Last Days

Synopsis: The last days of an unnamed Seattle rock & roll musician (Michael Pitt) whose life and career is strongly reminiscent of that of Kurt Cobain.

Gus Van Sant's film has polarised critics with some describing it as a haunting poetic essay on the loneliness of fame. I, however, am in the other camp that found it ultimately a tedious cinematic experience as we accompany a guy on his every aimless moment: camping out and bellowing Home on the Range into the night sky; \dressing in a little black frock and cruising his house with a shotgun while attempting to make himself a pot of macaroni cheese; slumping against the door semi-comatose, and so on ad nauseum. Add to this the smattering of characters whose path cross Blake's:  a Yellow Pages salesman who mechanically spins a sales pitch oblivious to his potential customer's condition; a pair of Mormons who sum up the situation and split; a woman who could be his mother asking about his daughter and pleading with him to come away with her; and a voice on the other end of the phone asking whether Blake is going to do the tour or not. Blake's only response to all this is either silence or incoherent mutterings.

The almost total lack of plot and back-story goes beyond observational aesthetics and belongs more to an aesthetics of boredom. Yes, we're witnessing Blake's disintegration first hand and unmediated, and therefore Van Sant might claim that the torpor we are forced to endure is a function of his fidelity to his subject, not the outcome of his treatment of it, but for me, it's just not good cinema.

Last Days, as much as it might trade on the myth of Cobain's demise, is not cinema verité but Van Sant's fictional re-construction of it. The camera often tracks Blake from behind, much in the way it tracked the young killers in Elephant (2003) but that film which went to some trouble to establish its characters was a far superior effort to this. The characters of Last Days were for me totally meaningless - Asia Argento plays one of the woman and hangers-on who shares Blake's house, and who, when Blake dies, splits the scene with callous disregard, now that there is nothing to be gained from the situation. The role of others we fleetingly see was totally unclear to me. Only if we are prepared to consider the film, along with Elephant and Gerry (2002) within the context of an "existential" trilogy ,does the film acquire some measure of validity but even in this respect it is the least rewarding of the three.

Pitt certainly gives a credible interpretation of the absolute alienation of his protagonist from the real world suggested by the shots of the verdant autumn woods which surround the house but we deserve more than his stoned meanderings through it to give the divorce  emotional depth. Only at one moment does he actually engage with what his life had been, namely music, when he goes into a frenzy of drumming.

This may be cutting edge art cinema (some have called it a masterpiece) but unless you can bring some personal connection Last Days will be what one could most generously call a "challenging" experience

 

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