La Balade sauvage

Is it really possible that this luminous masterpiece is a first feature film? It is as though Mozart had started his career in composition with one of his mature symphonies. What is totally special about 'Badlands' is the visual control that Terrence Malick applies to the story, and his use of fabulous music to embed his amazing images in our mind. The 'Bonnie & Clyde'-ish story could have been turgid, but Malick turns it into a mythic journey.

At the heart of Malick's method is the fabulous interior monologue by Holly explaining and ironically commenting on the story. "Kit made me take my schoolbooks so I wouldn't fall behind with my studies...". This has been characteristic of each of Malick's films - Linda in 'Days of Heaven' and Witt in 'The Thin Red Line' have somewhat similar monologues - and 'New World' is monumentalised by the haunting monologue/montage with which it ends. Here it totally sucks the viewer into the story and makes the montages that it accompanies into, just about, the high-point of seventies cinema.

Alongside this, Malick uses some of the most haunting music in existence. Whether it is Carl Orff or Nat King Cole, Malick transports us with fabulous romantic imagery that perfectly balances it.

I started on this comment determined not to use the word 'poetry', but I just can't avoid it. With nearly all filmmakers, including very great ones, the style that they present is very much prose - great prose, perhaps, but firmly rooted on the ground. With Malick, we are taken, emotionally, to the stars by the lyric magnificence of the totality of his vision.

It is said that Welles learned cinema by watching John Ford's 'Stagecoach' before embarking on 'Citizen Kane'. Every young filmmaker should watch this amazing masterpiece again and again and again and inform their work with Malick's matchless sense of true cinema.

Surely one of the most brilliant films ever made. The haunting music and cinematography would almost suffice by itself. The hero is little more than a child: the heroine his willing accomplice, and we are made to question what is good and what is evil by seeing the world through the eyes of children. From the moment when the girl's father shoots her dog to punish her, we lose any loyalty to traditional values or to the rights of parents over their children. By the end, it's obvious to us that society doesn't value the lives of those who were killed. It anticipates Natural Born Killers, but perhaps says more and uses a tighter structure.

Brilliantly acted and directed, with many layers to it. A film to watch again and again.

BADLANDS is an intelligent little film. We're given characters and situations and left to make our own conclusions. Based on an actual young couple who went on a killing spree across the southwest in the late 1950s, the story has two young people doing their own thing with precious little in the way of ethics to guide them. It's interesting to note that both these kids substitute their own fantasies for any sense of order or responsibility that society may have to offer. The turning point comes when Kit and Holly decide to shuck their semblances of normal life for whatever their fantasies provide which, unfortunately, can't sustain them. Sheen's Kit is full of swagger and bravado; it's almost easy for someone to see him committing robberies and serial murders. Spacek's Holly is more intriguing: a soft, vanilla, invisible girl from a respectable, emotionally detached home, she seemingly possesses little in the way of what one would associate with a violent criminal. Yet, she accompanies Kit, with nothing in the way of reservations or regret. The chance to fulfill her vapid, movie magazine fantasies, if only by hiding out in the woods and applying makeup, seem infinitely more palatable than her dull existence twirling batons in her yard(it's interesting to note that one of the few things she takes away from her home is a highly romanticized, Maxfield Parrish print). These misguided illusions, along with her adolescent love for Kit, keep her going to the end. A worthwhile exploration of the bland, vacant American sensibility that values appearances or passive, benign behavior over real ethics and personal morality. And definitely more relevant as the years have passed.

Badlands is a dark 1970s existential road oddity through the Badlands of the midwest with fugitive Kit and his 15 crush Holly. The story, which is set in the 1950s, seems to exist in a fairytale, and this element is one of the reasons I love this film. The film is mostly spoken through the internal monologue of Holly, delivering the film as a tale or fable. She encounters a war veteran who collects garbage, a man with images of grandeur, who has nothing to live for and nothing to lose. When the two social misfits hit it off, her protective father disapproves and kills her dog, bags it and dumps it into the river as punishment; a rather drastic measure. It does go some way to explain why Holly, who we must remember is 15, seems to be benevolent to the actions of Kit when he starts to murder people who pose a threat to Holly and their survival. Both father and lover seem to resort to vicious, violent acts to protect her. He naivete does not survive the whole film though, as she tires of their time on the road, she dreams of the man she will marry, what he looks like, and where he might be right now.

While it is important to note that the film was inspired by the real-life serial killer Charles Starkweather and his lover-or captive-Caril Fugate', one should not assume the script is a retelling of their story. Malick does not reference them in the movie, and it must be said Charles Starkweather's story was more horrific in every detail. Badlands is more a coming of age story for Holly, a fall from grace for Kit, and the fairytale they lived in the moments in between.

I must admit that I adore the dialogue from this film, the subtle interactions, often littered with dark humour, and an air of altruism fill the film with a poetry that is complemented by the exquisite imagery of the Badlands, nature and the most incredible shot of Martin Sheen holding his rifle over this shoulder as the sun sets. The soundtrack further accents the mood of the film, bringing the entire atmosphere to one that envelopes you.

In January, 1958, nineteen-year-old Charles Starkweather and fourteen-year-old Caril Ann Fugate went on a murder spree in Nebraska and Wyoming. Eleven innocent people died. Most, though not all, of the killings were random. Starkweather and Fugate's story "inspired" several films, including this one.

In "Badlands", the pair's names were changed to Kit Carruthers (Martin Sheen) and Holly Sargis (Sissy Spacek), and their ages were altered slightly. From what I have read, Starkweather and Fugate were emotionally detached and casual about the killings, especially Charles, once the initial murders had occurred. Both Sheen and Spacek do a good job of mimicking this nonchalant attitude. At various points throughout the film, Holly narrates the story in an emotionless, monotone voice. It's like she's reading a diary of what happened as we, the viewers, watch movie footage of the events.

The film's title is appropriate, given that the characters' inner lives must surely have been wastelands, and given that the film's plot takes place mostly outdoors, on the lonesome High Plains, with its brooding and "stark" landscape.

The film's color cinematography conveys a mood of desolation, especially in those scenes that contain little more than the horizon, expansive blue sky, treeless plains, and a couple of lonely desperados. At one point, the color morphs into sepia-tinted images of small town America, as the whole country, in fear, takes up arms against the fugitives, a photographic change that renders an almost documentary tone to the film.

From time to time, classical background music accompanies the senseless violence, a cinematic contrast so "stark" as to make the film surreal. And, of course, the sequence toward the end where Kit and Holly, with car radio on, dance in the headlights as Nat King Cole sings "A Blossom Fell", is truly mournful and haunting.

"Badlands" is incredibly understated and low-key, as detached as the characters portrayed. Director Terrence Malick conveys a simple, uninvolved story, packaged in a film that makes no effort to communicate either symbolism or thematic depth. Nor does the film render judgments about the characters or events. It's an approach that probably wouldn't work today. But it is effective, and through the years the film has gradually become more respected as an excellent character study of 1950's teen rebels without a cause.