Badlands

Terrence Malick, USA, 1974, 90 minutes

Recalling her experiences in the style of the teenage magazines she's always reading, Holly (Sissy Spacek) tells us how she fell for a 25 year old garbage collector called Kit (Martin Sheen). How when her father (Warren Oates) opposed the idea of their relationship, Kit shot him. And how after burning the house down they set of across the badlands of Montana towards the mountains of Saskatchewan, · leaving a trail of not-quite-motiveless murders in their wake.

Around the simple story and the familiar material Malick creates an atmospheric, poetic and totally American folk-tale which makes compelling viewing because he refuses to explain the pathology of his protagonists' crimes. Holly's naive voice-over is almost unconnected to the images - beautifully photographed by Tak Fujimoto - and the dialogue is separate again. One of Badlands' major themes is the blurring of the boundary between truth and fiction; Kit and Holly are living out their fantasies (which seem to hinge on Kit's imitation of James Dean in Giant) in a very real world. Their return to nature and their time-to-time killing denote them as just bored teenagers with nothing to do. It is a comment on the culture that made and broke them.

The obvious comparisons with Bonnie And Clyde and The Sugarland Express are pointless since Malick's technique owes more to Hitchcock and Orson Welles than to his contemporaries. By keeping nostalgia to a minimum he gives us the impression that we too are living in a fairy tale. Badlands is a haunting study of a psychopath and remains one of the most impressive debuts ever.

Review by Stephen Cox
Taken from EUFS Programme 1994-95