SONG TO SONG ****

You know that a Terrence Malick film about the music industry won't be like any other film about the music industry but then a Terrence Malick film won't be like anything other than the Terrence Malick film that preceded it and the one before that and quite possibly the one before that. You could say that Terrence Malick's films are unique...except they aren't; nowadays they all look and sound the same which is why so many people have written him off. I think I may be one of the very few people who not only liked "Knight of Cups" but actually chose it as my best film of the year.

That was about the movie industry, or at least about an actor in Hollywood, and "Song to Song" is about the music industry or at least about a handful of people involved with the music industry and like the last couple of Malick pictures it basically dispenses with dialogue and 'conversations' in favour of a stream of consciousness narration, or several narrations, as various characters take up 'the story'.

What story, you may ask? Perhaps unusually for Malick there are more characters than usual on display with at least three stories running through the picture. The central characters are Faye, (Rooney Mara), a would-be performer, Cook, (Michael Fassbender), the Svengali-like producer Faye is sleeping with in the hope that it will advance her career and BV, (Ryan Gosling), another musician with whom she embarks on an affair. Then there's Rhonda, (Natalie Portman), the waitress that Cook marries and Amanda, (Cate Blanchett), the older woman BV falls for, not to mention an extraordinarily good Patti Smith playing herself. Each of these characters has 'a story' to tell and all are beautifully played. In many respects this is Malick's most accessible film since "The Tree of Life".


Of course, how you respond to it will depend on how you respond to Malick in general. Personally I think this is a vast improvement on "To the Wonder" and it's certainly the equal of the vastly underrated "Knight of Cups". This is an intelligent and surprisingly engaging film and once again the dazzlingly brilliant cinematography is courtesy of Emmanuel Lubezki. It really shouldn't be missed.