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CANNES, FRANCE—There were more furrowed brows than clapping hands when the closing credits scrolled Tuesday for Lost River, the directing debut of Canadian actor Ryan Gosling.
This was perfectly okay, however, and likely anticipated by the London, Ont.-born Gosling, who is no stranger to controversy at the Cannes Film Festival.
Lost River, premiering in the parallel program Un Certain Regard, is designed to daze and confuse. Mission accomplished on both counts.
Rather than just go the usual actor-to-director route of making a life-affirming Sundance drama, Gosling has gone all out to provoke people with what he's calling a "dark fairy tale," although "insane nightmare" works nicely, too.
It's proving to be divisive here at Cannes, winning praises from many critics (myself among them) and damnation from others who see it as pretentious and derivative. Both camps observe that Gosling is drawing on his many movie influences and mentors, including Nicolas Winding Refn, the Danish auteur who directed him in Drive and Only God Forgives, which premiered in the Palme d'Or competition at Cannes in 2011 and 2013, respectively.
Only God Forgives was last year's big controversy, a sickening gorefest that brought boos from the press. Gosling didn't hear them, since he was busy filming Lost River and couldn't make it to Cannes. He may have learned from what happened to Refn, since he hasn't scheduled a press conference to discuss his film. He's front-and-centre for photo ops, however.
In visual terms alone, Lost River is a stunner. This is due in large part to the hallucinatory images of burning houses and bicycles, submerged streetscapes and savage nightclub scenes captured by cinematographer Benoît Debie, whose colour-saturated work has previously been seen in the likes of Spring Breakers and Enter the Void.
The story of Lost River is a whole other matter, and not easily parsed. To me, it recalls the surreal worlds of David Lynch and Leos Carax, especially the latter's Holy Motors, which has a common actress with this film: Eva Mendes, who has been romantically linked with Gosling, but so far hasn't been spotted at Cannes.
Here Mendes plays an entertainer named Cat, who performs strange and violent acts on stage in a creepy nightclub that could be owned by Hannibal Lecter, or maybe David Cronenberg.
This is the same club where Billy (Mad Men's Christina Hendricks), a single mom to two sons, ends up on the advice of her sleazy bank manager (Ben Mendolsohn), who is trying to foreclose on her house and wants both cash and sex from her.
Billy really gets into the swing of things, developing a routine where she appears to gruesomely slice off her own face.
Her taciturn son Bones (Iain De Caestecker) is doing his own bit to help save the family shack, by illegally foraging for copper amongst the many ruined homes of the neighborhood.
His nocturnal travels bring him into the orbit of a sociopath aptly named Bully (Matt Smith), who shouts "Look at my muscles!" through a loudspeaker as he tools around in a stretch convertible Lincoln.
Bones also falls in with a girl named Rat (Saoirse Ronan), so-called because she walks around with a large pet rat. Oh, and Bones also discovers an underwater town.
The above description makes the plot seem more linear than it actually is. The film is more like a psychedelic montage set to a soundtrack of 1950s pop and the eerie dreamscapes of composer Johnny Jewel.
One thing is certain: with Lost River Gosling fully lives up to the mandate of Un Certain Regard, which is to show films that have "a certain look" about them.
This one certainly does, and I intend to regard it again as soon as possible.
Source : http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/movies/2014/05/20/cannes_film_festival_ryan_goslings_directorial_debut.html
