RYAN’S ‘RIVER’ RUNS DEEP
Ryan Gosling turns director and gets his dystopia on, writes Kavish Chetty
Lost River
IT is clear from Lost River that Ryan Gosling is ambling down the same shadowed path favoured by Shia LaBeouf and James Franco. Each was birthed in the maw of the Hollywood star machine, and each has mounted a postmodern rebellion against his pretty-boy archetype.
Gosling’s film is a cascade of dreamy images, a fantasia in which the presence of David Lynch lurks alongside that of Nicholas Winding Refn (who directed him in Drive and Only God Forgives). It may cannibalise the masters of spooky cinema, but it’s equally indebted to Tumblr, a world in which filtered and colour-saturated surfaces bring a glamour to the most morbid of subjects.
Lost River is the name of a slowly-emptying neighbourhood whose houses are being torn down and burned. A mint-green clapboard house stands amid the dereliction. It belongs to single mother Billy (Christina Hendricks) and her two boys, Bones and Franky. The house is their beloved sanctuary, a place they will do anything to hold on to despite mounting economic pressures.
For Bones (Iain de Caestecker), this means prowling the abandoned school yards and ruined structures, gutting their innards for copper. For his mother, it amounts to taking employment at a gruesome burlesque club, where performers slit and slash at themselves, bleeding for the Sadean thrill of their gentlemen watchers. In one of its most memorably perverse scenes, Billy carves at her own porcelain face, rivulets of blood coursing down her features, and gently peels away a flap of fake flesh to reveal inner membranes.
Meanwhile, Bones develops an odd romance with the girl next door (Saoirse Ronan, above), a snot-nosed waif with silver nailpolish who can be reliably depended upon to sniff with orchestral melancholy. Bones is dogged throughout the silent arteries of the crumbling neighbourhood by Bully (Matt Smith), a violent, territorial thug who rides in a blue suede lounge-chair mounted atop a ’ 66 Cadillac Eldorado.
The plot remains swampy, and the real charm is to be found in the grim lighting, the camera eye that hangs from the vantage of a shoulder, and the phantasmagoria of colour, light and shadow.
But that said, this carefully tailored collage of compelling sights and sounds (the soundtrack by Johnny Jewel is thick with synth and bass) gives the sensation of being too self-aware, a stitched-together thing of reference and reverence.
One can feel the weight of Gosling’s anxious filmmaking. Some scenes are sodden with hipster sensibility and white poverty is given a glossy makeover. The result is an ominous thrill ride through an incomprehensible labyrinth of darkness, and its powers of seduction will not work on all. LS