The Knight of Cups, in tarot card terms, is a good omen. Draw this card in a reading and it signifies that your work and love life are about to improve and lead to a period of prolonged fulfilment. KNIGHT OF CUPS is the seventh film in esteemed director, Terrence Malick’s formidable cinematic canon, but does it live up to the hype that surrounds it at Berlinale 2015?

Christian Bale plays the lead character, Rick, a man in consuming and continuous employment to the Hollywood system. It’s the very same system we saw darkly depicted in David Cronenberg’s MAPS TO THE STARS last year, but with far less emphasis on incest and murder; and although it feels strange to write it, more of an emphasis on titty-shaking, bootylicious, bombastic all-day and all-night parties. Yes, we are still in a Terrence Malick film.

A haunting soundtrack featuring the likes of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “Fantasy on a Theme of Thomas Tallis”, Edvard Grieg’s “The Death of Ase” and Wojciech Kilar’s “Exodus” coat scenes in the all-encompassing, grandiose melancholy that fans of Malick’s work have come to love. The soundtrack is allowed to run continuously over numerous scenes featuring a labyrinthine amount of jumpcuts, in an engaging manner which would make Jean-Luc Godard proud. Whilst refreshing in its aesthetic style, and leading to a far more narratively esoteric film than previous works from Malick (even more so than 2011’s THE TREE OF LIFE), this heavy use of jump cutting ultimately lets the film down: we cut back, in each new tarot-card titled segment of the film, to a scene where Rick is sitting more-or-less fully clothed whilst a beautiful, lithe young woman runs around him with her breasts and buttocks out, adoring him.

… the male gaze of Malick sits almost uncomfortably one-sided …

Malick is undoubtedly the master of the gliding camera, and here it shimmers across scenes of great beauty as we listen to the interior monologues of our protagonists. The landscapes Malick captures are truly breathtaking: from the high-rise cityscape of Los Angeles, to the quiet magic slumbering of its surrounding beaches and deserts. There’s almost no director you would rather have cutting from ground-level establishing shot, up into the heavens of the aurora borealis, all within the first few minutes of a film – and yet the male gaze of Malick sits almost uncomfortably one-sided in its leery, masculine, voyeurism towards the nipples and pert buttocks of an array of dazzling female beauties. No man in the film really strips off to reveal their mystical, spiritual, sensual body to the same extent.

Perhaps the spiritualism of the tarot cards is not as strong a force as that of the Christianity featured in THE TREE OF LIFE, and to some extent TO THE WONDER? Does this spiritualism not lavish the film in a similar sense of the divine as its predecessors? Scenes in which prostitutes and strip-club dancers are ogled and then picked up by Rick on his quest for the promised fulfilment that the Knight of Cups card decrees, imbue this feature with rather a disappointing sense of Arthouse Whorehouse Existentialism. There are also only so many times one can watch a camera glide through a show-home bathroom or kitchen before these environments take on a peculiar kind of fetish value. Are we to value that marble work surface, or bespoke bachelor-pad bathtub to a similar extent as we do a pair of lips, or breasts, or any other female body part? It feels as if there are two types of women in this film: sex-objects and mothers. If you failed at producing a child for Rick, as Cate Blanchett’s character does, and have the misfortune of ageing ever-so-slightly, you’re screwed (not literally); as there are a seemingly never-ending line of gorgeous, younger women to come and take your place in the sexual carousel of Rick’s life in Hollywood.

It could be the case that the cards have been mis-read in terms of Malick’s intention with this film. In the press conference following the screening of KNIGHT OF CUPS at Berlinale, the first question posed to Christian Bale was essentially “in the nicest possible way, could you explain what just went on?” Bale’s initial response was: “not really”. You get the feeling that the member of the press posing the question already had a strong idea of what they thought was going on in the film, but wished for there surely to be a deeper, more divine meaning, than a masculine, lustful quest through life. Hopefully Malick’s next two films, UNTITLED (and possibly screening at this year’s Cannes Film Festival if the Berlinale rumours are to be believed) and VOYAGE OF TIME (out next year) will offer more of a return to form than this initially mysterious deck of cards, in which our faith turns out to be sadly unfounded.

KNIGHT OF CUPS premiered in the Wettbewerb strand at Berlinale 2015.
httpvh://youtu.be/bC-3rnv_b3o