Berlinale 2015: Knight of Cups

Director: Terrence Malick
Cast: Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Natalie Portman
Length: 118 minutes
Countries: USA

Going into Knight of Cups with the wrong expectations will only lead to disappointment. If you expect elements such as plot, well-defined characters and overall cohesion, you’re looking in the wrong place. It’s a strange work of challenging, enigmatic and elliptical meanings, only appreciated if you truly hone in to its unique rhythms and imagery.

Malick is not for the distracted, he demands keen intellectual appreciation on behalf of the viewer. Perhaps his oeuvre can only be fully appreciated in a cinema. It demands your full attention, and after one viewing, begs to be seen again. I have absolutely no idea what it is supposed to be about – yet it opens up a space in my mind for (probably) endless contemplation.

The central premise of the movie appears to boil down to this: who does Rick (Christian Bale) have to sleep with to understand the meaning of life? (Credit to Malick, many artists have built careers on this very question). The endless procession of women in this film – each related to a different symbol for Rick – makes 8 1/2 look positively Lutheran in comparison.  The film could be described as Fellini-esque, if Fellini had suffered from years of ketamin abuse. Rick is performing a Mastroianni role, a screenwriter who has it all – invited to all the parties, and sleeps with all the women – but ultimately feels empty inside. An ancient analogy is used: “Once there was a young prince whose father, the king of the East, sent him down into Egypt to find a pearl. But when the prince arrived, the people poured him a cup. Drinking it, he forgot he was the son of a king, forgot about the pearl and fell into a deep sleep.”

The central premise of the movie appears to boil down to this: who does Rick (Christian Bale) have to sleep with to understand the meaning of life? The film could be described as Fellini-esque, if Fellini had suffered from years of ketamin abuse.

Thankfully for Rick, he manages to wake up, and he journeys throughout the land trying to understand how to find a more profound truth than the one he is currently being sold. There are constant images of the sea, which although are kind of repetitive, do illustrate the vicissitude of Rick’s nature as he constantly finds himself drawn back into ‘the sweet life’.

There are some images in the film of exceptional beauty. Both LA and Las Vegas are seen as dreamworlds, and constructions of human fantasy. Malick finds exceptional elegance in the fake Roman architecture of the Vegas casinos and the erotic illusions offered in LA nightclubs. He mixes these contemplations with classical and ambient music, plus his trademark voice-over narration. The narration, however, is disappointing at times: it helped one to understand more from the imagery, and its free-flowing nature – floating between characters like they share a collective consciousness – added to the film’s dreamlike nature, but some of the questions were ridiculously vague and silly, like “Where do we go now?” and “What is it I’m looking for?” They make the film drift at times into parody, but perhaps it’s simply Malick doing his thing.

Thankfully, unlike Tree of Life, there were no dinosaurs, or – apart from a couple of opening shots – any scenes in space. Instead he shows us the world as we know it, yet permeated with a strange and unreal beauty. This should be an odds-on favourite to win the Golden Bear.

When it ended, some people clapped, whilst others booed. Knight of Cups is the kind of movie that doesn’t befit either response. At least not until we all see it again.

Image source: berlinale.de