Anmeldelse: «Knight of Cups» – Dagbladet.no

FILM: Something happens to famous character actors as they plunge into one of director Terrence Malick later films. They get this this hazy, absent, unhappy gaze, keeping it firmly fixed on nothing. Sean Penn had it in ‘Tree of Life’, Christian Bale slips into the same mode in the “Knight of Cups”.

Probably it is designed to act as soulful. It goes quickly over to serve as the standard expression of someone who takes his soul a little too seriously.

“Knight of Cups” is strangely immature to be made of such an experienced man. Bale plays scriptwriter Rick, a walking forty årskrise in Armani who goes around and wonder how it could be that he does not feel anything, despite comet career in Hollywood, sports car, designer clothes, party invitations, and the series of blinding beautiful women standing and tripper after getting up in his bed.

Women trappings

during two hours he goes six of them, ex-wife (Cate Blanchett ), a married woman he had an affair with (Natalie Portman), a stripper who leeks “there is something dark in you” from the edge of the stage (Teresa Palmer), a model with extremely low at heart (Freida Pinto), an artist sprout with pink hair (Imogen Poots) and a wide-eyed innocence (Isabel Lucas).

They laugh and laugh, take small pirouettes in flowing dresses and sending flirtatious glances across party premises. They do not say much, but when they speak, often of breath voiceover, it’s invariably about Rick. “You will not have love, you will have experience of love,” whispered one of them, whatever that means.

Now there is nothing wrong in showing that men like to look at pretty ladies. It has been told that it happens all the time. But it gets boring Dorge to showcase this without any distance, without adding an analytical or emotional level, as for example done in Paolo Sorrentino’s similar and far better “The great beauty.”

But neither of Rick or director are women much more than decoration, mystery, and flickering opportunities for male salvation. In the memories of his bases those in snow-white linens and toys laughing on the waterfront. There are moments when “Knight of Cups” reminiscent of an artsy commercial for an online dating site, where conditions look like something that is exclusively for people who do not have jobs and who never have to go home to change after they have spontaneously plunged into the Pacific Ocean.

Pretty self-pity

it happens between Rick and other men are marginally more interesting than what happens between him and women. He has a bull by a father (Brian Dennehy), a brother (Wes Bentley) with flickering gaze, a past drug addict and a love for boxing to random objects he goes past. It suggests a father complex and unresolved feelings of grief and guilt associated with the third brother’s suicide.

But every time Rick approaching this in the memories and scenes look as if they are about to buy something, snap him back to the present and to the next form consummate woman cradles in front of him on the sidewalk. Here no coherent story true Almighty mood.

self-pity has at least one glorious package. Malick and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki gives Los Angeles more soul than treating some of the people who live there. Some sequences are mesmerizing, as it slowly image of dogs that plunges after tennis balls into the pool, filmed from below while the large, eager mouths gulp for something they never get hold of. They flounder in the same way as Rick, but they are easier to get sympathy.