Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights. Bleak and marrow-bare.  Beautiful. Jesus. I wanted to cry, and I did. Wasn’t sure if I would be able to without music — music like nothing else gives me feelings, and explains why anyone can even watch, say, The Hills — but it turns out that brutal love, well-played, needs no strings. This or Melancholia is my favourite of TIFF. Probably this. I need to see it as many times as I’ve seen Fish Tank, now.

People said that I would love Another Earth, and I wanted to, but I felt like something was missing, or maybe it was just that I didn’t cry. I went alone and so crushingly tired that I fell asleep, in snatches, and my snatched dreams were set to the dialogue on-screen, or my in-head voices drifted over the film, and the whole effect was like being on tranquilizers. There is one scene of Brit Marling cutting pink flowers with her falling hair that looks so Tumblr.

Yesterday I went to see Gena Rowlands talk about her late man John Cassavetes. She’s 81 and looks fantastic. She talked for a long time in a long-gravel-road voice. There’s a Cassavetes retrospective on at the Lightbox here, that’s why all of this happened. Anyway. The host asked what drew her to John. She said “first of all, he was beautiful.” Then she said she liked the way he thought about life, and about work, and about life. 

To hear her talk about him, and then to see them as one on screen, you think well maybe they were naturals at love.

Still from Faces via toutlecine.com

So then I went to see Terence Malick’s Tree of Life with my brother, the only person I know who understands religion like I do, for obvious reasons. We saw it at the Lightbox, a sort of corporate arthouse cinema with proper seats and thick velvet curtains. It’s the respectful thing to do. Malick has made five films in thirty-eight years and this is the fifth, which you probably knew.

I won’t tell you what happened, in case you haven’t seen it, and you will see it, if not soon, then inevitably, because this film is our 2001: A Space Odyssey. It is that painfully epic and overreaching and beautiful. So fucking legit beautiful. Each blade of grass dazzles like the Hope Diamond. Each second is a symphony. It’s just that Malick takes every shot as though it’s his last. Ever. I left the theatre sobbing in a rush and my brother left laughing like he was stoned, and also feeling like he should have been, but we agreed on that. Could be the last film ever made. Could be Malick thinks he’s God.

Later I said I needed to watch it again on some kind of drug so I could understand it, but the frightening thing is I understood it perfectly. It’s more like needing to do shrooms or something just to deal with it.