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Badlands (1973)
"Badlands" REVIEW
"Badlands" is a quite straight story about how person can be under influence of another one. It takes quite long time for our main character, who is a naïve young girl Holly (brilliantly played by Sissy Spacek), to get enough experience and knowledge to understand the fact that what she has been doing with her "boyfriend" wasn't so good. But trip which they have made really helped Holly to explore the world and human soul, because all her life she was under her father's supervision, who tried to hide her from any "danger" of everyday life. And her house which was burnt to the ground may symbolize the ending of the old life and the beginning of something new and unknown.
She is also very full in herself, we may see it on the screen, and the fact that she is the narrator of the story also can say that she likes to remember and reanalyze her past, again and again. Most of the story she is just the witness and the passenger of this story, but at the end she takes situation in her arms, which means that she has had the really huge development of her character. She made a transfer from weak and naïve to self-confident and strong-minded.
Holly's contrast is her "boyfriend" Keith (played by Martin Sheen). During the film he does not learn anything, he continues doing reckless actions out of the blue and endangering himself and Holly. He is her ballast, pulling her to the bottom and destroying her fate with his every new trick. He thinks that he is doing everything to save her which is not true. But as he said at the beginning of the movie he will let her go if she wants to, and he keeps the word. By the way, we can tell him thank you because he showed the whole new world to Holly beyond their small town in South Dakota.
And at the end I want to emphasize the beauty of the movie. Terrence Malic is an extraordinary artist with his own style of filming. Every scene is so aesthetic that I couldn't look away during watching. And the soundtrack is so good, too. It adds an amazing atmosphere to this great story depicting the mood of the characters and scenes as a whole.