Gus Van Sant’s Last Days
Elephant (2003) was inspired by the Columbine shootings, the events of two high-schoolers’ murderous rampage unfolding with an overlapping time structure, as the tragic day is examined from multiple angles. Last Days riffs upon Kurt Cobain’s suicide, focusing on the final hours leading up to this event. Last Days is the most fully realized and aesthetically satisfying film of the trilogy, a truly singular and sensual experience.
This film is the apotheosis (so far) of Gus Van Sant’s remarkable career reinvigoration, in which he has finally emerged from the wilderness of conventional filmmaking that reached its nadir with the ill-conceived remake of Psycho (1998) and the impersonal and utterly forgettable Finding Forrester (2000). With this trilogy, and especially Last Days, Van Sant returns to the spirit and inventiveness of such early career triumphs as Mala Noche (1985), Drugstore Cowboy (1989), and My Own Private Idaho (1991).
For his most recent films, Van Sant gained inspiration from iconic European filmmakers such as Bela Tarr and Chantal Akerman, and their groundbreaking transformations of cinematic chronology and space. Specifically, Bela Tarr’s seven-hour masterpiece Satantango (1994) is a major touchstone to Van Sant’s stylistic strategies. This film’s overlapping time structure and long takes following character’s movements informs the entire trilogy.
Similarly, Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), her three-hour study of a woman’s household and lifestyle rituals, inspires such scenes in Last Days in which his protagonists performs such mundane tasks as making himself cereal and macaroni and cheese.
However, Van Sant is not content with mere slavish imitation of these cinematic models; he adds his own unique sensibility and a special gift for integrating sound and image. Sound, especially, is prominent in these films. In Last Days, sound designer Leslie Shatz creates a soundscape of clocks, tolling bells, and nature sounds that enhances our sense of the doomed rock star’s extreme isolation and quiet despair. Harris Savides’ cinematography in these films also adds an arresting and unique lyricism.
However, if you believe certain daily newspaper and television critics, this is all simply “self-indulgent,” (a particularly meaningless and clichÃ?©d reviewer canard), “pointless,” and “boring.” Quite obviously, such observers, apparently unaware of the reasons for Van Sant’s artistic choices, which he has elaborated on in numerous interviews, and expecting a more conventional biopic in the vein of, say, Ray, are quick to write the film off.
These remarks are more revealing of their lack of perception, acuity, and patience than about the film itself. On the other hand, more astute critics such as Dennis Lim in the Village Voice and Chris Chang in Film Comment have elucidated this film’s brilliant qualities. I hope that my own remarks will point viewers to a film that deserves to be engaged with on its own terms.
Last Days observes the movements of Blake (Michael Pitt), a rock star dwelling in a rotting mansion in an unnamed place. Although he is not alone here — various hangers-on live in the house also — they all keep their distance from him, and he from them; it is as if he is already dead and haunting the place. Appropriately, we as viewers are kept at a reserve by the camera’s distance.
In the entire film, there are only two or three close-up shots of Blake; usually we see him from mid-distance of in long shot. Blake’s drug-addled existential hell manifests itself in the film’s intricate time structure, which replays events from different angles. One example is the remarkable and faintly absurd scene in which Blake nods out while watching Boys II Men’s video “On Bended Knee.” One of the hangers-on (Asia Argento), upon waking, looks for Blake.
She opens a door, where she finds Blake slumped over, blocking the door. Later, we see the same scene from Blake’s point of view, as the video plays in its entirety. This is a typical example of the unique and unusual way Van Sant uses music in the film. Rather than the normal custom of choosing musical excerpts as cues for the action, Van Sant lets songs play uninterrupted in their entirety.
These blocks of real time give the texture of lived experience, and provide for the viewer a sense of the suspension of time that occurs as a result of drug addiction and mental collapse. This technique is also used to mesmerizing effect in the scene where another character plays the Velvet Underground’s “Venus in Furs.”
This particular track, with its hypnotic, Middle-Eastern sounding rhythms, is indicative of Van Sant’s astuteness in choosing music that fits the film’s scenario perfectly. One line in the song — “I am tired, I am weary/I could sleep for a thousand years” — succinctly expresses Blake’s state of mind, and the fact that he has presumably already made the decision to end his life.
Last Days both is and is not about Kurt Cobain. Van Sant’s film utilizes the iconography of the media spectacle of Cobain’s suicide — the image of Cobain’s leg in the shed, shotgun by his side — to paint a compelling portrait of existential despair. The film eschews such hackneyed banalities as psychological explanations or a typical rise-and-fall biopic trajectory to create low-rent Shakespearean tragedy.
Last Days is a bold stylistic triumph that by virtue of its considerable ambitions exposes the conventionality of the product that squanders space on most cinema screens. Despite the film’s downbeat subject matter, Van Sant injects touches of mordant and absurdist humor, for example in the scene in which a telephone book representative visits a distracted and nodding-out Blake.
Blake’s friends also receive a visit from twin Mormon proselytizers, in another humorous scene. However, even the humor is a corollary to the isolation that surrounds Blake. While he is to all appearances a successful musician, there is a deep hole inside him which is impossible to fill. All his interactions with others — the phone book salesman, a record executive (Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon), a friend (Lukas Haas) giving him a demo tape, and a phone call from his manager urging him to honor his tour commitments — consist of Blake simply listening and responding in the most minimal ways.
It is as if he has already left this earth. Blake seems to come to life only in the sequences in which he is playing his music. The song he performs, “Death to Birth” (an original song written by Pitt) is a fitting one in terms of what we see occur after Blake finally commits suicide. His music, rather than an escape from despair, only seems to deepen it further.
Last Days, in short, is one of the year’s best films, and is highly recommended to viewers willing to experience this true work of art. It rejects the baggage of conventional narrative to offer a paradoxically exhilarating and inspiring (despite its somber, melancholy tone) example of uncompromised artistic vision.
