the frame to be saturated with symbols and signs - spiritual, internal information, which in turn will provoke catharsis, giving answers to all questions at once. That’s just the observation of the disorderly throwing of heroes, their casual intercourse and sluggish reflection contributes little to enlightenment.
The most subjective film: both in terms of content and in terms of expression - everything we see is in the head of the hero and even from the head of the hero.
Malik finds the tools, the technique of transferring the inner world of the character. These are not only voice-over monologues, but also ragged, feverish editing. There is some (in a good sense of the word) plotlessness of the film, which gives the most realistic effect. It is like life as it is and even through the prism of the consciousness of the hero.
The actors don’t seem to play, they just live. While certainly playing in this mode, it is an unusually difficult task.
And now another film about love and finding yourself does not look banal and boring. It turns out that you have to find yourself with another.
Terrence Malik is a poet and painter of Hollywood. He makes films, from the point of view of film language, which have not surprised anyone in the circles of festival cinema. But he's doing it in the U.S., with Hollywood stars, at a wide box office. It's wonderful, but I was alone in the cinema for the evening session. It's cool when you see this monumental canvas on the big screen alone. But it’s also a shame. I hope the reason is that all the fans have already seen the film before, because it was two years before our release.
The film does not have a classic plot (no wonder the actors did not even have a script). It is impossible to understand the chronology of the events in the film. Before us are paintings in musical and poetic accompaniment. Footage with the characters of the film could also be replaced by landscapes.
The film poses to the heroes and the audience eternal questions. About the meaning of life, about happiness and love, about success and prosperity, about religion and faith, about relations with parents. They and we find peace in love and music. They don’t get answers anyway.
Music accompanies the whole film, music of completely different genres. In the film a bunch of cameos of famous musicians of the present and legends of the past. If you are not indifferent to music, then it is definitely worth watching.
The second thing to watch is Rooney Mara. It feels like the whole movie was made for her. 70% of the film is her close-ups. Even if you didn’t think it was beautiful before watching the movie, Emmanuel Lubecki’s camera will make you think it was perfect and divine.
I remember now 2017: the time when I first heard about the imminent release of the film 'Song after song' (in our version, the original translation sounded like this) and when I realized that I really wanted to see it. The desire nourished not only the presence of a dream caste, in which each next name is louder than another, not only a pretty trailer, catching its mystery and quite its attractive atmosphere, but also noticeably added to the weight of the popularity of musical cinema: in cinemas the amazing ' La La Land' and the opportunity to see in the potential something equally magical and enchanting seriously provoked the soul of the restless moviegoer. But, as they say, the music did not play for long: the protracted release in Russia and mediocre assessments from both viewers and critics were enough to cool the heat and quickly forget about the existence of this work.
Today, and now 'Song to Song' in a new localization knocks on the door again. The director and screenwriter of the film is Terrence Malik, hitherto known to me thanks to only two things: he has a unique cinematic language and for some unknown reason almost every first Hollywood star considers it a great honor for himself to star with this figure. And if you ask yourself whether Malik’s lost genius after 'The Wasteland', 'Days of Harvest' and 'A subtle red line' was a temporary phenomenon (completely all tapes of the 21st century are drowning in merciless criticism) and whether the creator’s penultimate work has become an incomprehensible, but pleasant exception in the current situation, then my answers will be: 'Perably the thin red line'#39;#39;for the music is too full and unconsident of our view;'''''#for the abstract and unconsiderl>
Trying to tell about the big through the small, the picture is constantly sinking under the weight of the load imposed on itself: the entertaining thoughts about freedom, life, search for oneself spoken behind the scenes remain such only on paper, and within the framework of art they serve as tinsel, covering a rather template and uninteresting plot (yes, it is here!) about a love quadrangle. And it turns out strange: the director's idea, according to which the main thing that the viewer needs to know, and everything superfluous with his ordinary dialogues, distracting actions occur somewhere out there, on the side, leaving the camera lens to capture the most important manifestations of life (heroes love, dance, fool, suffer), does not work, boring. The form polished to the extreme, creating the illusion of something philosophical, global, makes the presented vision of the world unseemable (at least for the unsophisticated viewer). At the same time, I do not in any case detract from the excellent camera abilities of Emmanuel Lubecki, in general, a good selection of musical compositions and protruding through the screen sexuality of Natalie Portman with Rooney Mara. There is something to see, there is something to listen to, but in the context of the film in question this is not enough.
The characters presented are familiar in principle, but I would not take them as a model. The central image of Faye (Rooney Mara) is slightly annoying because of his constantly on rushing mode in love pleasures and the general static, which is unsuccessfully tried to shift by monologues of existential questions; Cook (Michael Fassbender) is secondary in the image of a raging producer, and the BBC (Ryan Gosling) is not at all clear what he is; the only outlet is Ronda (Natalie Portman), whose painful role of the victim evokes a certain sympathy.
For those who decide to take risks: a leisurely, meditative ' Between us, the music' passes on its own wave, and if you tune in to this wave, then after two hours of watching you will catch yourself thinking that you were able to extract something positive.
6 out of 10
"Song after song" (in the Russian version "Music between us").
A director who does not make a simple movie has created a complex and nonlinear script. A great acting company gathered, a good soundtrack was selected, which changes its tone as the narrative unfolds. All this wrapped in insanely beautiful camera work and visual style and it turned out what happened.
Incredibly sad, but attractive film, to break away from which is simply impossible. Thinking about the life and place of an ordinary person in life. A man with a sea of internal problems and cockroaches in his head, a real man. Thinking about the values that we put at the forefront of our personality, about finding ourselves, about mistakes and their cost, about the ability to forgive.
In the synopsis of this film, it is stated that this is the story of four young people, but it is the story of life itself, as it is, and four young people serve us only as bright guides to this story. And in addition to the main characters, the secondary characters are also very bright, their replicas, how they complement the lines of the main characters is amazing!
Fassbender, Gosling, Rooney Mara, Natalie Portman and Cate Blanchett are in their seats. You feel their characters so much that you think, is it always a game? How much did they play themselves? The interactions between the characters, their dialogues, their movements, their views are so vivid that you feel the story being told. A story in which everyone will be able to find himself, to compare himself with this or that hero, his experiences, thoughts, deeds. Ask yourself, what would I do? How would I behave in his place? Or tell yourself when I did something different.
What's the right thing to do? There's no answer to that question, and the real movie isn't trying to find it. He only tries to convey to us one completely new idea, be kind, appreciate life and the world around you. Unlike many other works of art, this film, in my opinion, is achieving success in its aspirations.
I advise you to watch exclusively in the original language, it is very important to feel the contribution that the actors made to their characters. Bona Fidesz.
Finally, I will cite a quote from this film, a remark of one of the characters, the essence and meaning of which I personally felt more than others.
“It’s terrible to have good moments in life and not have life itself.”
10 out of 10
At first it seems that this film is about a girl who can not find herself, about how tender she is, but behaves lightly, tumbling with all the main characters of the film. You'll be asking yourself: 'What's all this I'm looking at?' But then, towards the end, everything will become clear and the questions will dissipate: this film is about everyone, about everything and very sad.
Basically everything revolves around Faye – the one played by Rooney Mara. (By the way, it seemed to me that only her name was pronounced throughout the film—this anonymity creates a convenient template for people who put themselves in the place of the main characters.) This feature was used by our Russian classics and to this day it is used so rarely that it is nice to meet it again. She wanders between two men, between career and love, between tenderness and pain, and then also connects with a woman with whom unconventional muddles. Faye's lost and looking for herself, that's the whole movie. About the search for my self, about relationships, about feelings, their absence and beauty of both the inner world of a person and the external world that surrounds him.
The role of Michael is also significant in the film because his character changes everyone who connects with him. He is 39; a bad boy, 39; who wants to make everyone else bad, make others look like him, but still stay taller and have some power over them. It is his character that gives movement to the plot. It breaks people down, which is why these people begin to think and try to understand who they are, eventually losing themselves completely. He spoiled and stretched the souls of all who were near him. Someone coped with this rock and recovered, and someone became drowned.
The whole film voiceovers of the actors tell the viewer their thoughts. They pronounce catchphrases, spoken in simple language, thereby expressing the feelings of their characters. The whole point will be told by these voices. Live dialogues are also there, but they are more like highlights - they serve as simple inserts for a change so that the brain does not strain.
Shooting took place without any script, Gosling said, this is confirmed by a series of episodes on the screen. The words of the voiceover were precisely spelled out and thought out at least after the shooting, but what happens in the film is a certain set of random events that the film crew obviously attended. All events related to parties, concerts, acquaintances and parties are present in the frame, but selectively, as if there was a simple idea ' where the hand will direct, there and go to shoot' The same opinion was formed thanks to the actors, because it is clear that they improvised, did what is not written in the script, because there is no script. The star cast did a great job.
In the intervals between concerts and walks, we are shown numerous magical landscapes and fabulously expensive houses, in which every game from a beautiful novel to a depraved orgy takes place. And all this is filmed very beautifully, well, really, the camera work is flawless and pleasing to the eye. Sometimes even an empty wall in a white room seems unrealistically emotional frame.
The film will highlight many famous musicians, some of them give useful advice and talk about the past. They seem to be leading the way by sharing their experiences. And this is not even quite for the main characters who got lost in their own lives, but more for us, for those of us who are also looking for themselves.
Verdict: Malik forces to get used to his films in the process of viewing, 'Marinuya' the viewer to the charming ending. This film is no exception. It seems confusing until the characters begin to reveal secrets to each other, so not everyone will grasp the soul of this film, but everyone will remember it and find in it a share of the truth, somehow related to himself.
8 out of 10
Couple yoga for the lazy and weightlessness of life: continuation of meditation
This new or, let’s say, relatively new movie is shot in the same manner as the films “To Miracle” and “Knight of the Cups”, but against the background of sultry Texas rock festivals. Perhaps that is why parable speech here is less, and moderate glamour more.
The added glamour is also motivated by the industry affiliation of three of the four main characters, who are employed in the music industry. In fact, there are at least two pairs of them (starring Rooney Mara and Ryan Gosling, Michael Fassbender and Natalie Portman), and most of the time Malik offers the viewer just to admire the ordinary human movements of these beautiful young people. Especially since they are played by movie stars, and movie stars are even more pleasant to admire. And there is something glamorous about it too.
It is not surprising that against such a background, all the complications in the relationship between the characters in the form of jealousy, betrayal, betrayal, as well as the corresponding moral experiences seem tortured and unnatural. However, it can also be a matter of special attention of the film to the musical element, which draws everything into its stream, deprives weight, materiality and seriousness.
And otherwise, of course, it is a long-known and recognizable Terrence Malik. The same voiceovers, sometimes falling off to prayer. The same pathetic visual poetry with fascinating shots of the water element. The same movie characters' search for themselves and the same hopes for lovers as guides in the process. The same dream and indefinite love relationship, seemingly protected from reality by its ephemerality, but still doomed.
It only seems that the time for relaxed love games, proceeding in an atmosphere of enveloping idleness, in the new film is allocated much more. A break for existential reflection - and again the same slow and sleepy paired yoga, perhaps pleasing to the eyes of an elderly director because it does not disappoint.
And in the film, among other cameos, there is Patti Smith, who talks about herself and at the same time acts as a saint (at least that’s how it looks), as well as there is music, a lot of music, a lot of music.
However, two hours, which is how long “Song by Song” lasts, can seem too long if you conduct this film meditation in the theater. But now you can watch the film at home, dividing it into several portions and turning to them as needed. And you can not watch the film at all, for example, so as not to write bad about the director. He's kind of a genius. Let him take what he wants. He deserves it.
6 out of 10
'Song after song' from director Terrence Malick will be a serious test for everyone who decides to master this picture, because two hours of walking through the agony will appeal, unfortunately, not all viewers. Incredibly protracted spectacle of senseless wandering, conversations, voice-over thoughts and light fooling from the main characters will be a serious test of the strength of your sympathy for the actors, because there is absolutely nothing else to look at. The most excellent composition, including Michael Fassbender, Ryan Gosling, Natalie Portman, Rooney Mara, Cate Blanchett and many others, at first will impress and please, but then throughout the history all the stars disappear and before us will be some incomprehensible and terribly boring actors who do not draw the film and do not attract visually.
The plot is quite difficult to put together because there is no specificity or clear plot structure in a blurred story. It seems that they are three friends who seem to be friends, but at the same time they are rivals. He loves her, and she loves the other, but she doesn’t abandon the first. Then there is another one that seems to save, but then it turns out that everything goes in circles, fixating on feelings of love, like a romantic song, set for endless repetition. The first twenty minutes will be incomprehensible the meaning of what is happening, as a result of which the viewer will gradually prepare for sleep, but then the appearance of Natalie Portman will refresh the dull picture and give her a bright shine and set a pleasant rhythm, but, unfortunately, later she does not save anything, turning everything into a dull movie.
Characters are faceless and not at all interesting as images. Lethargy and constant sad faces by the middle of the film begin to seriously strain. A huge amount of voice-over text just throws all the visualization into the basket, because so much that happens in the frame does not correspond to the words. It’s like a visual sketch of thoughts in the ear, accompanied by cute shots of beautiful actors. If you cut the film into five-minute clips, it would be chic shorts for every day, since the voiceover essentially talks about important things, events, aspirations, dreams, without which an ordinary person cannot exist. But, unfortunately, sitting without a break for two hours in front of the screen is unrealistically difficult.
As for the production, we will not see anything new here. Again, there will be Malik’s favorite method with a walking camera and constant close-ups, a live picture, almost incessant music and so on. Of course, it’s not 'Tree of Life' with magnificent camera masterpieces, everything is much simpler and more common here. It is sad to realize, but the most talented director, instead of taking a new step forward, seriously stepped back, without thinking about his own secondaryness and the meaninglessness of such a creation. I am sure that listening to this movie as an audio book will be very interesting, but unfortunately, I do not want to watch it at all.
Alas, but the film is not recommended for viewing, but if you are a real fan of the actors or the director himself, then enjoy watching, because this movie is made exclusively for you.
4 out of 10
Malik is torn, part by part lays out the mosaic of the film, moving into a completely different course of time. Habitual perception begins to interfere, you swell from the inside; I confess I want to turn it off. But Malik confidently bends his line (not thin and red, but broken and multicolored).
The torn montage (the scene literally tears into small pieces) and 'live' camera (no statics - everything [including responsibility for the beauty of the frame] on Lubetzky's shoulder), narrative, butterfly shots immerse you in this almost timeless space. 20 minutes, an hour, ten hours? When you get into this story, you're willing to watch it as long as Malik shows you. The voiceover of the characters invariably interweaves ' almost philosophical' thoughts about life, fate and self-determination. And gracefully flowing music (breaks only on Iggy Pop and Patti Smith) - like the cherry on the cake: without it - will not work.
'Perhaps the sexiest film of the decade' — would read my modest phrase on the poster of the film, I would be a critic with RT. In the present case - let it read here, a ' Decade ' I will change to ' of all that I have seen '.
'The entanglement of hands, the weaving of feet, fate gossip'. Although in 'Song by Song' Block poetics flows into the poetics of erotica and sexuality. This film is permeated from top to bottom, first to end.
Hands, ankles, short T-shirts, baring the body, tactile contact. . .
Rooney Mara is the apotheosis of sex. She demolishes the roof, makes you not blink, appearing in the frame.
There is not a single naked scene... Everything through touch, glances, camera entry into personal space, tension in the air, touch again ...
Malik moves the song to song, showing the viewer the highest erotic film pilotage. Here - it is high, poetic erotica; sex from pure cotton.
In the film, women are rushing; men occupy stable dogmatic positions (light Ryan and satanic Fassbender).
Mara and Portman are looking for a life of light, right, almost Christian; but still can not cope with the passions (to live with money and sex) – the current is strong.
The main thing is to listen to your heart and love, love faithfully and purely.
Just starting to study the work of director Terrence Malick, I got to his last, at the moment, film ' Song by Song' 2017 release. This is only the second film I’m going to describe. The fact is that watching such pictures, you must observe several things: firstly, you should not expect an active action or a clear plot, its denouement; secondly, you need to completely disable logic and analytical view during viewing, giving free rein to emotions and feelings, and it is they who need to perceive such a movie.
The film focuses on four characters whose names are not so important to us. They are played by such talented actors as Ryan Gosling, Michael Fassbender, Natalie Portman and Rooney Mara. To say more about the film is to think for the viewer. After all, the film really just tells about these 4 people and what events surround them. And the events themselves do not seem so significant, it is important how the characters react to them. This is a film about vices, dreams and love. Through all this and pass the main characters - they are confused, mistaken, almost lose themselves, but in the end come to certain conclusions.
To tell the truth, like the previous film I watched Malik, ' Knight of Cups' (2014), 'Song by Song' is a picture consisting of characters, their emotions of incoherent events and images. As you watch it, you don’t see a clear storyline that you can analyze or make sense of. Only an unconscious perception can tell what the director means. In general, both of these films are extremely similar, as the two brothers - in style, manner of development, cinematography and setting scenes. Everything is incoherent and nonlinear, much seems superfluous, but still remains beautiful. It is the very style and beauty of the film that makes you look at it with special interest.
The point is that this creation at certain moments resembles a trailer for a good movie, but not the tape itself. And as in all successful trailers, the film has a lot of music from different artists. In this case, the title speaks for itself and fully describes what you will see in the film. There's a lot of love songs, there's a lot of dreams, and the movie goes from song to song, from one scene to another, unrelated to the previous one. In the first, we are presented with the thoughts of one character, we see his path and aspirations, and in the second, another, thinking about something else. This is why the film seems incoherent.
In general, it is such a movie is called ' films are not for everyone' or art house, so people, potential viewers, avoid such projects, and those who watched it ' critics' want to trample them into the dirt, demanding logical explanations from the plot. But, as was said earlier, there are different movies that need to be perceived and evaluated in different ways. There is nothing wrong with the fact that a person may not like cult films that have invested a lot in the development of cinema. After all, everyone has the right to perceive art in different ways, just as great artists, musicians, writers and directors can create something by following their own voice, without trying to please all audiences.
8 out of 10
«There is something else, something that wants us to find it»
Looking at the thoughts that arise in your head after watching Terrence Malick’s Song by Song, you realize that any words will be too bland compared to the feelings you feel when watching. From pain and empathy to euphoria, happiness and of course catharsis.
The main thing in Song by Song is clear without words and cannot be expressed by them. Speech here has a very natural nature: it is like a diary, a revelation, an inner voice. We hear it either as casual dialogues of passers-by or as voiced thoughts. The film does not provide any obvious clues to explain what is happening. This creates dynamics 'documentality' on the screen.
In addition to the script solutions, a huge contribution to the documentary & #39 film & #39; made the camera work: all familiar camera Emmanuel Lubecki takes ultra-wide plans. The frame is like a greedy vessel that wants to accommodate itself as much as possible life. The composition inside seems random, the camera wanders behind the characters, sometimes dwelling on important details, making the viewer an unwitting participant in the story.
Writing about Terrence Malick's films is difficult. You can’t find words, you can’t describe what you feel. It focuses on the unconscious. In this film it is very difficult to find an unambiguous semantic message, and the narrative in it is traced only barely. You're just looking and plunging into a near-meditative state, being alone with what we usually hide behind the guise of rationality in our daily lives. I'll have to take that mask off here. Open your heart to inner dialogue.
Song by Song has a lot of characters. And the elements, the sun, nature (as well as Iggy Pop and Patti Smith) are among them. With the help of shots of the sunset, glare on the water, hands, crowds, colored lanterns, Malik creates a single space of life with a stunning atmosphere, emphasizing that everything has the same earthly nature. This means that harmony consists in unity with everything.
Behind the scenes, we hear the thoughts of the heroes. What unites them is that they reflect on the same things: love, affection, dreams, happiness, betrayal, emptiness. A metaphysics of life and emotions. Heroes call for a return to primitive feeling. The irrational passion to live, to know and to love. And, of course, to sing (which is why the film takes place in the context of the American music scene).
As a child, each of us experienced these feelings. Therefore, the voice calls to look at the world again with those eyes, to rejoice in simple things. Being a kid. Child of Earth.
The last triumph of the director can be considered Tree of Life, after that Terrence Malik excluded any commercial part of his films, hence the increased frequency of paintings in recent years. If earlier his projects were tested in the process of post-production, but still contributed to the world of cinema, the last three works are more like an echo of his work than the work itself.
And "Song to Song" falls into this list, almost not much differ "To the Miracle" and "Knight of the Cups" from this film, all the same open reflections have no beginning and end. With this approach, Terrence Malik can make five films a year, and knowing that he usually has films from California to New York, I wouldn’t be surprised if they ever discovered the secret and it turned out that these three films were shot in the title of the same project.
Emmanuel Lubecki uses the already developed skills of working with the camera - movement around the actors, almost no static position with the camera. Terrence Malik in "Song to Song" recreated strict minimalism, whether it is the clothes of the main characters, interiors of buildings or outdoor shooting, thus removing from the frame the most unnecessary details that would not allow the viewer to focus their attention on the frame.
Many are probably surprised how world stars rush to get into the list of invited actors, but this is probably the features of the creative nature of every celebrity of our time, because despite all the irritability of the films, I think there will be a day in the life of the viewer when one of his films will be revised and evaluated under the influence of another life experience.
Although after thirty minutes of screen time and it seemed hope that this work will be different in the work of the director: the characters even throw some dialogue, and the plot has some formal logical chain, later with this thought we have to part, because in fact the film is still the same set of frames in different positions, saturated with voiceover with reflections.
"Song to Song" about a girl who decided to try a lot, and did not catch the meaning of life. Malik reflects on the meaning of life throughout his creative life, but if he managed to establish a more constructive dialogue with the audience, maybe his films would reach a wider audience.
The film is great, the film is great, and just as bad. I think will not leave anyone indifferent, you either turn off after half an hour with the words “boring and incomprehensible”, or look and realize that there is something in this.
I won’t say that it has a very deep meaning and morals. I personally sat down to watch it because of Fassbender's presence. Everything is banal and unconventional – love, love, and again love – who seeks it but does not believe; who believes but does not seek; who finds; and who tries to create but cannot create, one can only feel.
The main character (Rooney Mara) has the “difficult” choice of her whole life: she found love and great sex, pity only with two different men. She betrays her love, but even in the end she is given happiness, unlike the rest.
The film awakened some primal feelings and instincts in me. I wanted hugs and kisses. And I thought it was good to give in to feelings sometimes.
And about the negative side: everything that happened and happened to the heroes happened and happened only because of boredom and idleness in their lives. In everyday life, when you are at work from 8 to 17, life is quite busy and fleeting and you do not always have time for all this mental anguish and suffering.
This film will not bring you any new knowledge. It is up to you to watch or not.
'Song after song' seemed to me a great reason to lamplight the passing of the diploma, because the film came out exactly the day before my performance. Such an honorable status, the picture provided itself with two things: an impressive acting cabbage led by the genius Gosling and the fact that it is these people who spin on the screen intricate love geometric figures. And in the background of the music scene. What is the new 'La La Land'?
Unfortunately, all my hopes for a more or less adequate movie evaporated somewhere in the first half hour, when there was a bitter realization: ' In this form, the film will survive until its final credits'. There is no sane storyline, written characters, smoothness of events and logic of actions here. Absolutely all the frames 'Songs after song' are tailored to each other in a completely indistinct sequence, which is why it is not just boring to perceive what is happening, but also damn... Not easy. Difficulties to the perception adds a very strange cameraman manner Lubetzky, shooting the characters as if they do not know that they are playing in the film and, in general, just went out cheerful company to walk while he in stelth mode captures on camera their stupidity.
And yet, in my mind and in my heart, I understand that in 'Song by Song' something is there. That the lack of dialogues, a clear storyline and any spelled out characters (images that, however, you can try to glue together from the scattered facts-semi-unamecs scattered throughout the film) hides some message, or all this deliberate insipidity in the process of viewing should immerse in some unusual emotional state. Like who. Therefore, this picture is one of those that seems to say something important, but to my ears, alas, she never managed to shout.
Because of the great love for Gosling, any film with which I throw one point from the top, squeaking ass put:
6 out of 10
P.S. Don't do that again, Ryan, because you're ruining your grades.
This time Terrence Malik has outdone himself. His last work was, in my opinion, disgusting and meaningless. It began to seem that he would not remove anything better than the classic "Wastes", but, fortunately, I was deeply mistaken. "Song after song" is first of all a new word in the history of cinema, and only then the second wind of the career of a long-suffering director.
We thought we could just loitere and roam the earth. Live from song to song, from kiss to kiss.
If I had been asked to describe the story in a nutshell, I could hardly have done it. Malik never refuses to do this – the lack of a clear narrative of the plot has long been his feature, but in Song by Song, this feature is played quite differently. In a conversation with a friend, you can not even ask: “Do you remember that moment where ...?”, because there are no separate passages here. The whole film is one big episode that you need to watch the whole thing from and to, without being distracted by something extraneous. This is the specificity of Malik’s films. That is why there are no “gaps” in the gluings between the scenes, and, despite the frequent change of frame, everything looks quite concise and smooth. This time, Malik made shorter plans, which was so lacking in his previous films. All this together gives the film a kind of dynamic, thanks to which you do not lose interest throughout the entire timekeeping.
"Pain is a great feeling." You feel life through her. I don't want this pain to just disappear.
I don’t think it’s worth writing about the very manner of shooting. About the really huge talent of Emmanuel Lubetzky ('Birdman', 'Survivor', 'Child of Man') wrote all who are not lazy. This time, Malik picked up the music surprisingly well. There are no "empty" melodies, and for staging the slam under Die Antwoord - Never Le Nkemise 2 generally I want to say a separate thank you - so effectively everything is performed.
You know how we say: “Learn all the rules when you’re young, because it’s happiness for mom and dad.” And then you can throw those rules to hell! And they expect you to do that.
Specifically, the characters in Song to Song are worth paying the most attention. Drawing on the relationships of four people, Malik tells us the whole story of his life – exactly what he likes to show in his films. He manages to think about absolutely all topics and their subtleties: love, betrayal, temptation and most importantly loneliness. Unbearable, conscious loneliness filled the whole film. But everything in order.
Faye (Rooney Mara) really hates himself. Everything she gets seems undeserved. It is Faye who most often asks the question "Who am I?", "Where am I from?" and loitering in the frame from corner to corner. With whomever and wherever she is, the feeling of longing and loneliness erodes her. Dreaming of a beautiful life, she loses herself and realizing it can not start everything from scratch. Even love cannot save her from being isolated from the outside world. You can’t call her a positive character. Her stupidity and constant lies have created many problems for other people. But Malik believes that admitting your mistake and realizing you’ve gone off track is one of the first steps to salvation. He is much more alarmed by the selfishness of those who do not question their actions and look at people as entertainment.
Cook (Michael Fassbender) is just such a person. A well-to-do producer who has a lot of weight in the music industry is one day bored with the way he lives. In this image, the director put the type of people who devour the weak and force them to do something against their will. Everyone who knew Cook changed for the worse, and after many lost lives, he finally comes to the realization of what a monster he was. But it's too late. Those whom he loved have left him forever, and life will not work again.
BV (Ryan Gosling) is a musician whose songs are constantly played on the radio. A man who has forgotten his roots, like everyone else, cannot find a place for himself. He seems to miss Faye after the breakup, and seemingly never loved her at all. Life gives B.V. a chance to make amends over and over again, and he doesn't realize that one day there won't be such an opportunity again. Does he feel happy? That's unlikely. Being deceived by Cook, he has a desire to quit music and live an ordinary, quiet life. But all this gradually pushes him only to self-destruction.
Ronda (Natalie Portman) is like a ray of light in this whole story. She is used to relying on her own strength and does not dream of any miracle. Working as a waitress for pennies, she tries to provide for her mother, and after all, to worry about other people is too alien to the characters of this film. Unfortunately, people like Rhonda can easily be fooled. That's what Cook does - he lies to her and ends up leaving her with nothing. She goes to the “deal” with him, probably not because of the thirst for money, but rather because of their lack. Malik, in the voices of other characters, argues that Rhonda is somewhat wrong - a miracle is possible and one should believe in it, but people like Cook can brazenly take advantage of this belief and use it for selfish purposes. Anyway, Rhonda has the saddest ending to the story.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Song by Song is an incredibly profound story about a person’s inner experiences, fears and doubts. Who's watching us? Where are we really? Many rhetorical and philosophical questions are raised by Malik in a seemingly simple story about the burners of life. It is said that the wise man who learns from the mistakes of others. All these characters have something to learn. Having understood all their shortcomings and problems, you begin to understand that to exist on the principle of "One Day" & "39" is not as good as it seems at first glance. You realize that a life filled with entertainment is gradually boring. Then comes the separation from the real world. How do you deal with that? Malik doesn't know. And how to resist when even love is powerless in the face of such oppressive and heavy loneliness?
10 out of 10
For those who are familiar with at least one brainchild of Terrence Malick, it is not a mystery what to expect from his new picture. Unprepared viewer to watch this film will be difficult, despite the presence in the frame of the stars of the first magnitude.
Michael Fassbender, Ryan Gosling, Rooney Mara - each of these figures alone is able to draw any picture. But in the film there are also Kate Blanchett, Natalie Portman, Holly Hunter, Berenis Marlo, and also Val Kilmer in the episodic role of a concert madman. And a whole bunch of rock idols, from Iggy Pop and Patty Smith to John Lydon and Florence Welch. Add here the virtuoso camera work of the three-time Oscar-winning ("Survivor", "Birdman", "Gravity") Emmanuel Lubetzky. Plus an amazing soundtrack. And yet, nevertheless...
Anyone who prefers an intelligible narrative to meditative visionaryism - I am not talking about those who appreciate this kind of canvas more than anything else in cinema - will hardly master this kind of canvas. Song by song is not for viewing under beer.
This is a slow, snagging, sometimes dreamlike narrative, nonlinear and nonlocal, where the inner monologues of the heroes are constantly intertwined with the external ones, and where alienation and loneliness, elevated to the degree of poetry, are in everything.
Yes, “Song after Song” is a tape for those who can observe not only the specifics of being, but also feel its poetics. Not everyone is allowed to grasp the poetic dimension of existence, but he who is given will always be happy to receive a new dose of its piercing radiation.
Another author's work of the director, revered in the circles of connoisseurs of beauty, Terrence Mullik. This time we will be presented with a story of love and betrayal against the backdrop of a series of music festivals.
What exactly Mallick's work is not completely clear. Judging by the stories of Ryan Gosling that the shooting took place without a script, you begin to realize that he may not have been at all. The entire Card Blanche is provided to actors and musicians creating a kind of creative experiment that allows characters to write their own self-portraits on a cinematic canvas.
The main characters of the woven love lines are young Faye performed by Rooney Mara and promising musician BV performed by Ryan Gosling. Young people are in love. But Faye is having an affair with a friend of BV, a noble music producer Cook played by Fassbender. And you can see immediately that the heroine gravitates more to BV. But, can not help but continue the affair with the brutal and punchy Cook. The story is as old as the world: love throwing between a wealthy Alpha male and a sensitive, sincere musician. In parallel, the picture acquires new colors and heroes. One of them is a waitress Rhonda performed by Natalie Portman, seduced by Cook and his financial capabilities. You can also see such great people as Val Kilmer, Johnny Rotten, Patti Smith, Iggy Pop and RHCP.
All dialogues in the picture are built more mentally than using the usual human speech. And touch. So many touches did not have a blind man reading the thickest Braille encyclopedia. Solid touches, light strokes, awkward looks and embarrassment. The behavior of female images is rather monotonous. All the gestures and looks of the heroines should throw Fleur mystery, but it looks like admitting this, if not caricature, then at least strange, given the fact that the heroines do not harbor any special mysteries. And if they do, they cannot find it themselves. All this should kind of push to idealize the light and airy female nature, but as in the case of the romantic hero Gosling, it does not lead to anything good. Anyone who has seen the movie knows how it ends. And one inconsistency still haunts me. The main characters are a musician and producer. But they don’t do music in the movie at all. All their professional activities are of less interest to the director than the party of the musical bohemian. Instead of music, the main characters engage in fooling so often that it seems that this is their main way of earning money.
I may not understand something or be in the caste of a select few who are able to appreciate real art, but this film added another coin to the scale of my patience with authorial cinema and art house in general. Another high-flown photo shoot without structure and idea.
+: Non-standard operator work.
-: Acting - collected great actors, but instead of playing they just loitering in the frame and touching each other. Timekeeping is incredibly stretched out for a movie where nothing happens. The concert documentary has more dynamics.
To begin with, Terrence Malik has always been a storyteller philosopher. His mesmerizing reflection on the theme of war in "The Thin Red Line" still remains a reference for me, despite the presence of such paintings as "Apocalypse Now", "Platoon" and others. Terrence Malik is also an artist who has a unique talent for feeling beauty and relaying it on the screen, in collaboration with the best masters of camera art.
Recalling the early works of the master, such as “Days of Harvest” or even “New Light”, we can also say that Terrence Malik always gravitated to the narrative on the scale of not a specific event, but a whole life. And the aforementioned “Thin Red Line” does not depart from this concept at all, since war is undoubtedly a separate life for each person who has visited it. However, in my opinion, it was from the "Tree of Life" Terrence Malik that he decided to use a new way of narrating, allowing him to capture on the screen not just the life of an individual, family or community, but the course of life as a whole. Not surprisingly, he needed more than one movie.
So, "The Tree of Life." For me personally, this is a film about childhood. No wonder in the matter of this tape is woven the history of the origin of life on our planet. And it is the children, not the characters of Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain, that are the center of the story for me. Children and their perception of the world as such is curious, irrational, loving, protesting, sometimes cruel, and sometimes sincerely tender. I don’t know if there will be a viewer who did not recognize and did not survive while watching emotions from his own childhood, but for me they undoubtedly were there, which is why I want to return to this film again and again.
“To the Miracle, to the Miracle.” If in the "Tree of Life" full-fledged episodes having "beginning-mid-end" skillfully combined with episodes-flashes, then in this film Malik first tried to abandon the plot in favor of a pure plot. But, in my opinion, here he has not yet found harmony in the combination of “memories” (this is how one of my good comrades once christened Malik’s new style), because of which the film, personally to me, seemed disjointed and tedious (perhaps it is now worth revisiting).
But already in "Knight of Cups" Malik fully uses this technique - fragmentary episodes-memories of the hero, from which the picture of a person's life is formed, turning into a full-fledged plot of searching for himself and his place among people (I affirm this, appealing to those who believe that there is no plot at all in the new films of Terrence Malick).
The new film, Song by Song, explores, in my opinion, another aspect of our lives – the connection between people. However, the author does not take a specific pair and does not trace the development of relationships in their entirety (as did, for example, Abdelatif Kesheesh in his “Life of Adele” ), but considers the fluidity of human relations in general, from different sides and on the example of various characters. This approach makes me personally different – not here and now (speaking about a particular couple), but on the scale of a lifetime – to look at the relationship between loved ones and, therefore, perhaps even more acutely feel all those moments that I have already experienced myself.
Unique and valuable here (as, indeed, in the rest of the paintings of late Terrence Malick) is also the fact that the author does not give his characters and their actions any assessment, does not instruct the viewer, does not delve into the cause-and-effect relationships of what is happening. He does not even endow his characters with characters, which allows us to consider the plot with a clean, impartial look. And this, in turn, helps the viewer to let the plot into himself and vice versa - to build his own personality into the canvas of the plot in order to experience it most acutely. That’s why Song by Song has become a very personal film for me, even though it’s a collection of generalized situations.
In such a concept, I think it is also funny how the author gravitates to a happy end, giving away grief and happiness to his heroes and managing, at the same time, not to destroy the sense of truth that arises in me as a viewer.
All this, in my opinion, testifies to the unique talent, subtle sense of harmony and visual-narrative balance inherent in Terrence Malik. His films in general, and Song by Song in particular, are pure experiences, allowing you to see your own life in some generalization. Or maybe look at your life on a global scale. But this, you will agree, succeeds very, very few paintings.
Shining holes (literally, not satirically) the script gives the actors the freedom to do whatever comes into their minds to develop their characters. From what we see, we can conclude: either they all hate each other, or they are tired of life, or they were kept on tranquilizers, because these voids they fill with agonizing static, staring at bugs, and lying on the floor or the ground. I'm serious. If you’re wondering what fills this movie, 95% of the screen time the characters don’t do anything at all.
But let’s figure out what happened to this guest of prestigious festivals, in which he managed to drag a bunch of pleasant actors (this does not apply to Rooney Mare). There is Fassbender, who, like a true Irishman, does everything for the loules; conceptual Gosling, playing his own songs on the guitar, VAL KILMER, cutting his hair right on stage, Natalie Portman, the Oscar winner who escaped from Thor to do something worthwhile, and, for a moment, Cate Blanchett.
Three slackers hang out on some Kazantip, and each of them tries to achieve something and dreams about something. It's about freedom, about exit. Her life seems to her a frightening emptiness, she cannot find herself and is afraid that she will never become a real creator. Rooney Mara, unlike her charismatic sister, has to play face to give something on the screen, but – I swear to Christ – the whole movie she rolls on the wall, lies on the floor or runs her finger on the glass.
Gosling dreams of becoming successful, but he doesn’t quite understand what he needs. Through his character see all those people he played before - the restless man from Valentine's, sometimes puzzled man from Drive, and most often - deep down the right man from Place under the pines. Why? Because this guy from Song to Song has nothing at all. What's the character development? No him. Where are they going? What do they want? At the end of the film, the character asks: Am I a bad person? How should I know? I just spent two hours watching people who aren't doing anything. All they do is live a good life, have sex with each other in a random order, like playing rock-paper-scissors every morning, and talk behind the scenes in very faint, dying voices. The meaning of the load is something like this: everything that is... all that is... I lived a good life... I ate a banana and a kiwi... but in the end my life was bad because I did not become a star... and the kiwi was not very. . .
There is still Fassbender, who at the beginning somehow revives everything and creates a false impression, they say, because of him, there will be a big conflict in the film, and all this sooner or later will make sense.
But nothing ever clears up. Rooney Mara spends the whole time (two hours!) walking slowly or touching things, or letting someone touch their stomach. You know what I could spend two hours on? You can drink a bottle of wine for two of us. You can walk or make a cake. Or a nap. Or go and jump off the roof. At the beginning of the film, because of the manner of shooting and the very, very slow manner of storytelling, you expect the ending as in the Virgin Suicide. When the action passes in an hour, you begin to hope for it.
But nothing comes to its logical conclusion. This is a brazen, pretentious falsity, an attempt to pass off complete laziness for high art; the heroes, each of whom does nothing at all for their own development or for others, randomly have sex, changing places as in a child's game. Thus, they supposedly figure out the relationship, deciding with whom they are better, and finding a way to the secrets of their own souls. If you can’t decide who you are in life and what to do, it’s worth taking care of yourself, finding something beneficial. Rooney Mara, who complains loudest of all in a dying tone that she is entangled and cornered, procrastinates, every five minutes finding a new lover, each crazy about her empty face, flat movements and hatred of dialogue. These people are not useful. They do not reveal any secrets about themselves and do not seek redemption. Loud word 'Betrayal' on the poster - what is it about? To betray someone, you need to love someone and win his trust, and these three generally the whole film on some drugs, kind of knowingly come to each other in front of their own passions, and ... in general, it was very difficult for me to watch this film.
And it ends in nothing. Beautiful shots of the sea, the sky, the muttering behind the scenes, replacing the whole speech of the film - and then they have a love there, which they again come to, because an hour and a half ago fifteen minutes ago kissed, and Fassbender there was still drunk and fought with someone. Somewhere between the eruption of hedonism and drunkenness, they had serious feelings, but it will be very difficult for the viewer to catch this, because there is no chemistry between the bored actors, and in general, there is nothing in them, and I understand that the idea was slowness, emancipation, so that the eye would rest from action and running; but this film does not reveal anything at all. How do you find yourself? Not here. What is love? Wrong address. This is a picture of parasites who do not value themselves, do not value people around, with efficiency at the level of the dungeon, and a complete lack of motivation. They're like paparazzi pictures -- empty, shiny, wild, deadly boring, devouring your time, and I'm so mad at all of this and I might have a nervous breakdown.
1 She didn’t believe in love and knew a lot about the currency. She dreamed of a fairy tale, like all decent princesses. While dreaming, got lost in such wilds that it became impossible to escape. I was so lost that it was disgusting to look in the mirror and embarrassing to talk to my father. Shame on yourself, your life and your dreams. Pity and self-loathing drowned out the pain. And the certainty that she did not deserve anything good was not allowed to breathe. Pain, despair and a small ray of hope in the form of memories of the most wonderful feelings she has ever had in her life. That's all she lived. That's all she needed. Her cure for life.
2 A She did not believe in miracles, leading a normal life, soberly looked at the world in which she was held by love for her mother and her own strength. She did everything herself. And when he came into her life, he did not believe, did not want, was afraid. After all, it is easier to control everything yourself, and trust is so scary. She wanted to love and be loved and did not want freedom. She bought the money and fell for it. She was expecting a hurricane, and she got a hard surface on her face. It hurts, cold and sad. I got everything I could dream of and fell to pieces. He left everything that never belonged to him.
1 He dreamed of glory. I dreamed of love and loyalty, just like any normal man. To achieve something and be needed by someone. And got it all. This Oasis kept his heart warm for a long time. A heart that lived and breathed for one, for her. He couldn't see anything beyond his nose. What is vanity? Or what's your favorite sin? Something closed his eyes, obscured the truth, the more difficult came the realization. The more painful the loss was. And he left. He went back to where it all started. But he believed and waited, hoped and loved. Furious and with all my soul. He heard the voice of her heart and wanted her to hear it. I went to see him. And she heard.
2 And he wanted money and love, but more money. Or is it love? He wanted something he wasn’t ready for, either mentally or physically. He needed everything and nothing. He needed medicine, and he got it. He was given all the cards in his hands, and he threw their lives in the face and laughed in a drunken frenzy. He was given a chance again, saying, calm down already. He took it, but didn’t know what to do with it. He twisted it and so on, and in the end left it as unnecessary. Gone. And when I returned, I realized that there was no one else on this huge planet who would need him.
P.S. It's up to you to watch this movie or not, comrades! Everyone who likes the work of Terrence Malick will be satisfied, and the rest will just pass by. I love all of his work, that’s all.
8 out of 10
In my opinion, lately old Terrence Malik is more popular because he invites famous stars into his films (and they are happy to try, because he is a recognized genius of modern cinema, albeit in narrow circles!), and then when editing them safely cuts. Well, also by editing his films for several years. And the beauty of the frame and the depth of thought is already a secondary matter.
So “Song to Song” / Song to Song was filmed in 2012, but the viewer has reached only now. My expectations, of course, were inflated: such caste (Fassbender, Mara, Gosling, Del Toro, Blanchett, Bale, Portman), such an operator (three-time Oscar winner Emmanuel Lubetzky), such a theme ... and what? Nothing. In addition, Bale and Del Toro were “under the knife”. The plot was quite simple and primitive, even boring. A young girl performed by Rooney Mara can not decide what she needs from life and, as a result, gets confused in men ... and women (!) too. That’s why we get several love triangles, the brightest of which, of course, Gosling – Mara – Fassbender and Mara – Fassbender – Portman. The case is slippery in the presence of so many bodies, but filmed, I note, all very beautiful and completely without vulgarity. And if Comrade Malik was not engaged in narcissism – “what a philosopher I am” and “how cool I am”, and a little worked out the script, the film could come out with such components simply brilliant, but our director did not want to bother, and who will condemn him? Not me. All are beautiful and everything is beautiful, but there is no such thing as a plot, there is simply no dynamics, even death does not cause any empathy in the viewer, because the characters are given to us purely schematically, it is difficult for us to love them and imbue with sympathy, given that the dialogues are just scraps of phrases. There was a claim to drama, but the drama failed. The idea of the film is banal and it can be expressed in the words of the famous song: “All you need is love...” Do you think that has happened before?
Is it worth watching? Definitely yes, if you like the stated actors, if you know a lot about the beauty of the frame and know how to just meditate and enjoy art in its pure form with good music. Alas, Malik repeats himself and there is absolutely nothing new in the tape, all this has already been in the Tree of Life and Knight of Cups, he goes into art for art, and we have to decide for ourselves – to watch or not.
P.S. I really enjoyed it.
A kind of mix of “Shame”, “Proximity” and some musical film like the same “Frank”.
To begin with, the picture depicts typical European life (in the worst sense). Showed well-fed and slightly stupefied with their freedom people. Everything in their lives is smooth, fresh, ordinary. You know why I don’t like these characters and movies? Their dramas seem sucked out of the finger, their plots are built around a kind of sand castle, they say, if you suffer, so glamorous. Like, tragedy is fashionable. It is these words “fashionable” and “usual” that make any film uninteresting to me. There is no dynamic, no acute experience.
Unfortunately, Europeans have a lot of such measured ribbons, where all feelings are presented empty and insincere. This is how in modern Russia they shoot any, alas, horror films, so in Europe they do not know how to shoot about sincerity and sincerity. I do not deny that for them it is probably all sensual and good, but personally I do not touch. There are so many opportunities to create, beautiful weather outside the windows, the whole life to music - but the heroes of the film "Song by Song" do not appreciate this and do not understand it. They're bored. That is why they are looking for banal entertainment for a banal drama. It's not about poverty, it's not about social conflict, it's about beautiful life. But empty.
That's good. Not even trivial. A strange, but interesting montage made you delay attention. The atmosphere is there too, it cannot be taken away. The style is felt and noticeable. From a visual and technical point of view, the film is not junk.
I saw nothing new in this creation. All this has happened. And even in the performance of these same actors. If the picture leaves almost no emotions and impressions - the review cannot be green, I believe.
4 out of 10