Song to Song

Watching Song to Song is like explaining an old romantic relationship to a new friend. You would certainly start at the beginning – how you met, how long it took to fall in love. And then you may suddenly jump to the end – the fighting, the apathy. Beginning to end, back to back. As you kept talking, your narrative might gradually shift to highlights – the highs, the lows, the vacations, the fights. In real life, stories of such personal importance are rarely told in order. We shape our own narrative to make things more compelling. It’s a challenging concept for film, but one that clearly interests director Terrence Malick.

I understand the frustration many have with Malick’s style. His films are poetic puzzles in motion. Putting a jigsaw puzzle together is challenging; doing so while the pieces are floating is damn near impossible. But once you complete that moving puzzle, the reward is even greater.

Many of Malick’s films contain seemingly conventional plots – criminals on the run, men in war, coming-of-age in Texas, love gained and love lost. Yet they are told in ways we aren’t used to seeing, specifically as it relates to the convention of time. Time is a construct. Man invented numbers, dates, orders, months. We follow time, because the structure of life dictates it. But in storytelling, it’s possible for time to be obscured. Time always goes in order, but memory doesn’t have to.

Song to Song is about two fledgling musicians (Rooney Mara and Ryan Gosling) who meet in and around the Austin music scene and quickly fall in love. The woman’s successful boss (Michael Fassbender) is around as well. The boss and the woman used to sleep together, and have since cooled down, but the boss’s rich, jealous entitlement complicates the lives of everyone he meets. A split occurs, and each of the three people begin dating someone new. The new relationships (to the likes of Natalie Portman, Cate Blanchett, Lykke Li and others) are intertwined with good and bad memories the original three shared together. The result is an emotional mosaic of love, loss, acceptance and pain.

Everyone in the film is uniformly excellent, even if their performances are presented in a tangled manner. Fassbender’s quiet, resentful rage bursts through Malick’s fractured narrative, proving again that the actor is one of the best we have. And Lykke Li (a talented singer making her mainstream film debut) carries herself with a confident vulnerability that is utterly arresting. You can always count on a Malick film to look great, and Song to Song is no exception. Shot by Emmanuel Lubezki (perhaps film’s greatest living cinematographer), Song to Song is captured with wide angles and fisheye shots, leaving nothing out of the frame, while making us curious what’s around the corner.

Malick’s most recent narrative films, To the Wonder, Knight of Cups and Song to Song, were all made without scripts, and you can tell. There is very little on-screen dialogue in the films (though more in Song to Song than the other two combined), and no linear narrative. Malick always shoots hours and hours of footage, then spends years editing them into a film. It seems, though, that the films in this unofficially trilogy have been completely found in editing, resulting in breathtaking, unconventional experiments that torment some and inspire others.

I appreciate Malick’s style. It challenges me. It forces me to look at love and life and hell and pain in new ways. Few films have the ability to do that. Regarding Song to Song, I simply ask that the next time you’re telling someone a story, be aware of how you’re telling it. Where do you begin and where do you end? Did you forget something? Maybe you’re already done, but open it back up to add something new. It was really important, so you put it in. That’s Song to Song. It isn’t wrong, it’s just the way some stories are told. A-

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