MY FAVORITE LOVE FILM EVER : "THE NEW WORLD"

Films like this made me start this blog up. No kidding. No caricaturizing. I mean it. Watching films like this, and then wanting to shout it from the rooftops, wanting to stop random people in the street and tell them how good the film is. I didn’t get the fuss about Terrance Malik before. Well to be fair I only watched Badlands. It was impressive but nowhere near on a scale with this… This leviathan. It is all about brilliant filmmaking marrying a brilliant story here. I would have said the filmmaking has a slightly larger part but on reflection this isn’t true. Because this brilliant true story needs to be told in its original form, because we do know it quite well but rarely do we know the whole, true thing. We are talking, ladies and gents, about the true story of Pochahontas. Now, one side note. Some of you may be a little surprised at this point. Yes, Pochahontas (played by the beautiful Q'oranika Kilcher) was a real person, as was Captain Smith (played here by Colin Farrel). As was their love affair. The settlers arrived on American shores at their wits end in the early 17th century. There was sickness, mutiny and very little hope as to the establishment of the colony. Captain John Smith was a career soldier and quite high ranking it is true, but he was by no means “the boss” he is made out to be in the cartoons and the like, or so it seems. He is however instrumental in the survival of that first little colony and in the dealings with the “naturals” as they seem to be called back then. And in the course of these dealings (I refuse to give too much away) the love affair between Pochahontas, the native American princess and Captain Smith blossoms. And it is beautiful, the discovery of true love, the forest, nature, communicating without words. But what then? What later? I will leave it to you to discover that. Trust me, it is nothing like the cartoon. I have to point something out. Some of you will not like the end. No, not one little bit. But I loved it. That ending made this categorically one of my favorite films ever, and I mean ever. I cried buckets. Buckets. All I will say is I strongly believe that John Rolfe (played by Christian Bale - no, I haven’t mentioned him above, watch the film and find out) deserved what he got. He suffered and fought for that happiness, that resolution. It would be a heart-rending shame if the story had ended in any other way. The very, very end is sad of course but neither here nor there. So there. Another thing I didn’t quite get before watching this film is “poetic” filming. Poems are poems and films are films and forcing the two together does not sound like the wisest of ideas to me. Err, wrong. Very wrong. The images Malik’s camera captures, the narration that is superimposed… The originality of the work of the film from beginning to end… Words cannot describe it. Having various images on screen with an external narrator in the background may not sound like the most riveting way to go about describing emotions. “Oh” , you might say, “he did that because he couldn’t have it in the film”. Wrong. He did it because he could do that kind of thing very, very well. I can think of no better way of portraying the inner thoughts of the characters. The text they narrate is pure literature. Yes, apparently the two go very well together. I am now in the small band that cannot wait for Malik’s next film. As you may know, he goes for quality rather than quantity. But hey, obviously it is worth the wait. In the meanwhile, I shall go and root out the rest of his films. I will keep you posted, naturally.