© 2013 by James Clark
It’s been a long time since Terrence Malick strove, as an academic researcher, to bring focus to the bewildering cacophony of Heideggerian phenomenological insights and oversights. That is not to say, however, that he has turned his back on this endeavor, now that his métier is movies instead of monographs. The phenomenological imperative has for him taken the form of accelerating sluggish sensibilities (by way of surging visuals and sounds, as evoking voice-over narration) to pry open their innermost alarms. Alarm has always been the watchword for Malick’s investigative films, and the magnitude and delicacy of its filmed procession (its filmed phenomenality) need involve no apologies for being repeated from various angles through a number of decades.
But the very emergence of such threatening dismissal entails that world of alarm that can never really be passé. Someone somewhere has chided Malick about (supposedly) losing sight, in his most recent film, To the Wonder (2012), of the supposed axiom, “Beauty is not enough…” The assumption in this rather smug rejoinder is that prettification fails to speak to full-bodied discovery. Heaven forbid that the extraordinary enhancement of the action by cinematographic intensities should lead to wondering what challenges the “beautiful” panoramic and intimate rushes should pose.
Beauty, in the form of sensual confirmation (when trenchantly engaged—and Malick is nothing if not trenchant), does not come neatly packaged to be gobbled down as a more or less satisfying entertainment. All of his previous films have made abundantly clear that the up-surge of that sensuous tang generally covered by the term, “beautiful,” is a most volatile phenomenon, never failing to entail punishing pitfalls; and To the Wonder is, unsurprisingly, an inspired variant of the same drama. But, unlike the previous five accelerations, the exploratory format of this production does not offer (with its main figures) socioeconomic enthusiasms that could be played forward and hence could cement empathy on the part of a larger proportion of viewers. As we scrutinize a scenario which many believe to encourage eschewal of close observation, in favor of being simply carried by nebulous emotive impulses flooding the screen, we have to put into play the possibility that To the Wonder’s tenuous actions constitute a phenomenological elicitation of a crucial shortfall (historically facilitated) in the delivery of a life of love.
The overture of this reflective adventure, for all its visual panache—the hand-held camera allying with the sweep of the TGV (Fast Train) to turn the contours of rural lives outside into grainy and rhapsodic shreds which only a fast (Paris-based), cosmopolitan life could fully embrace—shoves into our face a degree of rapture we haven’t been suitably prepared for. On this side of the glass, a young couple, idyllically enjoying the first waves of their love for each other (a passage from the Romantic repertoire demurely sounding forth with them), immediately put us on alert not to overreact to the scene’s resembling a tony perfume ad. As she expresses her affection for Neil by embraces, and by touching him with studied delicacy, Marina can be heard thinking to herself, “Newborn…I open my eyes…I melt into the eternal light…I fall into the flame…”
Introduced by their simulating, in the almost empty car, a motel room—he pulling her onto the floor, and both of them kissing in the form of faux bites—the lovers come around to the normal euphoria of off-season tourists (the countryside recovers its boundaries). Accordingly, Marina’s cri de coeur, broadcast to us in the form of voice-over, somewhat dispenses with philosophy and attends to a more domestic range of concerns. “You brought me out of the shadows…You brought me back to life…” We see them in Paris, meandering photogenically at a giant, illuminated Ferris wheel by the Eiffel Tower, alongside the Pantheon, inside one of the galleries at the Gobelin tapestry factory and along the quays of the Seine, where Neil has Marina falling backwards into his arms in a Dr. Phil-level attending to trust. Each one of these locales is metaphorically radioactive, putting the fun-seeker to a test of his and her mettle, whether they ever realize it. Our two protagonists fall into the category of those who do come to discover that there is far more about love than ardent phrases and choice attitudes.
One twist to this travelogue is Marina’s voice, coming to us entirely in French. The characteristically embroidered output of her musings does not manage to avoid detection as a rather juvenile clutter where the phenomenon of true silence is being essayed. At the Gobelin facility, she’s more about melodrama than the sublime. “What is he thinking of? How calm he is!” In face of a tapestry requiring silent attention to its crimson physical presence, she gushes, “Forever at peace!” (It is not until much later that we gain insight into Neil’s management of the cryptic, he being at this point of the narrative a mute sounding board for her overtures.) He drives her, in a rented convertible, to Mont Saint-Michel. Approaching the fabled abbey and monastery, located on a rocky tidal island, she waves cheerily as they whizz past security officers on the road. The metaphorical check-up here, comprising another Mike and another steep challenge, stands well back, in favor of depiction of their climb to the top of the church tower. “We climbed the steps,” she feels compelled to put on record, going on to display her awareness of the site’s other name, “la Merveille—the Marvel, Wonder. “We climbed the steps to the Wonder!” At the cloister, there is a moment of true (monastic) silence as they gently reach out to each other’s hands and face. Quickly we cut to the mud flats at low tide, where he holds her from behind, and she savors his affection in the register of a fair damsel (or a pre-Raphaelite poet [Mike Hammer’s Christina Rossetti]). She cautiously walks across the unstable sands, their springiness amusing her, and she does a little backward hop, followed by more confident and self-consciously skilled turning motifs. They both meander there, their feet increasingly dragged into the muck as the inertial tide begins to return. Marina chooses this awkward moment to strike into theological territory, in anticipation of a more corporate divine she is about to encounter in Neil’s home town. “Love makes us one…One being two…Two being one…You in me, me in you…”
An abrupt cut from this construction, finds us back in Paris, with Marina and her ten-year-old daughter, Tatiana, who asks her mother, pensively looking out the window of their flat, “Why are you so unhappy?” Though she insists she’s not troubled, there is something about the nearly frenzied balletic turning motions she (as accompanied by dance-school-redolent Tatiana) performs for Neil in a park, not to mention her catching up with a nanny pushing a pram and asking her daughter, “Do you want a little sister like that?” She rallies her travel companion with the hypothesis of leaving him if he should not want to marry her. Soon after that, she’s translating his uncoordinated French to the girl: “He’s asking if you want to go to the U.S.” Tatiana gives him a flying-tackle hug, and the two émigrés find a half-pint Statue of Liberty to rather frantically pay homage to.
Though apparently modelled on the Rhine palace of a mad monarch, the Disney logo surely takes inspiration from Mont Saint-Michel, zapping the oceanic horizon. At this early stage of her drive toward the Magic Kingdom, Marina can be seen to shoot forth to us a stagey dance attitude, once, at beholding the misty expanses surrounding the French abbey, and, once again, in a tract of undeveloped real estate in a small Oklahoma city, with the Big Sky painting a breathtaking sunset. (That that pose recalls Disney stalwart, Julie Andrews, in The Sound of Music, wafts toward these unorthodox breakaways a shot of harsh odds.) Soon it is discernible that that mystical confluence, seemingly within reach in the aura of Mont Saint-Michel, does not reside in Oklahoma, or at least, not for our Diner’s Club freewheelers. Marina, her face frozen from the thrust of an uprising of virulent malaise, treads along a neighbor’s high wooden fence, comes to a knothole and peers into the spare but meticulously maintained suburban yard. Her brush, in this way, with Cocteau’s The Blood of a Poet, proceeds to her entering the yard, assuring the lady watering her lawn and commiserating with her task as a single mom that “I like it here,” and being assured that it’s a great place, with a performance of the Nutcracker ballet at Christmas, and lots of movies. Upping the heat of her single mom tolerance of underdeveloped chic (Tatiana had in fact been induced to keep in step, their dance routines impressively choreographed and rehearsed), Marina lands straight amidst a rodeo parade, featuring longhorn cattle, as if from another planet, and 4H student cowboys driving their dads’ covered wagons. She stanches her discomfort by telling herself and us, “A land so calm… honest… rich… but gentle…” She regards some parade-goers almost as hefty as the heifers, plodding to their cars, carrying their deckchairs. Also bewilderingly withstanding music to her ears she can’t get a purchase upon, Tatiana makes a feeble solo attempt to do some spinning about under the grandstand of a football field where the marching band and cheerleaders are at a tentative stage of synchronization and musicality.
While such anathema to precious raptures rapidly eats away at the radiation-quotient of the sunshine girls, there is a more strictly subliminal and telling residue, primed by the camerawork of the hugely competent, Emmanuel Lubezki, which begins to make the quietly outrageous case for the sensuous riches of Oklahoma being more than a match for those of France. Whereas the treasures of Paris and Mont Saint-Michel offered well-worn visual delicacies (highly caloric instances of civilizational, tidy, “human-scale” locales), the “nowhere” of Oklahoma defies being turned into a ballet studio and instead unabashedly reels off overwhelmingly endless skies and their primal textures and coloration, and a deliciousness of gently rolling and stunningly colored landscape, which elicits enlivenment without our looking for it there.
Neil, soon discovered, once home, to be a technologically incisive investigator into various pollutants compromising his home on the range, in the dying moments of the abortive attempt to sustain the promise of his awesome vacation, attempts to draw a thoroughly disenchanted Tatiana into, for him, the most remarkable thing about the All-American sunset. Her face frozen into a grimace, she resists his effort to direct her gaze to the blazing horizon and its strip of purple at the lowest point. That this is scientifically demonstrable to be the shadow of the earth fails to make her dance for joy; in fact she runs away from him, her mother in pursuit, in hopes of calming her down, and in hopes of reconstructing a collapsing life. The girl shouts out, “You’re not my father! You’re annoying me!” Cut to Marina holding her in bed, singing to her a rustic French song, in hopes of bringing on the calm she so frequently claims to be blessed with. From a baseline of working from the same script that seemed a wow in Paris, Marina is visited by that bite of dysfunctionality which caused a lull of sadness back home before those successful manoeuvres in the park. She and Tatiana run through their irresistible sprites number in a big field touched by an even bigger sky; and Marina works on her languor by sighing into the void, “If you love me there’s nothing else I need.” In a big box grocery store, the girls dance down the aisles, a moment striking us as far more exorcism than delight. Tatiana tells herself, “How clean everything is…” Then, as if taking a cue from the emporium’s premium upon fresh produce, she asks, “Are you going to marry her? She has beautiful hair…You could get rich together…You’re going to marry her?” Marina is finally able to fasten her mouth, but the household is bleeding Angst and distemper like the industrial desolation Neil monitors for a living. During this mishap, his usual facial expression of quizzical forbearance shifts to hardened eyes and a menacingly set jaw.
Marina and Neil manage to retain, in spite of the strained circumstances, when beholding each other’s tantalizing though unmanageable sheen, some vestiges of that chivalry exuded by Mont Saint-Michel, which induced him to rescue her by arranging to have them accompany him home on a visitor’s visa. But, whereas in France the simplification afforded by his holiday mode and her having neither job nor qualifications—not to mention their being young and attractive—could float the vision of living totally under the auspices of love’s sparkle, in a sharply different land where radiance does not yield itself without reminders of its unglamorous side, the visitors could not find their way to a rhythm that would lead to joyous results. Tatiana is at a loss in face of classmates turning cartwheels as sunset touches a suburban street. The latent earthy sexuality of that management of inertia diminishes her somehow in her own eyes, as does a girl with pomegranate-colored hair maintaining that her mother doesn’t care about such an avenue of experimentation. At home she frantically flicks on and off a table lamp (the shade of which had been part of a desperate night of family fun) and tells her mother it’s time to go. “I don’t have any friends. In Paris I had lots…” Whether or not that is an accurate reminiscence, she has heard, from the perspective of her bedroom, an insupportably violent quarrel between Neil and Marina, which she tries to muffle by playing hopscotch on the carpet. And, despite being unable to do anything about it herself, she declares to her mother, who is on the hook to do something right, “There’s something missing.”
Spearheading with more discursive intensity the unglamorous side of ecstasy is an Oklahoma presence even more beached than the French gold-diggers, a Latino priest who trajects amidst the city’s few streets and inevitably becomes exposed to the confusion and anguish of the protagonists. Just as Marina and Tatiana look to Neil to make everything happen for them, Father Quintana, acutely and painfully aware that life’s payoff is missing, joylessly goes about his pastoral rounds (like Bresson’s Country Priest, and like Neil when confronted by a different [ecological] set of victims) in shock and bewilderment that his confidence in being on top of the crest of original power has receded to the point of being an ongoing embarrassment. In a near trance of depression in lieu of transcending traction, inducing parishioners to offer to him their own brands of being saved, Quintana is a natural in filling out the voice-over wavelength. “You’re within me…around me… And I have no experience of you… Everywhere you touch us, and still I can’t see you! Why don’t I hold on to what I’ve found? My heart is cold…” One Sunday, with Neil and Marina in attendance but impassive, the would-be oracle drones out the message, “Jesus insists that we make a choice. You may make the wrong choice; but you’ll be forgiven…”
Apropos of a somewhat smaller choice, but redolent of the priest’s choice that is so large that, if taken with gusto, would put him out of a job, Marina, now speaking to what was once what she would have called her lover, tells him, “My visa has expired. We need to face the facts.” His silence here, not without self-criticism, is more violent than the loud quarrels. As she packs her suitcase to return to romantic Paris, she observes to herself, “If you had asked me to stay I would have.” The girls get into their lift to the airport, and not a word is spoken. The deadness of Neil’s presence, in giving Tatiana a hug and in rushing to the back yard to watch the progress of their car, represents our purchase upon surveying the disintegration of that heavily recorded synthesis rushing over us at the film’s beginning. (In his helping pack the car, his eyes are resigned to a complex misfortune. So are theirs. This seemingly mundane moment involves, for our survey of the choices in the air, the joy brigade’s assimilation of the contingencies of misleadingly seductive romance.)
While Marina would rattle off pithy coverage like (that while beholding midway rides one night), “The world is so far away,” Neil is clearly an exponent of a range of traction that has little to do with talking. To the Wonder demands that we follow a virtual oratorio, sustained by Marina, Tatiana, Quintana (Quentin?) and some of the latter’s garrulous retainers; but it also comprises a tapestry (recall that early on the trio brings forward the Gobelin artistry) of endlessly engaging body language and wide open spaces. (Ben Affleck’s stony and yet quietly alarmed proceedings ease us into Antonioni territory.)
We receive a windfall, in making headway with the rampant wrongness, in (after Marina’s return to “the world”) Neil’s rebounding (after a season of upgrading his haven, in the form of a more spacious residence) to another woman, an attractive young blonde who had, the previous Summer captured his attention at a public swimming pool while Marina and Tatiana were busily playing, but not so busily that Marina failed to notice, bitterly plunging underwater in a near-suicide gesture. Perhaps Marina had intuited in a flash that such a coupling could rival hers and Neil’s, along lines of a bovine defiance that would fly under the radar of that Western cordiality inferring that virtual silence and a steady job means subscribing to mainstream priorities. (The coolness of his Green World venture being just technical enough to garner assent; and the woman’s exuding some indeterminate but indigenous career easily assimilated within the region’s clearly fastidious pieties. [Quintana would also be granted carte blanche at first sight.]) Vaguely known to each other—this being the local rule rather than the exception—they meet in visiting a mutual acquaintance in the hospital, an event covered by their being together in a hallway, the better to allow attenuated factors, like the just registered invalidation of the eccentrics and the precedent of Antonioni’s La Notte, to discreetly enter the building. The new woman, Jane, promptly accompanies him to a job site (taking samples from a creek), something Marina’s implicitly proud unemployability would see as a bore. Quickly over, then, to Jane’s anything but routine profit centre, a horse ranch on the brink of receivership, which she tries to keep running in the wake of her husband’s running out in the wake of their young daughter’s death. Such a tale of woe has been, I think, designed to elicit a sharply readable sample of Neil’s toxicity. On hearing about Jane’s difficult challenge, his response is modulated in such a way as to convey both wit and underestimation. “Caught you on the right day, then…” His curiosity about her would derive from her stewardship of wild (or semi-wild) beasts, and embrace of unspoiled rangeland; his dismissiveness would speak to not being able to get over what he perceives to be obsolescent navigation. They come, by way of his van, to a herd of bison in an expanse of autumn fields. Both silently walk among them, and then mount the car’s roof as the primeval-looking creatures press closer, their shaggy hair burnished by a sunset, their breathing punctuated by their munching grass, their snorts and kicking the ground, and by the calls and wings of birds flying overhead. Soon after, perhaps seizing upon their finding something to cherish together, Jane mentions that her dad recommended the Book of Romans, and its theme, “All things work together for good,” in face of her losing her child. “It helps me,” she simply and honestly reveals. On going on to ask, “Will you pray with me?” she makes herself look in his eyes as implicated in the historically crude slaughter of the bison. “I have no faith,” he explains, his voice barely a whisper, unable to conceal his embarrassment for her. She presents her case with both business smarts and unguarded candor. “Do you know who you are?…I can’t afford to make mistakes…” Her choices are, then, conspicuously not counting on forgiveness. But the Prairie skeptic can’t get over the uncool optics of her in fact far more mature and daring venture than his.
On our seeing her at the hospital, the first things that catch our eye are her big, grey cowboy boots, in being so far from Marina’s light dancing slippers. This may rankle Neil’s tightly guarded Lone Wolf posture, but, nevertheless, the whole tenor of the strictly American vignette is palpably far more playable than the stomach-churning preciousness of the Gallic-inspired fantasy of living only for romance, awesome vacations and saving the planet. At a juncture of elation between them (in direct response to their mutual attractiveness and that of the mysteriously flaring countryside), their dance consists of his embracing her and spinning her around, her feet off the ground, not so unlike one of the rides that left Marina cold. They make love, a fleeting flutter that is keynoted by his awesome tattoos, covering his arms, shoulders and back. She says, “I trust you…I want to be your wife…” In light of that poignantly forbidding non-starter in this context, her subsequent observation reels in the investigative payload from all this picturesque sluicing. Gamely trying to assure his acutely-perceived (by her) rebelliousness, Jane (struggling not to appear plain) lets him into her mother’s take on their relationship. “Mother thinks you’re a monster. I told her I’d rather have a monster than the life I had before.” With that, there is discharged into the cinematic stream a litmus medium of Beast and Beauty—an instance of the possibility of mutually-sustained, transformative choice—derived from not only Cocteau and Surrealism and Malick’s own Badlands (with its precious, flakey Belle and her compulsively self-conscious verbiage), but also (as accentuated by an excursion showing Neil on the mission, amidst the lunar despoliation of a cement works) Antonioni’s Red Desert, particularly in its protagonist’s coming to settle for toughing out life with a husband and child whose energies are monstrously anathematic to hers. “I’d rather have a monster” reaches down to an interpersonal repertoire that represents the most challenging dimension of the phenomenality buffeting us in To the Wonder. Of course, simplistic Neil, obviously, to her, fetching around for an endgame, becomes an abscess, and Jane never gets to embark upon a spate of harmonics consisting of immeasurable horsepower. Her entrepreneurial instincts for invention and discovery (far from coherent) send out an unusually wrenching sense of loss, augmented by the beauty of the landscape (hardly a stand-alone cop-out) and the timeless insistence of the herd. Passing him, on a raw, rainy suburban sidewalk, Jane invokes her own, problematic involvement in the voice-over channel. “Walk away…” Near the end of their tenure, he gropes her and she braces herself against a tree, punching backwards to ward him off. There is a scene very like that, in Antonioni’s Il Grido (The Cry). It, too, has to do with the end of a love affair, where the man stands exposed as lacking the sophisticated instincts to evoke phenomenal traction. In this way Malick locates his work within a long reflective task. With Marina emailing him about coming back, and his penchant for cheap heroics back on track after Jane’s overextending him, the latter fires him with the hard truths, “I’m not in your view. Now I don’t think you have a life to share…You made it into nothing.”
The second stage of Neil and Marina’s road show is decidedly more harsh than the first. Even before she hits town, the inconsistencies of her story read to the effect of more a con artist than a free spirit, more a basket case than a bundle of creative energy. Now in the less sublime voice-over of voice-mail, she maintains, as she gloomily rides the Metro and looks askance toward all those clueless monthly pass holders, “Paris is dreadful…I can’t find a job…I’m away from early morning till late at night…” (So let’s rephrase that to, “I can’t find a cool job.”) She had earlier made the more direct appeal to his chivalric idealism, “I feel stripped bare…I don’t know where I’m going…” In contradistinction to that picturing of herself as absorbed by first principles, this reunion immediately becomes waterlogged in dealing with the legalities of the situation. Tatiana has gone to live with her father and his new partner. That new constellation has rescinded her being formally still married to the unchivalric brute who fathered Tatiana when Marina was seventeen, and then embarked on a career of chasing other women. Immediately after her coming to his door with her bag in hand, like a door-to-door salesperson (Neil halting in the shadows of his unlighted living room and peering distractedly toward his next piece of work), they are seen having a courthouse wedding, with four shackled convicts serving as witnesses, in the course of being reintroduced to society at large, a pathway the fastidious lovers would like to see shut down. The ceremonial stricture, to “love, honor and cherish so long as you live,” would, from one angle, be right up their alley; but a missing dimension of love, almost instantly now, turns their love nest into a prison. Showing not much more joy at their wedding than if they were paying off a parking ticket, they go on to hone separate agendas, and only sporadically revisit the overwrought intimacy that had driven them crazy the first time around. Marina, furtively going through a chest of drawers, discovers a pair of Tatiana’s ballet slippers. Pushing herself toward some sort of epiphany at this, she caresses them and turns her previously cosmic dialogue into a domestic tete a tete. We had briefly seen Tatiana on Skype, telling her Mom that it was so much fun now with Dad. Marina gushes to this vision in the Oklahoma firmament, “I feel so close to you!” Though she would continue, as before, to exude the passions of the lead in a Romantic-era story ballet, and declaim to the ether, “It’s so strong this conviction that I belong to you…” this second campaign of their Civil War is marked by vicious brawls and silent venom. Soon they are receiving marriage counselling from a figure who must have loved the cowboy sage in The Big Lebowski, insofar as he leaves them with that film’s maxim about pressing on to true wonder, which seems to be just as far over their heads and hearts as it was for the Dude. “Sometimes you eat the bear. Sometimes the bear eats you.” Very germane to that challenge of choice and perdurance is their stroll across the fairway of a golf course, on the way home from an appointment with a representative of the grating practical world, a gynaecologist who recommends removing her IUD. They come to cessation of motion (but no rest) on the lip of a bunker, and their abstracted embrace recalls the finale of La Notte. Whereas Antonioni’s protagonists stage a messy but stirring rally toward a way out of their embitterment, Marina and Neil have clearly failed to make the cut. Soon after she stages an afternoon at the EconoLodge with a repairman whose tattoo is in the form of a spider’s web, they are driving along a highway on the edge of town. Neil suddenly brakes, rushes around to the passenger’s seat, smashes the rear-view mirror (pointlessly looking to what they left behind), drags her out and roars off, leaving her standing there, only to turn around and pick her up again, just as the protagonist of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita did, apropos of a clinging girlfriend, who like Marina, makes a gesture of gobbling down sleeping pills, but, unlike her, retains a purchase upon tattered dignity. With such allusions, Malick quietly registers his misgivings about a subculture intoxicated by the misleading cogency of its departure from mainstream verities, and way too soft to make a go of it.
They opt for a church wedding, revealingly without guests, in hopes of kindling some warmth; and back in bed, with his faux-outlaw tattoos giving his deadness a slag heap impression, she asks, “What are you afraid of?” Their connection now null and void (the counsellor insists, “Don’t stop talking to people!” [as if they ever started]) and their hatred frequently going public, she marches out of a bar, spitting out to him, “You don’t have the courage to end this! It’s killing me!” Thus sifting into this bleakness, there is another look at Marina, a looking beyond her self-evidently odious demonstrativeness (powerfully tempered by the expressive beauty of actress, Olga Kurylenko) and recognition of a white-hot poetic construct (too hot for her to handle) she had forged from out of the bountiful idleness of her impetuous life. Thus the scene with an Italian-born expatriate, does not merely telegraph the latent hostility of their privileged Eurotrash vision; but it sets in relief the generally eclipsed and effectively inoperative modulation of Marina’s smash and grab approach to life. (At the latter stages here, we have a street lamp glowing deliciously at sunset, allowing this film to show common cause with Antonioni’s The Eclipse.) This high-toned interplay begins (unpromisingly) with Marina complaining, “He just goes off!” That sets off her (demonstrably remote) acquaintance’s going into an operatic screed about the absolute worthlessness of Midwesterners. “Leave while you can…while you have your beauty!” She puts her ear close to Marina’s heart and asks, “Dead? Dead?” They walk past a fire hall and some of the less than beautiful staff sitting out front. The agent of recrimination belts out, at the top of her lungs, in Italian, “Empty lives! False!” while Marina tries to quieten her. “Listen to your heart,” she goes on. “You’re the little dreamer… You don’t need him! You need to fly! We’re gypsies! We can’t belong here!” She had, a few minutes earlier, grabbed Marina’s purse and tossed it into some shrubbery, to emphasize their obviating a market economy. Marina had protested, but had decided to stay the course, her fondest cares being on the line. Not only does this deceptively simple excursion give us a more positive view of Marina’s capacity for interpersonal nuance; but, away, for once, from Neil’s inexpressivity, it puts, with some charm, the case for an obdurate isolation calling for some form of combative resilience and ruthless self-preservation. Near the end of their walkabout, the self-styled gypsy fixes her Eurozone compatriot with a melodramatic leer and, reaching out her arms to her, sings out, “C’mon, Baby!” She pleads, “I want life to surprise me! I’m my own experiment!” Seeing that Marina is not quite onside, she tries to convey that a valid sense of desperation calls for some form of violence. “You think I’m selfish? A vampire? I want to breathe!”
During the death throes of her marriage, Marina consults Father Quintana, finding, no doubt, from him, more food for thought than the movie-buff counsellor could provide. The former’s caseload amidst Confederate flags and sublimity junkies would ready him for the broken-hearted rebel. Inconsolable sadness hopefully being lifted by a low-wattage tactician, who can, for a few seconds, make sense of his knowledge, is the treasure at the heart of Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest. The latter’s problematic severity (involving the almost immediate death of both figures) is not duplicated here. But the precedent does make a contribution, in setting in relief the current film’s vision of imprisonment (the priest spends quite a bit of time administering to inmates) where the means to wide open (but hardly easy) spaces are there for the truly, and that means bravely, loving. Just as in Bresson’s ironical outcome, the priest has an A-game and a B-game. As we listen to an instance of the latter, it is important to notice that his voice-over has to do with his own bid to overcome darkness, his being, that is, more a colleague of Marina’s than a mentor. “Flood our souls with your Spirit so completely that our lives may only be a reflection of Yours.” That passivity stands exposed as bereft of the kinetic rebellion of those would-be lovers distinguished by a mode of creativity vital for a correspondent nature. “We were made to seek You. Show us how to seek You…” is only marginally more to the point. But, as prompted by Marina’s telling him, in dismay, “We fight,” Quintana finds himself bringing into play (as much for himself as for her) a configuration of love’s primacy that outstrips both domesticity and theology. “Christ says you shall love whether you like it or not.” (In other words, the primal structure of individual consciousness features participation in a loving initiative on the part of the essence of nature, love being the keynote of sentient occurrence as intrinsically immersed in a drama of creative power. A significant part of that eternal drama would be not merely chivalrous magnanimity toward that vast precinct not effectively moved by their uncanny plenitude, but rapt affection for the reservoirs of delight implicit in sharing with them. Quintana, then, sends her on her way (a way that she had managed to illuminate [somewhat] on her own), with a precept as surprising, delighting and volatile to him as to her. “Your love has died. It perhaps is waiting to be transformed into something higher.”
At the airport, Marina tells Neil, “I want to keep your name.” Perhaps she’s thinking of a rather terrible beauty in movement from love that’s dead to love that refuses to die. (Along the way she has, as if etched in blood, prodded herself, with the presence of a beckoning she won’t abandon, “Where are we when we come there? Why not always?” Also, there is the near delirium of, “What is this cruel war?”) In an epilogue, we are shown Marina weaving herself into a scrubby Oklahoma field in unlovely light, not on tiptoes but pressing herself into its mud and going on to lick nectar from the tips of a twig. (There is, too, however, that facile dance motif, perhaps along lines of a transformative synthesis.) Love that loves us,” she whispers. “Thank you.”
