Knight of cups, dir. Terrence Malick - Berlinale 2015 Competition 

by Martin I. Petrov

“No one cares about reality anymore.” 

Realist or not, Terrence Malick seems to have sliced the cake in two, once again. For some, Knight of cups was worth the waiting and for others was two hours of an image flow, that - if we need to be exact - is his way of storytelling. 

And let’s face it, no one goes to see a film from the American indie representative and expects a National geographic doc, where not a single fly passes on the screen without an explanation. Once again, Malick delivers a massive universal research, this time with well hidden biblical dimensions. 

Rick is an actor whose life has taken the downhill. He’s lost in an existential challenge, searching for the light in an endless maze dipped in darkness. Discovering the easier solution of oblivion, he has left his wife Nancy (Cate Blanchette), entering an underworld where physical needs are in possession of his spiritual journey. 

Malick sees in Rick his 21st century son of God, of nature or of his beloved universe whose only errand in a jungle of sin and misery is to fail again and again till he finds the ‘white pearl’, symbol of light, rebirth and new life. As a continuation to The tree of life, Knight of cups is again a profound experimental portrayal of Malick’s understating of life and death, of the world and the soul - if and however these can be understood. Attempting to answer eternal questions is always tricky and he does not become arrogant or authoritative, rather than depicting a vanity of a modern biblical catastrophe in which he doesn't want to be involved. 

Much more erotic and daring, Knight of cups follows Rick as he returns to his superficial existence again and again, finding comfort in ignorance and carelessness. His brother and father are shadow figures that haunt him on every step, his lovers and club strippers are disposable, almost non-human - all part of the hell’s fire on earth. 

Malick’s favourite element, water - the symbol of life, is almost in every scene in the forms of swimming pools, the sea, lakes in the desert, mountain sources - a variety of purgatories, where his characters dive and bathe in hope for atonement and salvation. And, since non of them seems to have found it by the end, not even Malick himself, the vicious circle of madness starts all over again. 

In a pantheon of forgotten gods, we are exposed to images from the past, monuments and cosmopolitanism, all forms and shapes of human nature that burn in their own holocaust. Knight of cups is different, because it shows the paranoia of the world we live in, as a photographic collage of memories - the rolling tape in the mind of a god-blessed son, self-sentenced to death. And when towards the end Rick climbs a mountain, like a new Moses, calling his father for a sign - he will receive his new ten commandments to start all over, yet again.