"What is a movie that blew you away recently?"

A film that challenges what film can be.

Hey—I’m Mohnish Soundararajan, a filmmaker in Portland, Oregon, the director and screenwriter of the upcoming ‘Monochrome’, and a member of Desert Island Studios.

Knight of Cups

Question: so, what is a movie that blew you away recently?

Answer: Recently, my sister—after reading a draft of Monochrome, a film I’m working on that’s currently in development (if you’re interested, email me)—said you have to check out the work of Terrence Malick.

I’ve never seen a Terrence Malick film—besides Badlands—but she was referring to his newer, more experimental work—where he threw out all the rules, all the narrative functions that normal storytelling employs. She said check out a film; it’ll be worth your time.

There’s a moment in the novel I’ve been reading, Lust for Life—an autobiographical novel of Vincent Van Gogh—where his brother takes him and shows him impressionism for the first time. If you don’t know, impressionism looks like this:

Claude Monet, Woman with a Parasol – Madame Monet and Her Son.

It is wavy lines, impressions, snippets of color, that build, create an image that feels like it has an inner aliveness.

And yet everything Van Gogh knew at the time—everything he had studied, understood, was taught, all the technique, the counsel, all the advice he’d gotten from other people—was not like Impressionism. It looked like normal painting—a painting that simply tries to reproduce the image it seeks to make. An image where the air is ‘dead space.’

For a moment, Van Gogh looks up at the paintings, stunned into silence. All his life, he was told painting could be one way. And then, looking at the painting above him—he saw it was this way. He saw that painting could be something completely different—something he didn’t even really understand.

After being silent for some time, his brother, Theo, says to him:

“Vincent,” he said. “I know how you feel. Stunned. It’s tremendous, isn’t it? We’re throwing overboard nearly everything that painting has held sacred.”

Vincent’s small, hurt eyes caught Theo’s and held them.

“Then, why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t I know?”

This is exactly how I felt after watching Knight of Cups—which by the way, holds a 47% score on Rotten Tomatoes. Some people hate it; other people love it—are enamored with it, and think it is one of the most beautiful films they’ve ever seen.

Here’s what I think: to everyone that didn’t like—you’re out of your fucking mind.

The movie does what I have never, truly, ever seen before: it throws the rulebook out completely. There is no narrative, and yet—transfixed, lyrical, beautiful—the film aims directly at the human soul.

Most films are indirectly about the human spirit—the events are the primordial thing, the spirit is the texture and the by-product that comes out of it.

This film is the opposite: the soul comes first. The film directly, and repeatedly, comments on it—its warping, its shape. The film—the impressions, what the characters do, everything—comes second, stems from the first. The soul is the trunk, the leaves are the events—and they float in the wind. It was unlike anything I have ever seen, and I was stunned.

Knight of Cups

The protagonist (played by Christain Bale) transverses through a world of pleasure and paradise—and yet, from the voiceover, to the form the entire film takes (it is the closest to Impressionism I’ve ever seen within the film format), there is a deep emptiness to everything under the facade that it showcases.

Instinctually, we all—I believe—have a desire for this life. This is natural; a part of us. We find it attractive—the parties, the beauty, the indulgence, the high-status nature of it. It is the life that seeks to enamor and dive into the external metrics—status, fame, sex, beauty, money, looks—and a part of us wants to seek refuge in it, seek solace in.

We know, intellectually, that a life that consists on this alone can be devoid of soul—or maybe we don’t—and yet, we’re also pulled by it, enamored by it, deeper parts of us left wanting for it.

Knight of Cups

Knight of Cups was a film that spoke to this dilemma and cut right to the core: there is an emptiness (an emptiness I have felt myself) to this life, a life lived away from matters of what the spirit really wants for their life, for what the spirit—the Self—really wants to fill itself up in this lifetime. For what the proverbial True Self—the deep self, the self inside you that feels, truly, what it wants for it’s life—knows.

Spiritual, lyrical, profound, it is a beautiful film that left a lasting impression on me—not just “oh, that’s a great movie”, but a movie that actually shifted my psyche, my outlook, my perspective—something that many books and movies fail to routinely do.

It was so good, in fact, that I put one of the opening quotes up on my wall (when you hear “King of the East”, it’s that one)—that’s how much I loved it, so powerful the experience was of hearing that quote on first watch. Instinctually, I just knew—somewhere beyond language—what it meant, with the sense of something “hitting” you right in the soul.

Later, I dove into philosophy that was directly related to the film itself, and bought the book The Sickness Unto Death by Søren Kierkegaard, so inspired I was by the film that I was curious about potential philosophical influences that bore into the film itself.

The film is riveting: in style, in its subversiveness, and left me stunned. Nearly into silence. And I couldn’t recommend it enough.

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