By Jake Howell jake.howell@utoronto.ca
Cannes Un Certain Regard Review: Lost River
If Lost River is the film Ryan Gosling wanted to debut as his first film—and you only get one first film—then I’ll be the first to admit that I had him pegged (artistically speaking, anyway) as someone entirely different.
There are always one or two movies at Cannes that are prematurely tossed aside by critics immediately after the initial press screening, and it appears Gosling’s film is an example. It’s not the deepest picture at this festival by any stretch of the imagination—and it is self-indulgent to a fault—but this film is certainly an experience, albeit an avant-garde one; while I didn’t gain anything meaningful from the narrative aspect of Gosling’s fable, there’s no denying Lost River is primarily a strong visual offering, replete with striking compositions, arresting images, and a nuanced color palette.
One part urban fantasy, one part body horror “macabaret,” and two parts the hipster fringes of Instagram, Gosling’s film is a fairytale of sorts set in the ghostly ruins of Detroit. Billy (Christina Hendricks), single mother of two sons—a toddler named Franky and a teenager named Bones (Iain De Caestecker)—live in a house they can’t afford for much longer, and to make ends meet Billy begins working in a decadent sex club that offers a “bloody good time.” The family lives next to Rat (Saoirse Ronan), essentially a quiet, rodent-carrying manic pixie dream girl for Bones to admire; outside of this narrative bubble is the rampant anarchy spread by Bully (Matt Smith), the self-proclaimed king of town. Bully scours the nightscapes with his disfigured crony looking to bury Bones, and it’s a race to see who will end the other first.
If you go into an avant-garde film expecting a cohesive narrative, there is little to do but remind yourself that this is experimental work and continue from there. Elliptical editing, filtered lighting, unusual camera angles—hell, even different modes of camerawork (Gosling takes a GoPro for a spin)—this is what you can look forward to (or dread) in Lost River, and it’s juxtaposed against a soundtrack that sounds similar to the atmospheric, thumping, generally crepuscular music the Chromatics did for Drive (but of course). Yes, Drive. And even Only God Forgives. These films come to mind not simply because of Gosling’s lead performances in them, but because of director Nicolas Winding Refn’s distinctively electric aesthetic that Gosling is certainly inspired by here. But countless filmmakers pay shameless homage to the auteurs they admire, so this is par for the course, and it’s critically inconsistent to criticize Gosling for doing so himself.
Lost River boasts some memorable pictures (burning buildings, sunken highway lamps, a faceless woman), and though they may have come from Gosling’s pen, these images owe much to cinematographer Benoît Debie, the lens-genius behind Spring Breakers and Enter the Void. The same is also applicable to production designer Beth Mickle (who also worked on Drive), and to his credit, Gosling lists their names and many more with massively-sized font flair at the top of the film. Lost River has a remarkably strong artistic department, so while the plot may be a little too metaphorical to mean much of anything (and remember, Gosling isn’t actually in the movie), this is an admirable outing—and an intriguing first feature—nonetheless. Hell, it’s better than anything James Franco’s ever churned out.