two reviews

Badlands  - There is a privitiveness to the images of this film that has to do with the low budget and the reduced crew -a kind of naivete to the feeling and texture of the shots. One get the impression that under different, maybe more comfortable circumstances this film could not have been. The impression of raw cinema is something common to every Malick film; there are no traces of external influence on his movies, as if he hadn´t seen any, as if, in fact, he had just invented the medium. A Malick movie always seems like the first movie you see -the shots, so beautiful that you want to scratch your eyes in pain but never of a gratuitious beauty, purify the art and make tabula rasa with the history of cinema.

When Malick shoots an empty field with a dying sun on the horizon is like nobody had shot an empty field before.

That´s part of the mystery and genius of his art.

And yet you could tell by the characteristics of the film, the cellulloid, that this is a 70s movie: the rough definition, the beautiful contrast, the bright colours, hyper-realistic and dreamy at the same time (the form and feeling of a 70s movie was perfectly recreated in Sofia Coppola´s debut masterpiece The Virgin Suicides, but there have been very few other successful attemps). So that the movie seems timeless and very much of its age at the same time. The presence of Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen (magnifient performances from both) accentuate the seventies feeling but, watching Badlands now in 2005, they haven´t aged a day. Nor has the film (60s and 70s films, i think, age worse than other decades, unless we talk about underground cineme for which it was the golden age). Even though Malick´s next film Days of Heaven is also a masterpiece he didn´t have as much luck with the actors and characters.

Badlands is not a film as tightly constructed in musicality and rhythm as Days of Heaven (its freedom has to do a lot more with that in Malick´s best film, The Thin Red Line, of poetic association and free verse, the most radical and beautiful north american film in the last twenty years) but it´s just as well; the journey of its main characters has the incherency of a dream, the absurdity of Martin Sheen´s killings, the oniric reasoning of teen fantasies, of Sissy Spacek´s narration, a strange counterpoint (not exactly ironic, Malick is an artist without irony, is primitive genius before the time of irony) to the bursts of violence of the images.

Based on the case of Charles Starkweather and Caril Fugate that we serial killers fans know so well Badlands shows no moral take on its characters´ action. Brilliantly explained by Martin Sheen in the making off documentary what shock us about the movie is that we see all these horrible murders and yet we never stop caring about these kids. I think it comes from the lack of judgement the movie has.

Badlands has been welcomed as one of the most important movies in what´s been called the New American Cinema (I´m reading the gorgeous volume the Gijon Film Festival edited about the phenomena and that´s what has prompted me to re-watch Malick´s first film these days) and yet it is impossible to label Malick as a director from that "wave". Radically different from any of his peers, Malick has left us three masterpieces until now and a style that nobody has copied, a barren legacy.

The beauty of Badland´s images might be unbearable for the first viewer, its particular tempo, the long oasis of the forest part, the empty spaces framed by the hands of a painter and the sensibility of a photographer (I sensed quite a lot of influence of Malick in Van Sant´s splendorous negative spaces in Gerry), the use of Carl Orff´s music, the scene (my favourite, if even i suposse it´s a lot of fan´s favourite) where the couple dances to the car lights and radio... everything in this movie is achingly perfect.

Sometimes it hurts that Malick has only made three films in thirty years, if you think of the wonderful movies that could have been. But at the same time it would be unfair for the rest of directors if he made more, the comparsion would be so cruel that we might never need to see any other american film but his. And of course, I guess it takes at least ten years to produce such thought, carefully prepared, crafted jewels.

Dead Man - What strikes me as the strangest of a very strange movie is that though Jim Jarmusch made the film back to the genre he was supposedly inmersed in (the western) still Dead Man leaves more feeling of reality (the mud-dirty streets, the horses, the guns, the clothes, even the poetry-reciting indians) than any of the westerns of the last two decades.

Maybe it´s so odd, so oniric, so manieristic that it actually let you imagine how the Wild West was, instead of imposing its vision. The West, it comes to say, is merely a state of mind.

Jim Jarmusch is a filmmaker I´m very fond of, though I don´t admire him particulary or think he has been a great influence on my conception of cinema, but he has always done the films he has wanted, he is uncompromising and you have to respect that.

For most of its length the film is succesful and enthralling enough, yet I feel it goes a bit over the top and in the end there is something artificious about it that pulls the viewer back from the fiction; somehow it´s a bit like the feeling one gets while watching the Coen´s Oh Brother (a film I totally adore but), its fine elaboration plays against its charm.

But it sure is Jarmusch´s most beautiful film and radical work since Permanent Vacation; Johnny Depp is a pretty movie animal and he fills the screen like very few actors can. The black and white sharpens the angles of his face, turning him into a statue. Lovely. William Blake could not hope for a better model.

The framing of each shot is so beautiful that it´s almost distracting sometimes and overwhelming most of the time; this is refreshing actually because Jarmusch always seemed to me not entirely brave when it comes to image, more interesed in moods and characters and words. Here I´m totally in love with the fade-to-black moments, a bit Kiezlowsky-ish, okay, but gorgeous nonetheless. Director of photography Robby Müller makes an incredibly careful and precise work in black and white, very detailed spectrum of greys. Neil Young´s soundtrack, though not as brilliant as has been widely praised, does the rest.