_To the Wonder_

[septimus_...@q.com]

"You thought that we had forever, that time didn't exist."

Marina, _To the Wonder_

Winter sows the seed of love. It blossoms, a red rose that
erupts from icy grounds in Mont Saint-Michel, a miracle. it flows
underneath Pont Neuf, permeates Jarden de Tuileries like snow.
The man and the woman dance on water, ascend the stairs of the
monastery into bliss. Ancient Winged Victory watches over them.
Emmanuel Lubezki's camera holds them in dizzying embrace.

The swoon sustains her as grey Normandy melts into Oklahoma
plains. The light so beautiful and colorful at dusk, the small
town in its way as exotic as Paris' winding streets. A marching
band parade, even a visit to the laundrimat are adventures.
(In their unfurnished house they live out of suitcases, lacking
cabinets, much less washing machines.) Night time at a Sonic
fast-food drive through is as heroic as a Edward Hopper mural.

If only love had the constancy of museum pieces, or of midwestern
landscapes. (One day she will confess her infidelity in another
drive-through, and he will throw her off the truck.) As ever
with Malick, days of heaven inevitably prefigure the Fall.
Marina's visa expires. Her daughter Tatiana cannot fit in. Neil
grows remote, can no long hides his essential emptiness. His boots
sink in the mud oozing from loud fracking machines, and he sinks
into the quotidian, no longer floating on holy water. Marina
drowns her sorrow in the swimming pool. She takes the plunge
while he stands irresolute at the water's edge, his gaze already
drifting to the alluring blonde on the far shore.


"If you think love has died, perhaps it is waiting to be
transformed into something higher."

-- Father Quintana

A third voice is heard. Father Quintana (Javier Bardem) is a
transplanted catholic priest whose romance with the church has
faded. He tries to conjure God from his mostly vacant
cathedral as Marina fails to extract emotion from Neil's hard
heart, and Neil strikes from rocks the fire that God put there.
Quintana's parishioners repeatedly lament his autumnal air
(he is shown walking from room to empty room extinguishes the
lights in a lovely sequence reminiscent of Godard's elegiac
_Nouvelle Vague_). But divine love does not permit dwelling
on the self, or being blind to the world. He continues his
lonely visits to the homeless and the afflicted, in dilapidated
districts Marina does not frequent, although he develops a
special kinship with his fellow European expatriot.

Much has been made of _To the Wonder_ being Malick's first film
shot entirely in the contemporary world. But interrupted skype
calls and cell phone conversations in the street only accentuate
Malick's theme of spiritual alienation. Lubezki's camera is
in constant motion, the embodiment of ecstasy in times of bliss
but compounding the unease when the thrill is gone. The number of
static setups can be counted on two hands: snow-covered landscapes;
the cathedral interior; Versailles and Mont Saint-Michel at the
end. These rarities stick in one's mind, anchor the yearning for
permanence that continues to elude Malick's seekers after Grace.
Video images of Marina and Neil frolicking on a bullet train
-- a kaleidoscope of eyelashes and legs and bliss -- form the
film's exhilarating prologue. In retrospect, they echo the
black-and-white still photos (the advanced technology of *its*
time) that introduce _Days of Heaven_. Nestor Almendros famously,
imperceptibly zoomed in on a boy frozen in mid-leap over a ravine
(or an existential abyss). Lubezki's approach takes longer, but
is no less effective in crystallizing the tension between
stillness and motion, being and the void.

But perhaps the connection between Malick's two most perfect
films runs deeper. The paradise from which Marina and
Quintana fall is not so much the "heart of Nature" that
haunts the earlier work -- it is more overtly religious
-- but _To the Wonder_ undoubtedly plays a variation on the
director's favorite archtypes. Neil is Sam Shepard's Farmer,
taciturn, unfinished, rooted to his birthplace. Marina is
Brooke Adam's Abby, the woman he loves, but she is also
impulsive and hell-bent, leaving the prairie and returning
unannounced (Richard Gere suddenly arriving at the farmer's
window) -- only to flee again. Olga Kurylenka is such an
enigma; she can be gay and seductive, but carries within her
a prematurely melancholic air, maybe born of playing too many
battered woman at a young age. (Her character's favorite
Renaissance painters would have loved her mysterious face.)
Quintana stands between them in this unusual triangle, first
as Marina's confessor and later a comfort to Neil. Tatiana
is Marina's daughter from a previous marriage, as spirited and
idiosyncratic as Linda Manz's narrator. Soon mother and
daughter pack up and are taken to the airport by a neighbor.
Neil rushes through the house (to the extent he ever hurries)
to watch the car recede from his backyard, reminiscent of
Linda chasing departing trains and bridal processions. So
he is Linda as well. Indeed, he is just a child.


"You told me about her, the woman in the hospital."

Snow buries the prairies, freezing slow streams. A new flame
creeps into Neil's life. Rachel McAdam's Jane is in fact an
old acquintance, a local rancher's daughter. She is all
abundance, one with nature; pert, pretty, impossibly pale
yet at ease in the open. Sunlight catches her fair hair and
scatters into gold dust. Buffaloes by the hundreds surround
this queen of her domain as she beams atop her jeep; her red
summer red dress positively sets the prairie ablaze. Wild horses
hug the fences while she offers up her roped wrists to Neil.
Or is she whispering for him to be tamed? He is mute to her
declarations of love. To do justice to her sorrow and
introspection, Malick has to find the most sunless place in
Oklahoma -- the pitch-black interior of a museum about Pioneers.
(In its underlit chambers the exhibits are as eerie as the
embroidered lions and unicorns in the Lourve.) Jane vanishes,
never to reappear in his dreams.

Suddenly Marina is at the window, out of season (it must be
fall), an unheralded ghost. The dalliance with Jane has matured
Neil, made him more attentive to women's needs. He marries
Marina, buys her a piano and furniture, even laundry machines.
When the relationship grows stale he surprises her with a
Christian wedding and rekindles her spirit. (When they amicably
split again, he drives her to the airport himself, this time.)
But now Marina is the restless one, haunted by her missing daugher.
They stroll at cross-purpose in the house, like Sean Penn's and
Joanna Going's loveless couple in _The Tree of Life_. They
fight in cafes and at receptions and make up again. These
eddies of recriminations and reconciliations give shape to
their spiraling, rapidly failing relationship.

From these small everyday observations Malick distills enduring
human truths. Because this is Marina's film, _To the Wonder_
is his most psychologically astute work. She is his most fully
realized protagonist; her adult, contemporary neediness is more
relatable than the preteen boy's and native American princess'
musings in _The Tree of Life_/_The New World_. Not counting
Jessica Chastain's incandescent but sporadic voiceovers, Kurylenka's
lovely interior monologs, seemingly wrenched out of time from a
distant future, provide a groundedness never before seen. The
editing shares her maturity and sensuality. Blissful love in
the afternoon cues to an understated reach for her hip, then a
roaring merry-go-round in the sky. What goes up inevitably
comes down; after an one-night infidelity in an Econologe she
runs home in shame, clutching the hemline of her dress. Given
the turbulent motion of the camera, tracking this way and that,
the seemless matching cuts are nothing short of Resnaisian.

Lubecski's camera eye has also evolved from unstructured, roving,
child-like gazes in _The Tree of Life_ to a subtle ebb-and-flow
-- swinging from the woman's viewpoint to the man's and back --
as if approximating the emotional ballast that makes up a marriage.
The openness and naivetee in _The Tree of Life_, underscored by
van Gogh's sunflowers, give way close-ups on orchids -- restrained
and mysterious. It is as if the previous film has gone too far
and a corrective subtlety is applied. But the core of Malick's
new, subjective cinematic language remains intact. Happiness is
ecstasy, the immersing of the self into a fuller, greater whole.
Sorrow is solitary and Heideggerian, a suppression of a memory
that once was (Tatiana in the fields, Marina and Neil entwined
by her perfume) or could have been (her holding a baby -- fantasy
or premonition of her future with another man?). Both are equally
transient, undermined by a profound, spiritual and temporary
instability. The uninitiated may get sea-sick from the visual
rhythm, but seasoned fellow-travellers will thrill to Malick's
and Lubezki's discovery. Speaking of rhythm: Wagnerian strains
continue to connote newness in this film, but (in view of
Kurylenko's ethnicity?) Shostakovich, Tschaikovsky, and
Rachmaniloff all figure prominently in the playlist. Most pieces
of music are used twice, the second time subverting the initial
meaning, in keeping with Malick's fondness for thesis-and
-antithesis.


"My God. What a Cruel War. There are two women
in me., one full of love for you, the other pulls
me down towards the earth."

Divine love vies with earthly affection in _To the Wonder_.
But a host of other philosophical oppositions collide. Men and
women are equal parts angels and devils. They seek peace
even as they yearn for freedom (birds, airplanes, Ana's
"gypsy") and abhor stasis (a prisoner running, hugging the
courtyard boundary, as if he is Jane's wild horse). Marina
seeks Grace, yet succumbs to temptation and sleeps with a
oddly medieval carpenter, the bearer of a harp. He has tattoos
of spiders and skulls but she ignores the warning. Even in
her downfall, Malick blesses her with a sunburst she holds in
her fingers. In fact all women, including Jane, the deaf-mute,
and the drug addict, are photographed at low angles, kissed by
sun rays; forgiveness and benevolence is egalitarian, bestowed
to all.

Seeking solace, Neil follows Father Quintana on his visits to
the homeless and afflicted. Perhaps recognizing a kindred
soul, Quintana transcends his alienation and rediscovers the
presence of Christ all around him. Therein lies The dramatic
resolution of the film -- a Hegelian synthesis -- rendered so
off-handedly I completely missed it the first time I saw the
film. Trumpets and churchbells announce Quintana's rebirth.
Neil also bounces back, and is last seen in a fully-furnished
house, presumbly with a new family, and his own children.


"Newborn. I open my eyes. I melt into eternal light.
A spark. I fall into the flame. You brought me out
of the shadow. You lifted me from the ground, brought
me back to life."

For Marina, the music stops. She slams shut the piano and
and is already at the airport. Walking away, Neil turns to
tip his head in farewell, silent to the end. She moves down
the gateway, silhouetted against the light, another birth
canal. Her future is in the air. Will she find love again,
bear another child, achieve the eternal peace she yearns for?
The last shots of Marina are flashbacks to Oklahoma. She
wakes up in the fields, baptised in the morning dew, her face
ablaze in the sun. (What strange beast is she dreaming of?)
In the distance her talisman, Mont Saint-Michel, beckon.

(For A.)