Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick, 1978)

Malick's second feature was the first to fully embody his signature style, with voice-over narrative giving cohesion to the plot, in which characters wander across a natural world teeming with life and quite indifferent to their concerns. When the characters are given dialogue, it is as artless and unforced as the lighting of the scenes. In Malick's later works, the inimitable style has become so accentuated that it often reaches the level of parody, the pace too languid, the words banal, but in Days of Heaven it was not only fresh but perfectly realised.
The presence of a young Richard Gere and his sullen pout as the nominally main character cannot detract from the luminosity of Néstor Almendros's painterly photography of endless prairie landscapes, the telling detail shots or the perfectly judged score. The story outline, of a dirt-poor itinerant worker persuading his lover to marry a wealthy farmer under false pretences, is minimal. But it's not governed by the laws of conventional story-telling: it's to be imbibed rather than dissected. For once, as Malick has always sought to achieve, all the spirituality and politics are conveyed by the mood, which is utterly hypnotic.

8/10