It turns out that Ryan Gosling‘s Lost River, which ended about 50 minutes ago, is much, much better than I expected — a wide-angle-lensed, visually inventive decrepit dream-fantasia that’s obviously been influenced by Behn Zeitlin‘s Beasts of the Southern Wild as well as David Lynch, Terrence Malick (murmuring voice-overs mixed with impressionistic visuals), John Carpenter‘s Escape From New York and you-tell-me-what-else. The film may not be 100% successful but at least Gosling errs on the side of wild-ass imagination. Some journos hated it (“show-offy,” “pretentious”) and there was a definite mixture of boos and cheers when the closing credits began to roll, but I know a formidable envelope-pusher when I see it. Director-writer-producer Gosling and dp Benoit Debie have really come up with a ruined realm of their own — part Tobacco Road, part urban wasteland, part psychedelia — and a lot of it is very cool to gaze upon and…I don’t know, get lost in. Oh, the meditative muck and sprawl of it all!
Lost River star Iain De Caestecker.
Ryan Gosling during last summer’s filming of
Lost River.
Set in some kind of verdant, overgrown, foreclosed-upon urban shithole pockmarked with abandoned homes and rundown buildings (and shot near Detroit), Lost is really out there and a lot of it (okay, most of it) is driven by what could politely be called dream logic. That’s a nice way of saying some of it doesn’t make a lot of basic sense. There are mentions of a collapsed economy and a woman having taken out a home loan that she shouldn’t have so it’s obviously a post-2008 realm. There are predatory creeps roaming around like the feral bad guys in Robocop, and there are little pockets of normality and decency and respect for life and property. There are things that happen every so often without apparent motivation but with films like this you have to roll with the imaginative flow.
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