Last Days
Written and directed by Gus Van Sant
HBO Films
2005
Rating:


"Do what you will this life's a fiction / And is made up of contradiction," the eccentric poet William Blake wrote in "Gnomic Verses." Director Gus Van Sant applies that belief to the death of Kurt Cobain in "Last Days," the hallucinogenically rapturous postulation about Cobain's final 48 hours.

The film opens with the strains of Hildegard Westerkamp's "Doors of Redemption," named for a line from Blake's "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell," as a dirty blonde rock star, appropriately named Blake (Michael Pitt), ambles through the wilderness while mumbling to himself like Warren Beatty in "McCabe & Mrs. Miller." Blake makes his way to a river fed by a raging waterfall, strips down to his boxers and dives in. Blake's wanderings, not unlike those of Johnny Depp's William Blake character in "Dead Man," are of a man who has lost his ballast and is in search of a spiritual connection. Blake begins with a water baptism, but his efforts fail. He only feels moved to piss in the river. Later, a pair of Mormons attempt to convert Blake's hangers-on — played by Lukas Haas, Scott Green, Asia Argento and Nicole Vicius — but Blake ably avoids them.

For Blake, spirituality can only be found through music, and Blake comes close to finding transcendence the two times he picks up a guitar. Through Harris Savides' masterful cinematography, Blake's first musical interlude is an improvised alt-jam by himself in which he loops electric guitars, feedback, wails and drums as the camera slowly pulls back and watches Blake through a window. Later, Blake sits against a wall with his acoustic guitar and harrowingly performs a Nirvana-esque elegy
(the song, "Death to Birth," was written by Pitt). As fully embodied by Pitt, Blake's musical cry from Hell is as traumatic as the look on Cobain's face during his performance of Leadbelly's "Where Did You Sleep Last Night" on "Unplugged" in 1994. But the music fails Blake. He has to stop mid-song to pull out a snapped string.

The performances are filmed in such a way that, despite the widescreen format, there's a feeling of claustrophobia, as if the music only serves to trap Blake even further within his personal Hell. They're also edited, like Van Sant's Columbine hypothesis "Elephant," in a manner that creates temporal distortion and a disconnection between Blake and the world. Van Sant's decision to rarely show Blake in close-up and to hide his face behind his stringy hair creates distance between the enigmatic rock martyr and the audience.

At a young age and early into his career, Blake does not want what he has got and has become bored and old. Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon comes by to take Blake away from the house he seems determined to turn into a mausoleum and return him to his family, but Blake is unwilling to even talk to his young daughter on the phone. He's also avoiding calls from his agent and record label, who are frantically trying to put together a European tour for his band. Blake can barely stay awake while patronizing a Yellow Pages salesman and eventually passes out, wearing a black slip, while watching the Boyz II Men video "On Bended Knee."

"I am tired / I am weary / I could sleep for a thousand years," sings Lou Reed on The Velvet Underground's "Venus in Furs." The song plays while Blake clumsily attempts to make macaroni and cheese and Scott, in one of his last conversations with Blake, asks for money. "Down on your bended knee / Taste the whip, in love not given lightly / Taste the whip, now plead for me," Reed also sings. The bended knee motif is, for Blake, about praying, and his prayers are only answered once his spirit can walk a literal stairway to Heaven.

Posted Saturday, July 30, 2005

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