Terrence Malick’s Song to the Song premiered this week. The director, who is known for his poetic and philosophical style, became famous with works like The Thin Red Line. Bringing fragmented productions, without a constant timeline, and without an easy structure, his films bring controversy and differences of opinion. Even so, with incredible visuals, the director always manages to explore what mainstream cinema generally ignores. Canção a Canção, however, does not seem to have the strength of his previous films, dealing with themes and stories already beaten that do not take us to very original places.
With a love story and split power where important scenes are punctured and invariably appear during the film, what is constant are the characters. With the universe of pop music as a backdrop, we are first introduced to Faye, played by Rooney Mara, a girl looking not only for love but for life itself, who believes she does not feel anything real. Although Faye seems to love BV, played by Ryan Gosling, a singer with great potential, she ends up betraying him with Cook, a rich and daring musical entrepreneur who aggressively tries to add salt to his already boring life.
This love triangle in music, where a girl stands between a more sensitive man and a smarter, “walk-in-the-ground”, has been explored several times in several other titles, and is already part of our imagination in relation to musical universe The fact that Malick gives the film his signature with interrupted and contemplative scenes does not help to mitigate the fact that the production may sound to the public like a cliché of 130 minutes.
Using camera, editing and sound techniques to make the audience feel inside a character’s head, or at least understand their motivations and thoughts, the opposite is the result – the viewer seems to be inept to enter the characters’ story more emotional. For example, cameras with wide-angle lenses distort the scene and are intended to put us in the kind of suffering and confusion experienced by the characters. However, this causes the film to be seen as through a magical eye, where a door never lets us approach these characters.
With a similar result, the constant use of voice-over shows in an easy way what the characters are thinking, but its strongly stylized form, where everyone seems to whisper every moment, takes any chance of believing in the voices of these characters. Even the various improvisational scenes seem to have this effect. If in the director’s past films, these types of scenes brought the story to life by making it close to the everyday life of anyone, in Song the Song, improvisation seems false and exaggerated.
One can believe that the purpose of this fragmentation in this film is to create what the character Faye expresses desire at the beginning of the film, that is, a relationship in the present, from Song to Song, from “kiss in kiss”. Although the film seems to happen this way, the fact that we already know the plot very well does not give us anything very original. Even featuring great actresses like Natalie Portman and Cate Blanchett to spice up the love life of the main characters, the film seems to lose its breath from the start.
(article translated from the original version in portuguese, by Google Translate)