LOST RIVER
DIRECTOR: Ryan Gosling
CAST: Christina Hendricks, Saoirse Ronan, Iain de Caestecker, Eva Mendes, Beb Mendelsohn
CLASSIFICATION: 16 LV
RUNNING TIME: 94 minutes
RATING: **
PRESENTING stunning visuals anchored by not much at all, Gosling’s directorial debut is an aimless, wandering river that is random, strange, melancholic and lurid and as enchanting as it is repulsive.
Gosling, who also wrote Lost River, seems to be channeling David Lynch, Terence Mallick, Nicolas Winding Refn and every other director who loves throwing enchantingly odd imagery at the screen and watching you squirm and ask: “wtf is going on?”
There is a basic storyline – a mother discovers a seedy underworld in a quest to take care of her children, while her eldest son discovers the pathway to an enchanted town under a river. But, this is not a modern take on Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market. The storyline is a much more prosaic one of families barely surviving America’s bank-created mortgage crises and the things we do to survive while still pretending to be human.
But, between the wind-up treasure box music and the suggestive imagery, a fey atmosphere is created, though to what effect we don’t know, when the story keeps trying to drag us out of fantasy and back to miserable reality.
Hendricks is mom, Billie, desperate to hold on to the home she cannot afford and take care of her children as her surrounding suburb gives up the fight and moves on. Her eldest son Bones (de Caestecker, pictured) is p***ing off a local gangster when he steals copper from abandoned buildings deemed by said gangster as his territory.
Ronan is Rat, the girl next door with an ageing, non-communicative grandma, and then there is cute little Frankie, Billie’s youngest, who loves to play.
Themes are explored by dint of having them thrown right at you – for all that the cinematography is beautifully framed, the imagery of abandoned and decaying buildings to set up the idea of the dying suburb is as heavy-handed as Billie’s conversation with new bank manager Dave (Mendelsohn) about how she can make money.
Strangely, there is no singular vision holding everything together. The film is like Rat’s loony grandma’s house in that sense – filled with distracting gewgaws, peopled by voiceless eccentrics, but only dimly viewed in dreamlike snatches.
The film hops from one thought to the next – one moment we are exploring Rat’s nascent feelings for Bones, then we are skipping to Billie trying to figure out how far she will go to make money, then there’s some random guy with no lips at the petrol station.
Lost River is indulgent film-making only someone with money and complete control would attempt – it is Gosling trying different things with no greater aim in mind other than, perhaps, seeing what works and what doesn’t. He has a keen visual sense and it will be interesting to see what he can do with a coherent script that doesn’t try so hard to pay homage to his influences. Either you will hate it for being pretentiously artsy or love it as a mesmerising mess.
If you liked Inherent Vice, you will like this.