Directed by Terrence Malick. Rated PG

Less a movie than a year’s subscription to Architectural Digest crammed into a 130-minute montage, Song to Song is ostensibly set in the festival-heavy music world of Austin, Texas. But few songs are performed in the latest exercise in luxuriant shoegazing from Terrence Malick.

The imagistic flow here, again courtesy of resourceful cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, centres on Rooney Mara as a woman caught between Michael Fassbender’s powerful music producer and Ryan Gosling’s up-and-coming songwriter. Talk about your First World problems! There’s more than a whiff of white privilege to this voyeuristic tour of mansions, hotels, and private-jet Mexican vacations, hosted by young Caucasians who never need to work. Wealth is the cause of endless misery, but please don’t look away. That swimming-pool party is even more decadent than the other five!

Mara’s character—called Faye; the rest go unnamed—slept with the unlikable Fassbender dude to advance her music career, while actually digging the Gosling guy more. Despite briefly fondling a Fender, though, she never sings or plays a note. There is more live dialogue heard here than in Malick’s recent snoozers To the Wonder and Knight of Cups. But what’s uttered is improvised and uniformly banal. The usual off-screen murmuring allows the director to endlessly reshape his thin narrative—most of it shot around five years ago—in the editing booth. The difference between joy and sorrow, apparently, is mostly the product of voice-over explanation.

If I’m reading the Osterizer-on-high narrative right, the stubbly producer eventually drops Faye for a hot waitress (Natalie Portman), the stubbly songwriter meets another musician (Lykke Li) and then a ritzy Austinite (Cate Blanchett), and Faye changes things up with a glam Parisian lesbian (nonstubbly Bond veteran Bérénice Marlohe). Everyone pouts like mad.

Presumably, these A-listers keep returning to Malick hoping he’ll return to the brilliant form of 1978’s Days of Heaven. Well, he did combine classical storytelling with experimental cinema in 2011’s The Tree of Life, but now seems content to plunk pretty people against ever-shifting backdrops, the better to mug, twirl, and mock-fight their cares away. He reduces talent to its most childish elements and removes all material challenges. The sushi looks fantastic.