Last year when Ryan Gosling premiered his directorial debut Lost River at Cannes Film Festival, the chorus of boos, ridicule and cynical derision flooded the post-screening tweets and reviews. "Crapocalypse", some succinctly quipped, plus "insufferably conceited" and "folie de grandeur". Referring to Gosling's previous film as an actor, critic Jonathan Romney tweeted: "Let's see [if] God forgives this."
A scene from Lost River.
Next Thursday, Bangkok audiences will see for themselves when Lost River opens in a limited release here. In the US, the distributor was so unconfident that it initially planned the film only for video on demand, before opting for a limited theatrical release in New York and Los Angeles last month. It went largely under the radar.
The hostile reaction against the film at last year's Cannes has grounds. It is also exaggerated, in my view, and carried away by the storm of whiplashing emotion (a sport at big film festivals, especially Cannes). Lost River is a mess, no doubt about it, a lurid, pretentious, acid-fuelled circus of grotesquerie set in a decaying town — Detroit, or Lost River in the story — populated by thugs and degenerates. The art direction veers between the desolate, abandoned housing estate — America's post-industrial bad dream — and a faux-Surrealist, gooey nightclub where weird things happen inside. The whole thing doesn't make much sense, and the air of self-seriousness compounds the sense that Gosling takes himself and his Midwest Gothic too much to the unpleasant extreme.
Still, there's a perverse pleasure to have in all of this. Not that everyone would agree, and not that Gosling succeeds in imitating the macabre vision of David Lynch and Nicolas Winding Refn, but Lost River is a madman who's aware of his own madness. There must be a point when Gosling was writing the script, or during the production or the editing, that he realised how ridiculous his baby was and yet ploughed on.
The star here is Christina Hendricks, playing Billy, a single mum in a near-deserted town in Detroit. Her teenage son, Bones (Iain De Caestecker) spends idle hours in the overgrown yards and makes friends with a teen girl Rat (Saoirse Ronan), and steps on the toe of what looks like the only gold chain-wearing bully left in the entire state, whose name is also Bully (Matt Smith).
The story, however, focuses on Billy and her descent — through the force of predatory capitalism, of course — into a kinky nightclub that offers creepy services to its rich customers (Eva Mendes, Gosling's wife, shows up as the flamboyant, bloodlust showgirl).
In all, Lost River is about the poignant fate of America's neglected corners as the rest of the country races on. With the saturated look and surreal set-up, Gosling has chosen a style that heightens, and at the same time trivialises, the real story he's trying to tell. That decision has backfired, but it also shows that he set out with some kind of cinematic conviction. God wouldn't forgive this, but we should. And flawed as it is, Lost River still makes me want to see its director making another film.
