Cast: Michael Pitt, Lukas Haas, Asia Argento, Scott Green, Nicole Vicius, Ricky Jay, Ryan Orion, Kim Gordon.

This latest offering from innovative director Gus Van Sant, who is responsible for Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, To Die For, Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester as well as the more recent Elephant (2002), is not as bland and determinedly without plot as the last before this one, Gerry (2003). That was a story written by Van Sant with Casey Affleck and Matt Damon about two guys called Gerry who get lost in the desert. That’s about it. They get lost, they wander, one dies. The three latest films including this one are a trilogy on death, based on real events.

Last Days is a fictional story inspired by, but not depicting, the suicide of grunge rocker Kurt Cobain in 1994. Here the main character Blake (Michael Pitt) is mentally and emotionally lost, adrift in an inner confusion and unable to be reached. It’s not giving away the plot to tell you what the title already does. It’s not so much a plot, as a filmic record of an unravelling person who perhaps was not very ravelled to begin with. Like his last two films, the camera follows a few paces behind the character for much of the time, only this time it feels like he’s as exteriorised from his body as we are, observing his movements as non-committally as the camera.

It’s a challenging task to depict someone’s unfocused inner loops and lack of connectedness in his last days and hours. Van Sant’s filming is organic, looping elliptically in time and viewpoint. There’s little context. When the film opens Blake is already lost. He’s been a brilliantly creative musician, he’s been successful, he lives in a huge castle isolated in woods with some friends whom he’s avoiding and who also manage much of the time to avoid him, unless it’s to ask for money, advice on a song or, in the case of frantic phone calls from his manager, trying to get him to go on a tour that’s all set to go but for him.

For much of the film, Blake, with unkempt blond hair hanging over his face, or sunglasses hiding his eyes, spends his time wandering outside in the woods near river and lake, or in the greenhouse, separate from the main house. It’s a metaphor for Blake himself. He’s a person separate from and outside himself, like the woods full of yellowing leaf-fall through which he stumbles muttering to himself, or the empty, glass-paned greenhouse from which he can observe the entrance to the mansion unnoticed. When Blake is inside the house, making meals with incongruous ingredients (in the breakfast scene he puts the box of cocoa crispies in the fridge and leaves the milk out), or in his bedroom, the decaying, decrepit state of the interior of the house with its cracked and fallen plaster, its curling wallpaper behind elegantly framed oil paintings of a more genteel time, similarly reflect Blake’s disintegration. The camera frequently stays still while Blake moves out of frame and in again. Sometimes, it’s not quite focused, like Blake.

The sounds we hear are sometimes unfiltered environmental noise: planes, birds, river water and wind. Sometimes they are the sounds inside Blake’s head, voices chanting, praying, singing, while what is happening on screen is without sound. Carillons of bells chime frequently and sometimes they seem environmental, sometimes not. It seems incidental and irrelevant, and is meant to. It’s Blake’s disconnected reality we are seeing and hearing, as far as we are able, and perhaps as much as he does himself. He plays one rock song using recorded loops on multiple instruments and it’s cacophonous, and another, a ballad, with the refrain “It’s a long and lonely road from death to birth” which gives only a hint at his inner state.

From other characters such as the four living in Blake’s house – not so much guests as squatters or parasites, like mice in the skirting boards - Scott (Scott Green), Lukas (Lukas Haas), Asia (Asia Argento) and Nicole (Nicole Vicius), we get little more of the context of Blake’s state. More comes from outsiders like Donovan (Ryan Orion), the detective (Ricky Jay), and the record executive (Kim Gordon). It’s just enough to give us what we might see ourselves if we were there and not the omniscient viewer of more traditionally structured filmmaking. This applies to the entire film, conversations and actions have no frame and are non-sequiturs like reality as we live it. Even the loops from one side of an action to another, á la Elephant, are disconnected.

There is a final shot of Blake’s face: the first time we’ve seen it full-frontal and unobscured by hair or sunglasses. Whatever it is he’s seeing has his attention fully focused for the first time in the film. Shortly afterwards, there is the one directorial intervention of the film, with Blake’s spirit body, naked, climbing upwards. Tantalising and elusive, it still leaves us to our own conclusions. 

As a filmmaking technique it’s brilliantly non-traditional and aptly captures a mood and a poetic vision of a state of mind. It doesn’t give, not does it intend to give, any more understanding of what happens in the mind of Blake, it simply shows it for us to know and interpret as we will. As such, it opens us to far more questions without any answers. As an experience, I found the film not quite as impactful as perhaps it’s intended to be. I left feeling no wiser and perhaps a little saddened by the futility of both the subject and, perhaps, the beautifully shot and crafted film itself.

© Avril Carruthers                                  24^th July 2005