Knight of Cups

Just fresh from the Irish premiere of Terence Malick's latest film Knight of Cups, screened as part of the Cork Film Festival... America's artiest director serves up another visually stunning meditation on life, love and the whole damn thing. Very much cut from the same cloth as Malick's previous films Tree of Life and To the Wonder - all minimal dialogue, whispered narration and Emmanuel Lubezki's exquisite images of water water everywhere. Malick's most puzzling and fragmented film to date with Christian Bale's Hollywood type wandering like an ethereal observer through the memories of his life...perhaps, for Malick offers no clues, but one thing's for sure, the film features one of the most breathtaking visions of Los Angeles in some time, surreal and dreamlike and strangely clean and empty. If there was one point of distraction from the beautiful visuals it was the soundtrack which raids selections from a number of modern composers like Arvo Part and Gorecki as well as contemporary electronic artists like Explosions in the Sky, Burial and significantly Biosphere - stunning, of course but frequently throughout the screening my brain was addled trying to put a name to a familiar piece of music. I must re-acquaint myself with Biosphere's Substrata over the weekend...