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Song to Song
CAN go on for hours with one chord. Just one chord, hammerin’,” the singer-songwriter Patti Smith advises a young musical disciple towards the end of Song to Song.
Terrence Malick, it turns out, is no different. The reclusive master’s latest opus glides past the 120-minute mark still tinkling away in the same tone in which it began — one that also predominated in his 2015 romantic odyssey Knight of Cups and vast tracts of his 2012 heartbreaker To The Wonder.
These three latter-day Malicks have been turned out in uncharacteristically quick succession for the director. (His miraculous second and third features, Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line, came 20 years apart.) But even describing them as “of a piece” would undersell just how interchangeable so much of their look and substance feels.
Song to Song unfolds in and around the rock scene in Austin, but you sense it wouldn’t be noticeably different if it had been set at a bacon factory or an ice rink. The sweat and throb and stink of the music business — all out-of-character stuff you’d love to see Malick grapple with — are conspicuous by their absence. In their place is yet another petalhued Miltonian whisperscape, with attractive actors dancing the usual metaphysical love-ballet in shifting sunlight.
Michael Fassbender and Ryan Gosling fare better than you might expect. Both men’s styles might seem incompatibly different, but they mix well on the Malick palette. Gosling plays BV, an affable singer-songwriter who’s offered a contract by Fassbender’s Cook, a fearsome record producer who lives in an impossibly expensive-looking glass and concrete cuboid. The film is far less intrigued by music than privilege: even the various cameoing rock stars, from John Lydon to Iggy Pop, are usuSex
and Malick have never been an easy fit, but Song to Song plumbs new boreholes of cringe, and its various bedroom encounters, shot in the usual extreme wide-angle, are gauzy and bloodless. The film is to sex as a lepidopterist is to a butterfly cabinet — it gets right in there with the magnifying glass, but perish the thought that anything might flap.
See also Bérénice Marlohe in the thankless role of a chic lesbian house-sitter, or Natalie Portman as a sugar-pink, bottleblonde and unwittingly stunning diner waitress whom Cook seduces and corrupts. Their stories don’t operate on anything other than a symbolic level, and become just more froth on the film’s meandering current. —© The Daily Telegraph, London
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