NEW WORLDS: THE FILMS OF TERRENCE MALICK from Saturday (June 4) to June 15 at the TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King), tiff.net. See listings Rating: NNNN
With Terrence Malick’s the Tree Of Life opening next week, TIFF Cinematheque hosts a retrospective of the director’s four previous features, each of which enjoys multiple screenings over the next two weeks. Palme d’Or winner The Tree Of Life starts its own Lightbox run June 17.
The retrospective’s a good idea. Viewed in chronological order, Malick’s filmography reveals an artist transcending the constraints of conventional narrative and forging his own idiosyncratic cinema.
Badlands, Malick’s 1973 interpretation of the murder spree of Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate (played by Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek), is a gorgeously realized lovers-on-the-run thriller set against the South Dakota Badlands. Days Of Heaven, released in 1978, plays out a romantic triangle between Richard Gere, Brooke Adams and Sam Shepard against the majesty of the Texas Panhandle (actually Alberta, but never mind).
Tender and allusive, and narrated by characters in the process of losing their essential innocence, Badlands and Days Of Heaven are clearly the works of a visionary filmmaker colouring just inside the lines of American narrative cinema.
When Malick broke his self-imposed exile and returned to filmmaking two decades later, he came back as his own man. The Thin Red Line and The New World expand on techniques used in Badlands and Days Of Heaven – rapturous nature footage, contemplative voice-overs – to create dreamlike cautionary tales of human intrusion into the natural world. War devastates Guadalcanal in 1998’s The Thin Red Line colonization spoils a virgin America in 2005’s The New World.
The characters moving through Malick’s later films are almost incidental it’s about the landscape, the mood and the message. And if you’ve only seen them on video, you haven’t really seen them at all.
normw@nowtoronto.com
