Malick's latest contribution to film, "To the Wonder", has been said to be inspired by the Song of Songs. Having spent the last several years immersed in the poetic of the Song of Songs, I would have to agree. It breathes the same air. I heard only the slightest reference in the screen play to the text per se, but the sense of it, the imagery, the emotion especially, the despair, longing, yearning, failures, rawness, heights, passions, darkness, flame, (and its quenching), and existential elements such as life and death, this was all so very much framed by the Song. Particular cross overs that signalled to me a very rich reading of the Song of Songs was the privileging of the created world ... sunsets, fields, birds in flight, horses, buffaloes on the plains seemed to be as important as the human players. The hero's failures to communicate, his absences, his lack, his coldness, his aspect which seemed trapped inside is not alien to the Song of Songs where the lover is both present and absent, in parts of the text, fails in his suit in others. In this way I felt the Song of Songs and Malick's To the wonder, tells the truth and not the fantasy often presented. The film, To the wonder, is cool and silent, where the Song bursts with heat and colour, and yet even in this perceived conflict I believe Malick and believed his reading. The film was a wonder and I don't regret a moment of it.
"no one can turn film into a vehicle for illumination as Terrence Malick does" -Pico Iyer
http://harpers.org/blog/2013/04/terrence-malicks-song-of-songs/
