Something to watch tonight: Thursday 23 May

A Hidden Life (Malick, 2020)

They don’t make much of a song and dance about it because their bread and but­ter remains fran­chises and brands, but if you want to stream some prop­er films there are lots to choose from on Disney+.

I was lucky enough to review Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life for RNZ’s At the Movies back in February 2020 and I opened the seg­ment with one of my favour­ite lines:

No one makes film like Terrence Malick and no one makes films like Terrence Malick makes films.

The script for that review was nev­er turned into a web page so there’s only an audio ver­sion at the link. Here are some highlights:

A HIDDEN LIFE pays more atten­tion to nar­rat­ive than most of his recent films. For the most part the things you see in the film hap­pen in the order you see them. But thereby hangs both a strength and a weak­ness of a film that exults and exhausts you in equal measure.

It’s based on the life of a real per­son – Austrian farm­er Franz Jägerstätter who was a con­scien­tious object­or dur­ing World War II and who has been declared a mar­tyr by the Catholic Church for his pass­ive res­ist­ance to the Nazis. Malick is a spir­itu­al film­maker but it is rare for him to deal with reli­gion and a spe­cif­ic faith in quite this way.

…

The strengths of this beau­ti­ful and deeply felt film are what you might call Malick-ian. A hand-held or Steadicam cam­era, close to the action but with a wide-angle lens to ensure that the sub­jects are always seen in con­text. Movement is often not rehearsed and takes are long so that the move­ment of the cam­era and act­ors can seem like a kind of dance between them.

Refer a friend

Some sequences in A HIDDEN LIFE are as beau­ti­ful as any­thing Malick has shot before – the Alpine land­scape con­trast­ing with the shabby greys of the Berlin pris­on – and there are sequences of the har­vest that reminded me of Malick’s 1978 mas­ter­piece DAYS OF HEAVEN.

…

A HIDDEN LIFE was shot in 2016 and Malick spent two years in post-production before it premiered at last year’s Cannes Film Festival. This means that the appear­ance of Michael Nyqvist (who died in 2017) and Bruno Ganz (who passed last year) is also jar­ring and mov­ing in equal meas­ure. For both of those great European act­ors, A HIDDEN LIFE is their final screen appearance.

Also in that epis­ode of At the Movies, I reviewed the WWII epic Midway and Adam Sandler’s acclaimed per­form­ance in the Safdie Bros.’ Uncut Gems.

Where to watch xxxx

Aotearoa, Australia, Canada, Ireland and UK: Streaming on Disney+

USA: Streaming on Fubo or FXNow

Further reading

In New Zealand, the French Film Festival Aotearoa com­mences next week. I got to pre­view three of the 24 fea­tures in the fest­iv­al for RNZ: The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan (Les trois mous­quetaires : D’Artagnan), The President’s Wife (Bernadette) and The Crime is Mine (Mon crime).

By the way, RNZ have said they don’t want phys­ic­al media reviews any longer – “a niche of a niche”. Would any­one mind if I dropped a few more DVD/Blu-ray/UHD recom­mend­a­tions in here? I’m try­ing to hold back the tide, I know, but sil­ver discs are still the best way to watch anything.