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MY
OWN PRIVATE IDAHO
6/10
USA 1991
: Gus VAN SANT : 104 mins
Freewheeling
and mercurial, this engaging compilation of writer-director Van Sant’s
fads and fancies dances along the narrow line between inspiration and
affectation. In the chilly Pacific north-west (Portland and Seattle, mainly)
two best pals supplement their income via prostitution. Scott (Keanu Reeves),
swings both ways as business demands but is basically straight when push
comes to shove. Gay Mike (River Phoenix) suffers from narcolepsy – as
someone notes, not the ideal condition for a hustler. He’s in perpetual
search for his long-lost mother, and Scott tags along for a ride which
takes them to distant Italy – where Mike falls in love with a farmer’s
daughter (Chiara Caselli). Back home in Portland, the death of Mike’s
father – the city’s Mayor, no less - sees him cast off his black-sheep
mantle, and with it his old friends, including charismatic king-of-the-bums
Bob (William Richert)…
It’s hard to
know which aspect of Idaho is the more self-indulgent: the implausible
‘hustlers’ odyssey’ mythos (concentrating on Mike) that constitutes the
main plot, or the subtext Henry IV rewrite (Scott = Hal, Bob =
Falstaff) that surfaces in overlong passages of mock-articulate, cod-Shakespeherian
dialogue - with which the younger performers often audibly struggle. Reeves,
in particular, justifies his (often unfairly applied) reputation for woodenness
- but this isn’t a problem when the spellbindingly oddball Richert (maverick
director of 1979’s delirious Winter Kills) is around to keep things
watchable. Performing a similar movie-saving function (albeit in a radically
different key) is the one and only Udo Kier, typecast but terrific value
in his all-too-brief appearances as the genial but sexually predatory
travelling-salesman Hans: his rendition of the Kraut-rock-space-operatic
“Mr Klein” is a camp knockout of a show-stopper.
The picture
does sag a little whenever Richert and Kier are off-screen, but there’s
always something going on – even if it’s just rushing clouds. Because,
while occasionally capable of striking visuals and moments of hallucinatory,
poetic intensity (most famously, a shack landing on an Idaho backroad
in one of Mike’s many fantasies), Van Sant more often doesn’t just flirt
with cliché, he drags it home with him: whenever Mike has a narcoleptic
seizure (which is repetitively often) we get hackneyed, grainy 8mm-style
‘flashbacks’ to his infant years with Mom in Idaho. And, while undeniably
a talented director (as confirmed by his previous and subsequent films)
there are times when he comes across like the gauchest of indie poseurs,
such as the arbitrarily tilted camera-angles deployed to film the Portland
hustlers. On the plus side, however, he has a great sense of ‘place’,
ambition to burn, and makes excellent use of sound and music – as befits
a movie named after a track by the B-52’s.
3rd
December, 2003
(seen 26th November : CineSide,
Newcastle-upon-Tyne)
by Neil
Young
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