To the Wonder (M). Director: Terrence Malick. Starring: Ben Affleck, Olga Kurylenko, Javier Bardem. 112 minutes
Oblique as they are beautiful, it is small wonder that Terrence Malick's films divide audiences into disciples and detractors of equal fervour. His latest film To the Wonder is as stirring and divisive as ever. At the screening I attended, as it ended, a collective murmur of bewilderment was obscured by a sparse burst of sincere applause. 'What on earth was that?' said a woman seated in the row behind me. I repeated this question with a wry smile to the friend beside me. 'That was genius,' said this confessed disciple with a grin. I was inclined to agree.
Malick's meditative style is well rehearsed through films such as The Thin Red Line and the Cannes Palme d'Or winning The Tree of Life. Using images cut impressionistically to the swell and ebb of the symphonic score and stanzas of prayer-like voiceover narration, he composes cinematic poems, richly allegorical, about the lives of ordinary people, their relationship to God and the world. Story and theme emerge cumulatively for the patient and responsive viewer. Like meditation, Malick's films demand active stillness.
Here Malick reteams with his The Tree of Life cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, who provides him with endless layers of gorgeously composed images, each one alive with metaphor — as my friend the disciple declares, you could write an essay about each and every shot. On paper the story is a simple one of doomed romance: girl meets boy, they fall in love, fall apart, then try to rebuild. In Malick's hands it becomes nothing short of a religious experience. Just what kind of religious experience might depend on the viewer's predisposition.
The 'girl' in question is Marina (Kurylenko), a young Ukrainian woman living in Paris who migrates to America to live with her lover, Neil (Affleck). But once there her sense of alienation is immediate and palpable. Their house is part of a displaced and hastily erected patch of suburbia on the grassy fringes of civilisation. This only emphasises the emptiness inside the house and in the relationship itself; while Marina yearns to recapture the 'wonder' she experienced when she was first with Neil, he is emotionally and often physically absent. Increasingly she is alone.
Her aloneness is mirrored in the life of a disillusioned priest, Father Quintana (Bardem). He is ceaselessly questing for an absent God the way that Marina quests for her