‘Knight Of Cups’ Falls Victim To Poor Editing

KNIGHT OF CUPS

 “Dreams are nice, but you can’t live in them,” says Freida Pinto, mid-way through Knight Of Cups. The line lingers because she says it in a Terrence Malick movie; the legendary filmmaker having devoted half a century to summoning wafting cine-poems that feel like dreams. And Knight Of Cups is no exception. Malick’s seventh film never settles in a single time or place; its story is non-linear, and discontinuous; it feels disembodied, unmoored, as if floating; and all its impressionist waft and drift means that even when Malick employs devices of realism, the effect is surreal.

This effect is part chosen style, part product of Malick’s now-famous working ways: shooting vast amounts of footage, recording even more voice-over, ‘finding’ the story in editing, leaving Hollywood stars on the cutting-room floor. Since he’s embraced digital filmmaking, this process has grown even more convoluted: Malick able to shoot more footage than ever, with the once-reclusive filmmaker (who took 20 years to follow up Days Of Heaven) now somehow working on multiple films simultaneously.

If we’re to take Knight Of Cups as evidence, perhaps the great auteur is getting lost in all this possibility, all this footage. Drawing on so many shot hours, the finished film is one long montage. There’s no real story, no true emotions, no chance to inhabit a scene, a feeling, a location. To give this picture a sense of structure, Malick divides the film into loose ‘chapters’ whose title cards are named after tarot cards. This is all too symbolic: the film itself as imprecise, opaque, and unlikely as an act of divination.

Knight Of Cups effectively plays like Malick self-parody. There’s constant half-whispered voice-overs over-explaining emotions in breathy poetry. There’s endless artful imagery of natural splendour, sunlight bleeding into the lens. And, of course, there’s cavorting, pirouetting, impossibly-attractive film-stars shot in rapturous close-up.

Malick has been tagged with accusations of self-parody ever since his return from the wilderness with The Thin Red Line. But they’ve never quite stuck, nor really mattered: all his familiar peculiarities doing nothing to disguise the profound emotional heart of The New World, or The Tree Of Life, or To The Wonder. But Knight Of Cups has no emotional heart; and, despite voice-overs claiming so, no real emotions.

Its vague, implied story finds Christian Bale as a super-successful Hollywood type —he’s either a screenwriter or director, it’s never stated— who is dead inside, living an empty life of excess, throwing himself into the bacchanalia of privilege and wealth. This means we’re stuck in a drama in which the main character has essentially no character; where he stands for nothing, says nothing, is nothing.

To medicate himself against the inertia and ennui of being rich, successful, and attractive, Bale sleeps with a parade of beautiful, glamorous women: Pinto, Imogen Poots, Cate Blanchett, Teresa Palmer, Isabel Lucas (yes, three Australian blondes), Natalie Portman; not to mention all the anonymous, porn-y types who’re shown in blurry drunken-montage, jumping on his bed, or walking naked around his modernist-box apartment.

Whilst Malick can’t help but return to natural imagery periodically, Knight Of Cups finds his rapturous camera ogling naked women and ridiculous real estate; there a wealth-porn feel to all the glittering mansions, hotel rooftops, infinity swimming pools, and Las Vegas palaces he pirouettes through. The film’s centrepiece —if anything so restless and non-linear can have a centrepiece— is a Hollywood party; here, those cast-members otherwise edited out (Antonio Banderas, Jason Clarke, Joe Manganiello) momentarily appear, like phantoms from the movie that wasn’t.

The party ends with people leaping into a swimming pool, fully clothed. Shot with Malick’s camera, it’s a beautiful image, light streaming through water, clothes and hair snaking and dancing with the ripple and flow. The only problem is, Malick returns to images just like this over-and-over, to the point where those accusations of self-parody take hold. The first time Bale leaps into the ocean fully-clothed, it’s charming; by the fourth time, less so. And, as beautiful as they are, the countless shots of starlets languorously dragging their delicate fingers through water soon grow so familiar as to breed contempt.

Out of all these women, only Blanchett, as the ex-wife who hasn’t left Bale’s orbit, and Palmer, as a smart-ass stripper with the gift of the gab, show any kind of life; manage to break beyond being just an attractive face, a mark for Bale to hit. Even Portman, whose character is supposed to be some great, tortured, tragic love, is utterly unmemorable, coming off just as a two-dimensional figure. In the weightless, bloodless throes of Malick’s endless montage, we never get any sense of these people as people; the cumulative effect one of attractive figures feigning romantic interest in expensive clothes; Knight Of Cups truly earning the critical pejorative ‘perfume commercial’.

Even still, given Malick’s reputation for visual splendour, this emptiness may not’ve ‘mattered’, in the grand scheme, if Knight Of Cups had looked more beautiful, been more beautiful. In isolation, there’s real visual wonder to so many of its shots; to that way that Malick looks at the world, alive to the glories of light and shade, to the magic of the things that surround us. But, in needing to compress so much source footage into 120 minutes, even the film’s most beautiful shots are brief snippets, cut down to barely a glimpse. There’s little chance to revel in the profundity of an image when each is so fleeting, the restless editing turning the film into a scattershot collection of artful ephemera; a tone-poem without resonance; a dream minus meaning.

99 HOMES

99 Homes is the housing-bubble thriller you’ve been apparently waiting for, a supposed Prestige Picture that really just shows that the film-biz can turn any real-world tumult into a genre movie. Here, amidst a Floridian milieu of mass-foreclosures, Andrew Garfield —“ain’t no”-ing away in vague ‘Southern’ accent— plays a builder who, when the construction boom stalls, is out of work and out of a house. Him, mom Laura Dern, and son Noah Lomax are forcibly evicted from their family home by evil Michael Shannon, a tanned, leathery, e-cig-suckin’ shark for whom economic collapse has been a financial windfall.

In a delicious reversal-of-fortunes, the desperate-and-broke Garfield soon starts working for Shannon. At first he just wants to get his old house back, but soon the Tao of Shannon —from: “it’s a home” to “America doesn’t bail out losers”— seduced him with the spirit of opportunism, Garfield drawn to the darkside of shady real-estate deals. Soon, he yearns for upward mobility; not just to get back what was once his, but to get his.

At this point, it seems that director Roman Bahrani —who cut his teeth with on-the-street socio-realist pics Man Push Cart and Chop Shop— is staging a kind of real-estate-world Nightcrawler: Shannon’s essential sociopath being rewarded by the dog-eat-dog, success-at-the-expense-of-others nature of late-period capitalism. But then there’s a silly final act, where Garfield has a crisis of conscience, and everyone is suddenly wielding guns, and there’s a grand showdown in which Shannon can get his comeuppance and all can be put conveniently ‘right’. It’s a piece of screenwritten contrivance so pat that it has the essential effect of ruthlessly, stupidly simplifying the moral/social/financial complexities previously explored in the picture; 99 Homes first provoking thoughts, then facepalms.

BRISBANE ASIA PACIFIC FILM FESTIVAL

Now in its second year, the Brisbane Asia Pacific Film Festival is expanding, already entrenching its place on the local cinematic cultural calendar. Though there’s a scattering of ‘classic’ features —from Mikio Naruse’s 1955 masterwork Floating Clouds to the renegade staple of Australian best-of lists, Rolf de Heer’s 1993 barney Bad Boy Bubby— the fest assembles a host of outstanding contemporary films from the Middle East to Australia.

AN

Naomi Kawase’s particular style —documentary realism mixed with florid reveries for the natural world— have never before been used to create something particularly crowdpleasing. Then along comes An, a feelgood fable about Japanese social stigmas and collective national healing, whose drama sets a scarred baker, gnarled old lady, and lonely schoolgirl at a dorayaki stand; the loving looks at their constructed confectionary being particularly pleasing to viewers who come to the cinema to watch food being made.

THE ASSASSIN

The Assassin is a wuxia film —there’s swordfights, chases on horseback, palace intrigue, murders by cold blade— but its also a wuxia film by Hou Hsiao-Hsien. And, as ever, the minimalist tends to a kind of rapturous naturalism; camera sitting still at a distance, long-shot long-takes painting a portrait of vast environmental splendour, humans tiny figures within, lost in the world. Come for the swordfights, but stay for the endless shots of leaves rustling in the breeze.

ATOMIC HEART

Ali Ahmadzadeh’s second film starts out feeling like a familiar piece of Iranian realism: a pair of women drive around Tehran at the end of a night of drunken revelry, the drama unfolding in something resembling real time. But a car accident tilts the film, unexpectedly, into a kind of nocturnal nightmare. It moves, thereafter, with dreamlike dislocation, playing games with time, space, perception, and special-guest appearances by dead Iraqi dictators; the film a sly, satirical mix of absurdist comedy, mounting anxiety, and social commentary.

CEMETERY OF SPLENDOUR

Cemetery Of Splendour is definitely not Apichatpong Weerasethakul at his most transcendent, but even a ‘lesser’ work of his is still blessed with an individualist spirit. Here, in rural township on the Thai/Laotian borders, the doctors, nurses, and soothsayers of a local hospital tend to a mass outbreak of sleeping sickness; Weerasethakul, as ever, losing familiar ‘narrative’ in formalist feints and the space between reality and dream.

A CORNER OF HEAVEN

Zhang Miao-yan’s brilliantly-photographed feature essentially just sets one lost boy wandering through vast landscapes, from industrial wastelands to rugged mountain terrain. Zhang shoots in sparkling black-and-white, turning the landscapes surreal whilst evoking old social-realist cinema.

EARLY WINTER

After two films made in Mexico, ex-pat Australian Michael Rowe moves North to Québec, casting Xavier Dolan stand-by Suzanna Clément in this cold, grim, ultimately unnerving portrait of a marriage in decline; Rowe showing his continued filmmaking fascination with family units and unerotic fucking.

HONG KONG TRILOGY

Christopher Doyle is one of the world’s most celebrated cinematographers, but that’s yet to translate to his directorial works. His third film is a wonky docu-drama than employs real citizens and zany set-pieces to create an interpretive portrait of its titular city.

IVY

When a skeleton crew are left on an essentially-abandoned Turkish cargo-freighter moored off the Egyptian coast, they all go slowly crazy; the rising tide of cabin-fever slowly but all-too-surely turning them all against each other.

JOURNEY TO THE SHORE

Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s filmography is filled with odd, singular pictures; and Journey To The Shore can be added to that list, only this time for its gentleness, sweetness, and fondness for certain conventions. Here, Asano Tadanobu plays a ghost who returns to the life of his ex-wife, the pair going on a cross-country road-trip to the places that defined the dead husband’s life.

THE LOOK OF SILENCE

Joshua Oppenheimer continues to perform the most noble cine-political work, The Look Of Silence marking the companion-piece follow-up to The Act Of Killing, the astonishing, self-reflexive portrait of the celebrated goons who carried out mid-’60s genocide in Indonesia. Here, Oppenheimer moves from the perps to the victims, losing some of the stranger-than-fiction absurdity as he does. It’s a look at the lingering effects of state-sanctioned violence; the filmmaker once again agitating for national healing and social change.

MINA WALKING

Yosef Baraki’s debut feature, shot guerrilla-style on the streets of Kabul, channels classic Iranian cinema with its central premise: a 12-year-old girl, forced to peddle goods on the street by her junkie father, wishes she could just spend her time on school and studies. When her grandfather dies, she’s set the Sisyphean task of organising his burial before sundown, met by resistence, dismissal, and overbearing male figures all the while. Given a jolt of realist energy by its street scenes and non-professional cast, headlined by Farzana Nawabi’s amazing lead turn, Mina Walking quietly mounts a searing look at life under oppressive, patriarchal law.

MOUNTAINS MAY DEPART

The latest film for beloved Chinese renegade Jia Zhang-ke starts out in familiar form: a symbolic parable on changing Chinese cultural values and the transforming of agrarian peasants into an indentured workforce, as embodied by a love triangle, in which two dudes —one rich, one poor— battle over the one girl. But in its third act, the film unexpectedly alights in Australian in 2025; its strange, sci-fi ish final reel an audacious, divisive act.

MUSTANG

The debut feature for Deniz Gamze Ergüven openly echoes The Virgin Suicides, giving  us five sisters who incite moral panic in a Turkish seaside village by dint of their nascent adolescent sexuality. Their evil uncle (Ayberk Pekcan from Winter Sleep) locks them up in their family villa, and employs their grandmother to teach them in the ways of proper womanliness. In short, the house-as-prison becomes a "wife factory" and the first sisters are swiftly married off; before comedy, tragedy, and, eventually, heroic jailbreak escape break out.

MY LOVE, DON’T CROSS THAT RIVER

Jin Mo-young’s documentary introduces us to a loveable old couple who, 76 years into their marriage, are still playful, tender, and sweet. But, given the husband in question is approaching 100, you know the film isn’t going to end before death comes calling, and tears are shed.

OUR LITTLE SISTER

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s films were once singular and abstract; works like 1998’s After Life and 2001’s Distance showing a sense of cine-philosophical daring. But, as he’s progressed, the filmmakers moved more and more towards crowdpleasin’, as seen with the ‘lovable’ scamps of 2011’s I Wish. His tenth fiction feature finds him delivering more crowdpleasery, rendering an idyllic portrait of small-town, seaside Japanese life and oddball sisterhood; the film bookended with funerals, and filled with non-threatening comedy and musings on life.

RIGHT NOW, WRONG THEN

The 17th Hong Sang-soo film is just like the previous 16: another study of male vanity, Korean social mores, bad drunken decisions, and the artifice of artmaking. And, like so many of his films, it’s another diptych: in which the story is told once, then all over again; the slight differences a commentary on the thrown-shade of social cues.

SUNRISE

Though set in Mumbai, Partho Sen-Gupta’s highly-stylised action-thriller is dowsed in so much darkness and unending rainfall it seems more like it’s set in the unnamed city from Seven. Here, amidst the shadows and shadowy characters, a grizzled cop (Adil Hussain) working the missing-children’s beat is obsessed with the disappearance of his own daughter; leading him down a noir-film’s descent into a city underbelly rife with moral compromise and social decay.

TEHRAN TAXI

Jafar Panahi’s first two films made under his state-mandated ban from filmmaking, This Is Not A Film and Closed Curtain, revelled in their covert status, each made behind closed door. For Tehran Taxi, he journeys out into the world. In homage to Kiarostami’s Ten, the premise finds Panahi as a taxi-driver at work around Tehran, the film shot from dashboard-mounted cameras. It’s a work of docu-fiction that’s a riff on his own career: passengers and their various travails filled with explicit reference to The White Balloon, Crimson Gold, and Offside. As always, the Ministry of Culture looms as an abstract villain; Panahi picking up his real-life niece (Hana Saeidi), and having her read from the sanctioned guidelines for filmmaking under Islamic law.

UNDER ELECTRIC CLOUDS

Alexei German Jr’s long-awaited follow-up to his great Paper Soldier isn’t exactly worth the wait. Set in a not-too-distant future of social/real-estate collapse, it’s like Russian Ark if it was set amongst ruined buildings; German wandering through an endless ensemble cast spouting poetic monologues about humanity and nationhood. At its worst, it almost feels like a parody of an art-movie: long, slow, cold, confusing, and plenty pretentious.

A YOUNG PATRIOT

In Du Haibin’s fascinating documentary, a Mao-loving teenager stands as symbol of a new generation of nationalist Chinese millennials; proudly —and literally— waving the flag of communist patriotism. But when an imminent government development requires the demolition of the house he grew up in and the new house his parents are building, his idealism starts to waver, the struggle between individualism and nationalism embodied in the form of one increasingly-dissolute kid.