There are few directors who does not believe in scripts..,
they believe in relations between characters rather than the story..Among this
group we can include Paul Thomas
Anderson(Watch Inherent Vice, Magnolia If you have any doubt), Coen Brothers (No Country for old men , almost
every Movie).. There was Satyajit Roy, Stanley Kubrick And many others...Actually these
relationships between their characters make the stories..Sometimes we can
follow them sometimes we are not..But Terrence Malick above all of them..His
view is different, makes movies mostly without scripts, with less dialogues ,
with stunning landscapes ,collaboration
with talented cinematographer(recently with Emmanuel
Lubezki) creates a movie
without almost any story ,makes an ambiguity and leaves audience at what the movie was
about..
I recently saw Knight
of cups , released in 2015, starring Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Natalie Portman, Frieda Pinto and Many others..Its my 2 nd
movie of Malick I watched…Let me get this
straight..If you have watched a movie and someone asks about your movie ,then
you probably say it’s story in a small version ..But in this case you can’t
tell them anything about the story or what you have seen sequentially as there
is no such story..Actually Malick creates montages ..
The movie follows lifestyle of a screenplay writer Rick
(Christian bale), who is seeking real love in his deserted life..The film is
divided into 8 chapters (I am not mentioning their names as you can see in Wikipedia
)..The film introduces us with two
things one the voice over of Ben kingsley at the beginning of the film as the
same voiceover we saw in “The Trees of Life”, this voice overs make us
understand the plot of the story..But here the second thing he introduces us
with is a story of finding a pearl by a prince from the Acts
of Thomas passage "Hymn
of the Pearl, depicts the main theme more clearly..here the pearl is the
symbol of happiness, that he tries to find in his life through many ways, his
father ,his ex wife, an upcoming model, a stripper, a married woman ..but his
life cannot find the “pearl”..
LA plays as a character ,the city which is beautiful, but
without no happiness…In one scene , Bale is driving through the road of LA and he asks the viewer
to see the palm trees which have been far away from the street …it depicts the mind’s
state of the broken screenwriter .. In
the whole movie when he meets with his love, sea is introduced to the scene and
when he becomes alone we see that he is wondering in desert..Lubezki again does an excellent work..I think his power
is creating a wide angle landscapes, that stuns his viewer..Here also some non
formal close-ups in our characters, mostly steady camera movements and
excluding those some awesome camera movements, that can be a lesson for
freshers..
Critics said Terrence Malick
have a special kind of viewers, without whom others are not gonna like his
films so much…lets see you are on which side…In case of mine I am not fully on
his viewer list…
Please comment how you think about it….Thank You…
