Berlin Film Festival: Knight of Cups - film review: Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett and Natalie Portman star in Terrence Malick's latest

Terrence Malick's latest offering is 'the work of a visionary artist, going his own way, regardless'
Looking for a pearl: Christian Bale as prodigal son Rick and Natalie Portman as model Freida Pinto
David Sexton15 February 2015

There's a story of sorts to Knight of Cups, the latest film from the indubitably great but increasingly mannered and wayward director Terrence Malick.

It's a pilgrim's progress, to start with. We actually hear the beginning of The Pilgrim's Progress From This World to That That is to Come at the very beginning of the film. So there's that, for setting the tone.

Then we are told the story of a young prince, a knight, sent by his father into Egypt to find a pearl, a pearl from the depths of the sea — but then he drinks from a cup that takes away his memory. "He forgot he was the son of a king. He forgot about the pearl and fell into a deep sleep. The prince slept on..."

It's a story from the tarot — and it's the film's story, translated to lush Los Angeles. Rick (Christian Bale) is a successful screenwriter, a prodigal son who has plunged into a life of glamour and pleasure, pursuing a series of exquisitely beautiful women in hedonistic surroundings, forgetting himself, time passing without him ever finding what he wants or even what it could be that he seeks, "longing for something other, without knowing what it is."

His women include, astonishingly, Imogen Poots (pink hair, panda eyes, wilful), Cate Blanchett (a doctor, Rick's one-time wife), Natalie Portman, Freida Pinto (a model) and Teresa Palmer. Meanwhile, he has a troubled relationship with his angry father (Brian Dennehy) and wounded brother (Wes Bentley).

But to describe it like this is to give a false impression that it is a drama, as commonly understood, or has a real narrative for us. It doesn't. It's a giant montage; a rhapsody and an elegy, cinema as prayer.

It was filmed apparently without a script for the actors. "He didn't tell us was it was about", Bale admitted at the Berlin press conference after the film's premiere. This may seem a strange method of making a movie, but it has to be said that Malick has a strange ability to get his actors behaving in the same way in his films: looking lost, alone, aimless. These people never really talk to each other — they just do the Malick thing of drifting melancholically through scenes (for the men) or skipping around angelically, dancing and twirling (for the women). Instead of dialogue, there's a whispered voice-over of despairing metaphysical questions: Where did I go wrong? Which way should I go? Suppose it isn't there for me in the end? How do I begin? Who are you? What do you want from me? How do I reach you? On and on it goes.

These people are filmed quite extraordinarily by Emmanuel Lubezki whose camera moves constantly around the people as if unable to rest or find a stable point of view. It has the effect of making what you see see not fully present in the here and now, but seen as if already only a memory, or perhaps a memory only of a dream.

There's very strong repeated imagery throughout; for example, the now-trademark Malickian shot of looking up towards the heavens from beneath great canyons of linear gleaming skyscrapers, telling us that these buildings have an inhuman scale that denies us meaning. There's lots of sky (traversed by distant planes or helicopters) and, instead of Malick's usual waving grasslands and threshing trees, a constant turning outwards to the ocean as a sign of belonging to nature and to life — where else to find the pearl? — while LA's swimming pools, so brightly lit, seem only to trap people in their luxury.

There are amazingly powerful speeded-up sequences of the camera racing ahead on the freeways at night, the lights all so beautiful but flashing by. Over one such shot, it is whispered "you think when you reach a certain age things will start making sense and you find you are just as lost as before. I guess that's what damnation is..."

The Knight of Cups belongs in some ways to the genre known as faith films. If it depicts the decadence of Hollywood, it's not satirised but, rather, grieved-over sub specie aeternitatis (Malick doesn't resist showing us the whole planet from space). If you demand realism in your cinema, it's a ludicrous film, so repetitious and grandiose, probably self-pitying and undeniably self-parodic. In Berlin, it was greeted with snorts of derision from some in the audience.

Yet it is clearly the work of a visionary artist, going his own way, regardless. Visionaries are often tiresome and preposterous. Preposterous and tiresome as this film may seem, it shows us the world in a way that's unlike that of any other director: the world in which we live so far from nature, without transcendence, lost to ourselves. That's worth anybody's time.

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