A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Tuesday, August 28, 2018

Mala Noche (Gus Van Sant, 1986)

Tim Streeter and Doug Cooeyate in Mala Noche
Walt: Tim Streeter
Johnny: Doug Cooeyate
Roberto Pepper: Ray Monge
Betty: Nyla McCarthy

Director: Gus Van Sant
Screenplay: Gus Van Sant
Based on a story by Walt Curtis
Cinematography: John J. Campbell
Film editing: Gus Van Sant
Music: Creighton Lindsay

It occurs to me that Gus Van Sant's first feature, Mala Noche, has something in common with his best-known and most commercially successful films, Good Will Hunting (1997) and Milk (2008), both of which earned him Oscar nominations (and won Oscars for, respectively, actors Robin Williams and Sean Penn): They're all about dispossessed young men. Harvey Milk manages to overcome the political stigma of being gay, but is gunned down by a homophobe. Will Hunting emerges from South Boston as a mathematical savant, but never quite overcomes the feeling of being out of place. And Walt, the protagonist of Mala Noche, is a gay man living apparently by choice on Skid Row in Portland, working as a janitor and as a clerk in a tiny liquor store that mostly sells cheap hooch to winos. It's pretty clear that Walt is not much for impulse control: The object of his obsession, Johnny, with his long dark eyelashes and full lips, looks like a cross between Mick Jagger and a Pre-Raphaelite angel, and Walt pursues him relentlessly. Unable to get Johnny to sleep with him, Walt goes for proximity -- having rough sex with Johnny's friend Roberto. (Wouldn't a gay man have a better lube in his medicine cabinet than Vaseline?) Van Sant intentionally withholds much of Walt's backstory: We suspect from his good looks and affable, articulate manner that he comes from middle-class origins, so his slumming and his frustrated erotic obsession look like a kind of masochism. Mala Noche is no masterpiece, but it's a fascinating work of first-film ultra-low-budget ingenuity, with its location shooting, its high-contrast black-and-white cinematography, and its plausible performances by actors who were then unknown and have pretty much remained so.
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