Days of Heaven....................what a masterpiece.
A visually stunning film - with Oscar-winning cinematography by Nestor Almendros, and Haskell Wexler - Days of Heaven resonated with me deeply, and made me so emotionally invested in the film, I found myself thinking about it for days after.
After accidentally killing his boss in a Chicago factory, steelworker Bill (Richard Gere) flees with his girlfriend Abby (Brooke Adams) and younger sister Linda (Linda Manz) to work as harvesters on a wheat field owned by wealthy farmer (Sam Shepard).
"A love triangle, a swarm of locusts, a hellish fire - Malick captures it all with dreamlike authenticity, creating at once a timeless American idyll and a gritty evocation of turn-of-the-century labor." - The Criterion Collection
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| Sam Shepard |
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| Brooke Adams, Richard Gere and Linda Manz |
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| The harvest prayer |
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| 17-year-old Linda Manz, full of charisma, perfectly portrays the young sister |
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| The farmer's manor, which was built for the film, looms over the landscape |
After hearing of the farmer's terminal illness, Bill convinces Abby, who is posing as his sister, to marry the wealthy farmer in order to inherit his estate. Of course, things don't go entirely to plan, and the gradual sense of foreboding is built expertly by the score composed by Ennio Morricone, juxtaposed with the beautifully photographed stillness of the rural landscape.
The film charts the imposing nature of modernity and mechanization on the rural lifestyle, and the attention to detail to capture the daily movements of the natural landscape is breathtaking.
From the project's initial creation, Malick dreamed of crafting it to be like "a drop of water on a pond, that moment of perfection".
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| A fantastic sequence of a locust plague which sweeps the farm |
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