The most evocative image in Ryan Gosling‘s Lost River is midway its hyper-saturated nightmare, when Billy (Christina Hendricks), to the sick delight of a sizable audience, slices off the skin of her face. She traces the outlines of skin the incision has left, touches the flesh irrevocably exposed, all to an almost grinning composure—like a true performer would and must do. This blunt abstraction of a society whose best days have long passed and have long abandoned them might indicate a promise of an aspirant who, thru cinema, wishes to express his truths in a relatively personal level. For this reason I remain inclined to watching more from Gosling, once a “dasher” of all women until he preferred “harbinger of neon-lit, washed-up nihilism”—a much heavier title if you ask me, but can anyone blame him?
Gosling’s frequent collaborator Nicolas Winding Refn (Drive, Only God Forgives) permeates the air this unmistakably Lynchian neo-noir breathes. His imagery takes from Refn’s fashion of framing dread, Lynch’s relentless carnality for the nightmarish, and, underlying all of it, Terrence Malick‘s looking to the wonder. There’s also hints that suggest Gosling fashioned his Detroit-set wasteland with David Gordon Green in mind. From these words, it may seem that Gosling has set foot on a cinematic treasure island—hell, perhaps he actually is on such an island!—but what he does about it is what concerns me gravely. Critics have accused him, through his “uncompromising pastiche,” of theft; a charge that, after all is said and done, seems reasonable. The scene I described earlier, then, may just be a blatant rip off of Franju’s Eyes Without a Face. Could it be, only by some unfathomable force (read: irony), that the scene now bears a different meaning, rendered unknowingly so by Gosling the Filmmaker (and perhaps more excitedly by Gosling the Cinephile)?
For a film that features much of faces, complete and missing apiece, it is difficult to identify with Lost River, and by extension with Gosling the Artist(?).
That said, there is a sense of firmness here, a product of laid-back fearlessness and The Gosling Cool. The result almost always translates to Gosling’s visuals, owing much of the work from his DP Benoît Debie, who works with a resembling palette as the one he used in Harmony Korine‘s Spring Breakers. Half-sunk light posts gleam in pallid streaks, a rusting reminder of whatever is in the depths of this proverbial lost river used to exist. There is fire too, shot lovingly, though I’m not entirely sure what Gosling makes of it; maybe he himself is not entirely sure either.
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As one may deduce, it’s all pretty muddled and the whole of the film musty. It’s indispensable, yes, Gosling’s contribution to films like Half Nelson, Blue Valentine and Lars and the Real Girl, where he goes on about cloaked underneath a character. Yet it’s ultimately disenchanting to look through someone, through his work, and see only a faceless figure. That said, I’m inclined still to see Gosling’s first film, because this is not a film, not yet anyway.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8ngDiG9V8w
2 thoughts on “Lost River”