GUS VAN SANT'S LAST DAYS

 

The time displacement in Last Days is familiar from Elephant, the second in Gus Van Sant’s morbid trilogy, of which Last Days is the third and the culmination.  From time to time, the viewer is shaken from the ingrained impression of watching a linear progression of time when the film stumbles onto a scene they have already seen from a different angle and/or in more or less detail.  The film can be said to start at a point that is before where it ends up, but the more it is thought about, the more difficult it is to definitively said what happened when, where to locate the before and after.  It is not a puzzle to solve or any such gimmick, but only a fact of the film’s universe, which is heavily influenced by chemical suicidal depression.

Also familiar from Elephant and the first of the trilogy, Gerry, are the sometimes long duration of shots and/or between words.  Van Sant is bold in this respect; the meditative narcotic effect is invigorating, almost a throwback to the glory days of Antonioni, when film lovers bristled to long frames of inaction, maps of unlife, ellipses.  If a song can maintain but a flimsy narrative propelled by a feeling or lack thereof for more than three minutes, then why not a shot in a movie?

Jean-Luc Godard has made a few great films and several infuriating and/or awful ones, but has never failed to be a source of amusing, provocative, sloganeering soundbites, including the infamous “every edit is a lie.”  Of course, the restraint of edits becomes its own lie, manipulating and guiding the viewer in a less didactic way.  Last Days contains more longer shots than most films seen nowadays, forcing the viewer to interact with and interpret the material in an unfamiliar way, and like the suggested gore of Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the presence of this element creates the psychic impression that there is much more of it than there actually is.  Van Sant’s recent films are not confrontational parlor tricks like Andy Warhol’s unwatchable Sleep, but rather he wields the confidence of a long shooter like Stanley Kubrick or Todd Haynes, with a brave musician’s sense of how long a shot can be held to create the correct, uncanny impression.

The film and its distant protagonist are locked into a mindset, a soundscape, an unstoppable groove.  It is just too bad this groove is undoubtedly locked into drug stupor and suicide.  The protagonist desperately flees the linearity of conversation and interaction, the imposition of time onto his hazy stupor.  The global perceptions and expectations of this lost soul in the woods are distant ghosts, indicated by fuzzy telephone voices and detached television monitors which the protagonist is wanly unresponsive to.

Of course it sounds rather pretentious (starting to hate that word and how it suits my writing style…) and dour, but Last Days is not without a sense of humor.  This may be my bias given my belief that most of the films I love are at least somewhat comedic, even if in the Simpsonsesque definition of comedic trauma as “traumedy.”  Life is sad and enough to despair, but life is beautiful and enough to laugh.  The classic clipart masks co-exist and affirm the reality of one another.  Even in this bare account of the few days before grim, self-imposed death, there is a humor to the protagonist’s flight, evoking with his trusty gun nobody more than Elmer Fudd if he were running away from rabbits.

The impassiveness of Van Sant’s camera (realized by Harris Savides, whose work in Van Sant’s recent films qualifies him for the pantheon of great lensmen) in many conspicuous shots creates the illusion and misdirection of perceived omniscience, not unlike the point of view of modern angels in Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire, mostly unable to intervene, only able to sadly observe the display and loss of humanity.  This distracts from the great interest (that registers subliminally) the camera takes in many of its subjects.  The reasons for this interest, in the explanatory story sense, are at best hinted at, leaving an ambiguity that serves only to draw the viewer further into a portrait in which the primary subject is the least coherent and understood.

George Mèlies, the magician, may have been the first artist of film, and the best of film is masterful command of illusion and misdirection to create a resonating, unforgettable feeling in the audience.  It is a hint as to Van Sant’s interest in this intention that, among a cast of nepotistic, onanistic, incestuous film world kids and subterranean pop stars (Lukas Haas, Asia Argento, Harmony Korine, Kim Gordon…), he included the David Mamet-approved legendary magician Ricky Jay.

Actually, the clearest the subject speaks are in the few musical sequences (which Michael Pitt, in a transcendent, invisible portrayal, wrote and performed himself).  As he mumbles and barely responds through his limited interactions with people who care about him and want to help him, want his money and luxury, or to ramble incoherently about Dungeons and Dragons to him, the only occasions he expresses himself coherently and we might get a tangible grasp on his emotion.

Van Sant masterfully frustrates/entices the viewer by leaving the inevitable event of the film offscreen, suggesting it artfully and subtly in a way that is probably the most blatantly, decisively artistic moment of the film, especially considering the protagonist’s direction.  The film continues, however, in a way that is true and fails to accept the temptation of pat memorializing.  After a retrospectively amazing string of classics and a Hollywood period that was better and more interesting than most sellout eras, Gus Van Sant’s recent triumphs, including the masterpiece that is Last Days solidifies his status as one of the greatest living filmmakers.