Review
“Broken
pieces trying to make a whole” is how writer/director Ryan Gosling describes
his new film, Lost River. He follows a single-parent family in
their struggle to survive against many odds. Billy (Christina Hendricks) has two sons, a four year-old,
and teenaged Bones (Iain De Caestecker), who works long hours gathering scrap
metal and whatever else he can sell from empty buildings in town to help them survive. Much of the town was abandoned
following a major flood (which has a story behind it), but a few people
stubbornly hold onto their homes.
Billy is one of these, but she is behind on her payments, and the bank manager,
Dave (Ben Mendelsohn) who owns a bordello, wants her to start working
there. Her older son is clearly
against this, and is trying to make enough money selling scraps to support the
family, but standing in his way is the town Bully (Matt Smith), who claims he
owns the town and doesn’t want anyone “stealing” from him. He has no qualms about killing and maiming
those who defy his orders, so now, Bones’ life is in danger.
After
the flood, residents believe their town was cursed, and one named Belladonna
(Barbara Steele) became mute. Her
granddaughter, called Rat (Saoirse Ronan), takes care of her, and is Bones’
best friend. She shares a
historical video with Bones that reveals significant parts of the town’s
history, and he goes looking for a city buried beneath the river. There, he finds something that will be
of critical value later.
Simultaneously, there are intrigues taking place at the Bordello, where
the Cat (Eva Mendes) and Billy entertain club patrons with weird, titillating
acts featuring sadistic pleasures (lots of “blood”) and Dave sexually harasses
Billy.
As
the flaming houses, decaying buildings, and tangled forests float by on the
screen, with the melodic but haunting score of Johnny Jewel, the viewer is
struck by the visual beauty amidst human poverty and suffering, and the cruelty
of some. Cinematographer Benoit
Debie’s work enhances all these effects.
Gosling’s
underlying points seem to relate to current events such as the growing
importance of family in a self-serving world and the increasing disparity
between a few mega-wealthy people and everyone else. But families through the centuries have survived almost
impossible odds; maybe that’s where humanity’s hope lies.
Grade: B
Conversation Hour at SXSW Film Festival, 2015
Del Toro (always an entertainment) praised
Gosling’s new film and directorial debut, Lost
River, as “weird, a fairy tale, and magical—one in which anything is
possible.” Briefly, it is meant as
a fairy tale in which a single parent has to fight for survival after their
town is abandoned following a catastrophe. One day, the teenage son in the family finds a mysterious
city hidden under the water of the river.
This leads them on a surprising journey that will test the limits of
their love for one another.
The history of Lost River is that it was three years in the making. Gosling first approached del Toro with
his ideas, often expressed simply in pictures, which he had taken after Detroit
was abandoned following the crash of the U.S automobile industry. del Toro emphasized that the finished
product differed little from how it was mapped out in the beginning, and told
Gosling, “I’ll direct it if you don.”
Gosling was intent on tapping into the feeling of Detroit in a fairy tale
format. Gosling, as a child in
Canada, used to look at Detroit as the American Dream, and now it had come to
this. Paired with those images,
the film is partially based on Gosling’s personal life, growing up in a
single-parent family; his mother was beautiful, but bothered by the catcalls
she got simply walking down the street, so saw men primarily as predators.
Lost River was difficult to shoot because of
the need to enhance the fairy-tale effect, so Gosling engaged the talented
Benoit Debie, who only shoots on film (not digital), and the two of them kept
the lighting low, using only hints of color. The intent was always to make it as mysterious and magical,
without going over the edge. The
music by Johnny Jewel added to the magical tone using romantic melodies with
dark, threatening undertones
In casting, Gosling talked lovingly about the
actors, having recruited the main characters from his friendships. His style is to write the characters
and then allow the actors to fill them in. He spoke of Barbara Steele (Belladonna) as representing the
mystery of the story, lending a powerful presence. He required people auditioning for the role of Dave, the
bordello owner, to do an audition online on an open site by having them read a
Robert Frost poem and perform a dance as
if they were dancing with someone else. Ben Mendelsohn nailed the part, making a big production of
the dance, and increasing its dramatic effect by periodically dancing
off-screen. There are fairy-tale
like names for characters, such as Dr. Fucking Who, who longs to be the king of
a place where there are no subjects and Rat, a hoarder who lives like a rat and
has a rat for a friend. Then there
is the talented four year-old whom Gosling sees as a future “Marlon
Brando.” Because Franky
actually didn’t like cameras, the crew had to film him out of his sight by, for
instance, hiding themselves and their cameras behind bushes.
The current residents of Detroit coincidentally
got into the picture because Gosling had the choice of keeping them off the
set—which seemed impossible—or using them in the scenes. He decided they added an authenticity
to the production by integrating reality into the fantasy.
Lost River
is meant to be viewed as magical realism, as when a work of art has magical,
unrealistic elements in an otherwise realistic world, such as a fairy tale, for
example. Gosling intentionally
inserted those elements into his film to capture better what he had observed as
changes Detroit went through after it was almost abandoned by the auto
industry. The story, color, and
tone of the work is in the tradition of Terrence Malick (Tree of Life and To the
Wonder) and Nicolas Winding Rifn (Only
God Forgives).
By
Donna R. Copeland
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