45th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival: Second Report

I'd never seen Days Of Heaven (1978) before last week, and what struck me was the opening music: The Aquarium, from Carnival Of The Animals by Camille Saint-Saëns. Instantly, I thought of Cannes, where this film premiered, and I wondered which came first, Terrence Malick's choice of this as his opening music or the festival's decision to use it before every screening in their official selection. Saint-Saëns' music evokes immediate nostalgia in me, which is useful, since Malick's film is about a sort of nostalgia too, though not necessarily a rose-tinted one, as I suspect mine is. Days Of Heaven was his second film, after the excellent Badlands (1973), and the film that preceded his 20-year hiatus. And if you haven't seen it, I'd say that now is a good time, since it promises to foreshadow a lot of what seems likely to await us in his new film, Tree Of Life. I know that not a lot is known about this film just yet, but we do know that it tells two stories in parallel: one about a father and son (Sean Penn and Brad Pitt), another dealing with the history of the universe, in 70mm yet.

In some ways, Days Of Heaven does a similar thing. It purports to be the story of a Chicago-based drifter, Bill (Richard Gere), travelling through the American South and looking for work in the Depression era with his lover, Abby (Brook Adams), who is posing as his sister. But in reality, it is the story of his real sister, Linda (Linda Manz), whose detached voiceover appears in bursts while Malick creates a second, meta-story around it, a cyclical swirl through the four seasons, illustrated (at length) with scenes of winter austerity and summer harvests. Abby and Bill are at the mercy of the foreman, a hard, unsentimental taskmaster, until Bill notices that the big boss, known only as The Farmer (Sam Shepard), has taken a shine to Abby. Believing The Farmer to be dying, Bill allows him to court Abby and finally marry her, thinking they will inherit his money and estate within the year. But The Farmer doesn't die, and film's “days of heaven” turn out to be equal part purgatory, as the couple wait and wait, while The Farmer becomes increasingly suspicious.

If it were made today, it's hard to tell whether Malick's film would find an audience straight away; it is elliptical and choppy, and its leading man – then on his way to becoming one of the biggest stars of the 80s – never becomes a fully fledged character. We only get hints of his backstory – did he really kill his boss in Chicago? Why does he pass Abby off as his sister? What will he do with The Farmer's money? – but this is likely because Linda, a girl in her early teens, never knew either. In this way, the film mimics her butterfly memory, in particularly in the way we spend time with a woman Linda befriends but who moves on and leaves her; she means nothing to the film's narrative, but she clearly means a lot to Linda. The high point of the film is a locust attack, to which The Farmer retaliates by setting fire to his crop. The destruction is incredible and truly breathtaking, creating a visual poetry you'd be hard-pressed to find in any equivalent studio film today.

Seeing the film in Karlovy Vary, I was struck by how of-the-moment Malick is these days. His heritage farm aesthetic is a little mechanical in Days Of Heaven but his agrarian lyricism (or is that just farm porn?) is quite prevalent these days. In Cannes, there were such films as Two Gates Of Sleep (mentioned in an earlier blog), from the US, and, more pertinently, the Italian film La Quattro Volte, which I saw in Karlovy Vary a few days later. Though it has been more closely aligned with the work of Robert Bresson, Michaelangelo Frammartino's film does bear comparison with Malick, since it suggests the natural order of things as the defining narrative of, well, everything. It begins with the life and death of a lonely goatherd, but by the end it has become a portrait of life in the Calabrian hills. I wouldn't suggest you cross continents to see it, but Frammartino creates some extraordinary moments – in particular, a stunning, wordless one-take scene in which the goatherd's dog tries to sabotage the village pageant by causing a lorry to roll back into the goat-pen.

A film requiring similar patience is the beautiful Alamar, from Mexico. Directed by Pedro González-Rubio, it tells the story of a Mayan divorcee who, before separating from his Italian wife for good, takes their five-year-old son for a last holiday together at the coral reef of Banco Chinchorro. Part fiction, part doc, but without revealing how many measures of each, Alamar plays like a real-life Walkabout as the child unwittingly explores the literal waterfront of his existence.

I saw this back to back with La Quattro Volte, after which I was begging for a bit of storytelling, but, by itself, Alamar stands as a incredibly poignant and absorbing one-off. And in light of the prevalence of this kind of movie-making lately, I think it's also interesting to wonder what kind of audience Malick's latest film will find today; either the time is perfectly right for his ecologically sensitive, abstract brand of drama, or the market is close to saturated with dazzling curios that have built on his groundwork to reach sophisticated new heights. Either way, it'll be fascinating to find out.