By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
The ache of human impermanence: Manohla ♥ Terry; we ♥ Manohla
Lyrical movies elicit lyrical writing: why aren’t we all this goddam good? Don’t know whether to be mad at or mad about Manohla Dargis when she writes this way on the daily film beat at NY Times, on The New World: “Birds and passion still soar in the latest version of The New World, Terrence Malick‘s rapturously beautiful [film]… Lovers of the film can rest easy; both theatrical versions are satisfying and devastating in equal measure. (It’s promised that the DVD will contain both the 135-minute version and a three-hour edit, bringing the number of director’s cuts to three.) Although I miss the drifty interludes in the longer edition that sweep us along in the dream, it’s also a relief that Colin Farrell no longer registers quite as much like a new age Hamlet—to be with Pocahontas or not to be. This Smith is slyer, cagier (watch his eyes) and much less of a moral question mark… In the 1950s, the young turks at Cahiers du Cinéma advanced an idea that cinema is not literature, but instead expresses itself visually through the mise-en-scène. The image of laundry hanging on a line or of a pair of empty shoes in a film by Yasujiro Ozu matters as much as the dialogue; those are no more decorative than the image of birds taking flight in The New World. The images don’t exist apart from the narrative; they are the narrative, adding layers and moods, imparting philosophies of life. In one film, the shoes convey a sense of profound loss, the ache of human impermanence; in the other, the birds speak to the idea that the world is not ours for the taking… Something I didn’t fully appreciate until [this second viewing] was how Mr. Malick uses physical space to contrast two separate world views. Indeed, the entire meaning of the film is conveyed in a single sublime edit that joins a shot of the grubby settlement as it looks from outside its walls—and framed inside an open door—with its mirror image. As the camera looks through the same door, this time pointed out, we see how the settlers would have viewed the beautiful wide world from inside a fort that was every bit as much a prison as their own consciousness.”
