Robinson Crusoe on Mars on blu-ray: Lonely planet made less so by monkey, alien miner, sense of wonder

There exists in so much science fiction a fantasy of heroic, ennobling loneliness, of entire planets available just for you to explore, or perhaps for you and an unobtrusive little companion, a robot, say, or a primate. Special effects pioneer-turned-director Byron Haskin’s wonderfully imaginative Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) begins with US astronaut Commander “Kit” Draper (Paul Mantee) crashes on the red planet. It proves just barely inhabitable, a world of desert canyons and columns of flame, like Death Valley meets Kuwait after the first Gulf War. Draper has lost his one and only shipmate, Colonel Dan (Adam West, a couple of years shy of Bat-fame), who it seems to me may have quite possibly also been his secret lover, and from whom he’s inherited Mona, a feisty little monkey in an orange space suit who does all sorts of very funny little monkey things but is clearly no replacement for a buddy, colleague, or boyfriend. Fortunately, Draper is fit, resourceful, endlessly curious, and, most of all, lucky.

Fascination with Mars overpowers grief or despair, its glowing, oxygen-rich rocks like hot potatoes, its subterranean deposits of pastel-coloured stuff, its peculiar vegetation, which Draper consumes and gradually converts into very silly-looking tunics and Robin Hood hats, and most of all its gorgeous landscapes that expand and undulate, traversed by balls of fire that meander the terrain like wandering bison. Early on we’re offered a rather long sequence during which Draper silently makes his first baffling geological discoveries. There is then a subsequent scene where Draper simply describes all of them into his recording device. The movie takes its sweet time, it’s true, but it’s never hard to watch, being so vibrantly visualized and so dramatically scored by Van Cleave, whose themes reminds me of some of the music Howard Shore’s composed for David Cronenberg. If you happened to have sees Cast Away (2000) you might recall that the best parts of the movie by far were just Tom Hanks wordlessly negotiating his survival on the desert isle. There’s a somewhat similar dynamic at work here, a focus on tasks, labour, and reward. Long stretches of the movie resemble a fake documentary, an episode of Intergalactic Geographic, if you will, yet with enough time Draper will inevitably discover that he’s not alone, that like Daniel Defoe’s hero he gets his own Friday (Victor Lundin), an alien who looks a lot like an ancient Egyptian with immaculate grooming, and whose language sounds not unlike Nahuatl. However, like the archetypically asinine American abroad, as soon as Draper learns that Friday can talk he immediately assumes his new friend will have to learn English.

There’s a wealth of future-retro imagery to enjoy here—the tape decks, pulsating radar, and buttons like Starburst candies—but the aesthetic of Robinson Crusoe on Mars is far too magnificently realized to be reduced to kitsch, and its science is actually remarkably sound given what we knew about Mars at the time, and some of Draper’s equipment, such as his portable video camera unit, are positively prescient. The special effects are fluid and striking, like those mining ships that appear in the Martian sky with unnerving swiftness, though they look an awful lot like the terrifying Martian ships that arrived to slaughter the citizens of Earth in Haskin’s earlier War of the Worlds (53). Not least among the movie’s most impressive elements are its sounds, such as that of Draper’s ship rocketing through space at unfathomable speed in the very first scene. It’s reason alone to seek out the movie on Criterion’s brand-new blu-ray edition, along with its terrific documentary explaining the movie’s relative scientific verisimilitude, and a cute music video for a song about the movie composed and performed by Lundin, whose lyrics imply that maybe he really wanted to play the lead.

The singularity of Colin Firth

I missed A Single Man during the Toronto Film Festival and missed it again when it first opened theatrically. I was wary of it, noting review headlines that often insinuated the too-easy yet suspiciously accurate-sounding attacks on fashion designer-turned-filmmaker Tom Ford’s excessively fussed-over, largely superficial direction. What made me keep wanting to see it was, of course, Colin Firth. Is there another leading actor so consistently pleasurable and moving to watch who makes so many mediocre movies? Would A Single Man be the one to showcase his tremendous blend of talent and pure screen presence? It has, in any event, won him an Oscar nomination.


Having finally caught up with A Single Man—the depiction of a day in the life of Firth’s Anglo-American English professor George, mourning the loss of his lover, set in November of 1962, and based on the novel by Christopher Isherwood—I was surprised to find the movie to be actually less glossy or formally rigorous or provocative that I’d intuited. Or hoped. It is an oddly cool movie for one so steeped in grief. There are loudly announced stylistic choices to be sure, but many of them fall short of their intended impact. Ford’s jump-cuts are annoying, and his jarring switching of angles within a scene is superfluous, often disguising stasis. His cutty yet ceremonialized flashbacks to moments shared by George and his conspicuously younger boyfriend convey little in the way of emotional weight. His combination of slow-motion and the shifting of the image from dull tones to saturated colour is employed frequently, which does help us to trace the many moment’s in George’s day when he briefly recognizes hints of beauty in an otherwise drab, Cold War era and now largely loveless world, but it also renders the technique a gimmick whose meaning is very limited. Besides, if George can so often be reminded of life’s value, even a purely aesthetic one, does his depression not begin to feel too close to mere self-pity?


Firth, unsurprisingly, looks very compelling. In fact, as unlikely as this might seem, with his lovely haircut, large framed glasses, and elegant suits, he closely resembles Marcello Mastroianni from roughly the same period in which A Single Man is set. (Julianne Moore, who plays George’s one close friend, by contrast seems modeled after Dusty Springfield.) Firth has absorbed his costume fully, letting it alter his posture and expressions. Ford’s careful attention to George’s personal appearance and accoutrements is commendable. It only seems problematic when it begins to seem like a replacement for characterization.


“I am exactly what I appear to be. If only you look closely.” This is George’s most memorable line, and says an awful lot about Firth too, whose best moments may be the ones where George, as a way of making peace with the world before leaving it—he’s planning to kill himself before the day is through—makes a point of saying something nice to women. In one such beautifully played moment, while complimenting a secretary’s hair, he almost looks like he’s in a trance. Firth has always had great success with a less-is-more approach to his craft. His eyes especially are exceptionally expressive, and his awareness of this allows him to make bold choices with regards to how much he lets his visage colour a moment. But A Single Man simply lacks colour, even during those moments when the whole world seems to blush for George, and Firth’s careful modulation and discretion, while still the best approach given the circumstances, can’t flush out what simply isn’t there to be had. George has some sort of revelation before the movie is through, though it barely registers on screen.


I’m thrilled that Firth is getting more attention as an actor, though I hope audiences less familiar with his work don’t get the false impression that A Single Man is its apotheosis. How much more alive, dynamic, charming, and emotionally vivid Firth has been in movies more obviously awkward or even tacky than this one. In some cases, more risky too. I'm thinking of one of Bridget Jones' Diary, and one of the all-time great comic punch-ups. I’m thinking of recent movies like Helen Hunt’s Then She Found Me, where Firth played a single dad who was wildly neurotic, tactless, exhausted, and totally irresistible, or When Did You Last See Your Father?, where he played a middle-aged man seething with childish anger toward his dying pup. Hell, even in fairly awful or silly movies like the new Dorian Gray or The Last Legion or Where the Truth Lies or Easy Virtue… I could go on. The point is he’s a wonderful actor, and should he win an Oscar for A Single Man (which isn’t very likely, I suppose) then so be it. Just don’t let the movie’s undigested gloom let you think this guy can’t do so much more.

It Couldn't Please Me More: Chris and Don on DVD

It’s among the most daunting challenges in movies, a medium saturated with romance but often adverse to romantic complication: to convey with empathy and insight the nature and functionality of different kinds of love, especially those easily dismissed or judged. That romance between men is but the least provocative kind of love considered in Chris and Don: A Love Story is a tribute to how bravely and sensitively this documentary assumes this challenge. Its lovers shared a 35-year relationship that prodded conventional wisdom about class, monogamy, age difference, and, perhaps most interestingly, the compatibility of lovers of whose interaction incorporates parent-child or master-protégé dynamics. Directed by Tina Mascara and Guido Santi, who make elegant use of the couple's abundance of home movies, Chris and Don is a tender and thoughtful portrait of intimacy and communion finding its own pattern in a world fraught with obstacles.

Those obstacles would not however include obscurity or poverty. The titular Chris is Christopher Isherwood, the blue-blood Brit of the global literary set and author of Berlin Stories, the basis for the stage and screen phenomena known as Cabaret. Isherwood met Don Bachardy on a Santa Monica beach in 1953. He was 48, Don 18, though he looked even younger. Their relationship grew steadily but was frowned upon by even close friends. Don must have seemed so unformed, often attending parties with the likes of Auden, Stravinsky and Tennessee Williams, where his presence would register as little more than a fetching accessory, so impressionable that despite his So-Cal roots he adopted a mid-Atlantic accent and many of Isherwood’s gestures, not to mention haircut. But he stuck around. And thanks in part to Isherwood’s support and mentorship Bachardy became a renown portrait artist. (Samples of his work are featured not only in the film but in the booklet in Zeitgeist’s new DVD.)

When Isherwood died in 1986 Bachardy explains how he immediately, almost unconsciously, began to read Isherwood’s diaries, patiently working his way backwards through this extraordinary life, knowing that somewhere in the middle he would find his own first appearance. Like so many things in Chris and Don, this factoid can initially seem creepy, yet slowly becomes something very moving in its manifestation of trust and a sort of sublime exchange of ideas, body and soul. Bachardy’s our guide on this journey through the past, and his recollections and manner feel honest, calm and forthcoming. He’s also an interesting subject for a film in that film itself was so formative an influence in his youth—his mother took him to see Joan Crawford films when he was four. A pivotal moment in his maturity came when he was on the set of The Rose Tattoo and heard Anna Magnani’s fart. The fart helped him to pentrate the veneer of vacuous movie glamour and, we can assume from the development of his work, take interest on the richness of human life that lurked below. It’s but one of the irreverent, surprisingly sweet anecdotes that make Chris and Don a lively, smart, and emotionally intense experience.

Navigating the Milky way: the fertile tension between Gus Van Sant and the gay mainstream

Gus Van Sant and Harvey Milk were always destined to seem either an ideal hook-up or a sort of studio-contrived shotgun wedding. That the most famed and acclaimed openly gay filmmaker in the US should helm the long-in-development biopic about the first openly gay man to herald the gay cause in US politics seems obvious until you start to consider the complicated nature of Van Sant’s previous contributions to gay cinema.

I more or less grew up with Van Sant’s early features, enthralled by their visual poetics and oddball humour, their nipple-twisted Americana and palpable affection for all the world’s lost boys. By the time of My Own Private Idaho Van Sant’s rendering of Portland’s runaway male hustler scene—centered as it was around the tenderly compelling and, it would appear, not so gay River Phoenix—practically made me want to be gay. Van Sant’s gay boys were antiheroes, outlaws, non-conformists, vulnerable adventurers, their sexuality tied directly to their outsider status. I found them cool beyond measure.

But what, by contrast, really matters in the story of Harvey Milk? Today more than ever, the core of Milk’s accomplishment is the very antithesis of Van Sant’s outsider chic. Milk’s bold and perilous first steps as San Francisco city supervisor, his nationally recognized efforts to stake out an unabashedly gay presence in the era of Anita Bryant reactionism, were designed to lead the community into the light of the mainstream, and the recent defeat of gay marriage in California feels like a direct attack on that legacy. To have same-sex partnership legally recognized should be a fundamental right, but such an ethos of normalization should not be confused with the sort of romance or shadow side of gay culture so beguilingly evoked in Mala Noche, Van Sant’s debut, or Idaho.

This tension between sensibilities may explain why, rather than aligning itself to his more experimentally-minded, equally death-haunted quartet of Gerry, Elephant, Last Days and Paranoid Park, Milk feels more akin to Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester, Van Sant’s earlier stabs at multiplex acceptance. Yet I think this is finally a more effective movie than either. Milk needed to be made for the biggest possible audience—to do otherwise would be to miss the entire point of this story—and Van Sant deserves credit for recognizing this. His flexibility as a filmmaker is in my books something to admire.

Written by Dustin Lance Black, the movie is structured around audio recordings Milk made when he began to fear for his life—threats of assassination had been made for some time. It’s a useful convention, allowing us to cut to the chase more often than not, and allowing the voice of Sean Penn, in pleasingly nasal-fey Noo-Yawk, to invitingly guide us in. The movie’s concerned solely with the final eight years or so of Milk’s life, the period that begins with his picking up of the attractive, much younger Scott Smith (James Franco) in an NYC subway station on the night of Milk’s 40th birthday.

Falling love with Smith was the catalyst that allowed Milk to give up his semi-closeted financial sector existence and go west to a rainbow wonderland waiting to erupt from under a blanket of stale conservatism. A Republican and late-blooming hippy of sorts, Milk goes from suited to shaggy, sees opportunities for gay consumers to gain foothold in his new community, and opens a little camera shop on Castro Street. This section of the movie ends with a magnificent crane shot of Milk and Smith necking in broad daylight. It’s glorious, the first crest of a wave of enthrallment over new hopes. It also features a telling detail: as in the subway pick-up scene, Milk is conspicuously positioned below Smith. His affection for his boyfriends tends toward the adulatory.

Smith doesn’t stick around, leaving Milk to exercise his generally poor judgment with regards to lovers, culminating in a disastrous partnership with a needy Chicano played by Diego Luna. But buoyed by San Fran’s brimming gay underground, Milk is already well on his way to triumph and that fateful retribution. His ascent into municipal politics is highly fraught and makes for superb drama. He’s trying always to bond gays together, controversially declaring privacy, ie: the closet, an antiquated luxury in times of violent bigotry. “Come out, come out, wherever you are!” was his clever rallying cry. And his charisma is awesome, his arguments persuasive, his sense of populism shrewd—he gained his supervisor position as much through the promise of legislating against abandoned dog shit as through gay rights.

Van Sant collaborates again here with cinematographer Harris Savides, who previously wrought San Francisco in the 70s to great effect in Zodiac. Milk’s dynamic use of archival footage serves it well, making the spirit of the times come alive. But the decisive force in this project, what will make or break it for audiences, are the performances, and Penn is on fire here. The role of Milk grants the volatile actor and activist permission to express his moral fervor in a fresh, invigorating context. He mimics Milk’s peculiar fist shaking with a goofy sort of grace, milking it, so to speak, with great aplomb. He speechifies with great emotional dexterity, yet brings a wonderfully conspiratorial glee to quieter scenes of political negotiation. He’s also very funny. Josh Brolin’s Dan White challenges him with the tired old theological arguments against homosexuality. “Can two men reproduce?” White asks. “No,” Milk replies, with the warmest and slyest of smiles. “But god knows we keep trying.”

In a superlative and teeming supporting cast that includes lovingly realized turns from Franco, very sexy and subtle in his grudging support, and from Emile Hirsch and Alison Pill, Brolin demands special mention. His embodiment of profoundly conflicted homophobia swings from sympathetic to repulsive with an absolute minimum of fuss. In a grim, sobering way he grounds the picture. Which is to say he represents an element that doubtlessly still lingers in Milk’s audience, a prejudice and resentment that can’t be quelled by the comforts of increasing familiarity with gay culture alone. And it’s because of this that I sincerely hope the Dan Whites of the world see this movie.

Written on the body: the generous frankness, smoky pensiveness and silent articulation of Jacques Nolot's Before I Forget

A curious thing about Jacques Nolot’s Before I Forget (Avant que j'oublie): the title implies urgency, yet the film, now on DVD from Strand Releasing, is anything but. The writer/director/actor’s presence throughout seems to be perpetually fixed upon a point of pause, of consideration, we suppose, a cigarette burning away between his fingers like some substitute hourglass to mark time, his largely immobile face betraying no inner call to action. He says at one point that he wants nothing, which doesn’t entirely ring true, but the calming of desire, or at least its complication by age, illness and the small rewards of reflection, certainly appears to have marked this character in some irreversible way. Right up until the final moments, even when he’s radically altered his appearance, his capacity to linger is tremendous.

But then exactly what sort of task is it that Nolot’s Pierre—another variation on the other Pierres Nolot has portrayed in his previous three films, Manège (1986), Hinterland (98) and Porn Theatre (02)—needs to perform in advance of memory’s erosion? With his emotions rarely manifesting in any flamboyant or dramatic manner, what do we really know of the inner life of this guy?

We know he’s around 60, and his health is so-so. He takes pills that he says interfere with his ability to orgasm, and an early scene follows him as he wakes in the dead of night to be sick. We learn later that he’s been HIV-positive for more than 20 years. He makes a habit of hiring young men for sex. In his very particular deadpan, he tells a cop through his building’s intercom system that his lover has left him and that he’s very sad. He bears an exceedingly French moustache that he says he wouldn’t dare shave off, a sign of vanity, or at least a stubbornness about his image, that can be gauged against the sobering effects of time on his body, which we see naked—naked in a way that bodies rarely are in movies—for prolonged periods, especially the pronounced paunch he cloaks with baggy suits. He visits a few friends, other gay men of a certain age, with similarly lonely lives, and he visits a shrink, speaking frankly to all of them. He keeps his dead father’s barbershop in a corner of his Paris apartment. He spends a great deal of time at his desk, trying to write, but distracted by the past. An old lover of his is dying, and he’s to inherit money.

We witness Pierre frequently in moments of monetary transaction. Well, we witness Pierre paying others to be more precise: the young hustlers, the shrink, the cashier at the grocery we see him visit in a striking sequence that cuts between his grocery shopping with the auctioning off of his old lover’s valuable art collection. He lives modestly, yet there is a special emphasis in this rigorously observational, unobtrusive movie on the funds he expends. The diminishing savings, the diminishing desires, the body in quiet, gradual decline: as things fall apart, Before I Forget makes no effort to wring the situation for high emotions of any kind, yet it presents a visually rich, meditative, narratively loose but strangely cohesive experience. It’s about the tasks that fill up a person’s days, and the weight that some of the simplest tasks assume when we take a moment to stop and really see them.

So eventually, those mysterious things, the ones that Pierre is trying to do something with before they’re forgotten, feel like the accumulation of ordinary—or, well, ordinary for some of us anyway—things that define a life as much as the prized memories of outstanding events. All of it falls under the scrutiny of Pierre’s pen. And it’s as though the real testimony winds up being not the things Pierre writes but those that Nolot allows us to see unfold. There is an awful lot of talk about the past here, but the way the past is reconsidered is very much a present tense drama. Nolot is living it for us onscreen, doing as little as possible, which is to say exactly what it needed and nothing more. It’s a full, generous performance because it’s so un-forced, and because the camera is likewise so steady and unwavering. Many great filmmakers over the years have used the real, unbroken passage of time in interesting ways that usually heighten our corporeal experience of movie-watching, but Nolot’s use of it here is to shed light on the corporeal experience his own body is undertaking, a body that has so much memory written right there on its surface for us to see.

Savage Grace: the rare occasion where we could use a little less of Moore and a whole lot more of something to truly care about

This long-awaited second feature from director Tom Kalin, who made such an impression way back in 1992 with the Leopold and Loeb retelling Swoon, comfortably nestles up against its predecessor with regards to categorization: it’s a true crime movie, involving sex, horrific murder and characters with deeply pretentious ambitions, and it’s as queer as any movie can hope to be, with its personage mixing in all sorts of combinations untraditional, kinky, or downright deviant.

Besides apparently being exactingly tailored to the thematic interests of prolific producer Christine Vachon (an instrumental force behind Swoon, Boys Don’t Cry, I Shot Andy Warhol, Party Monster, The Notorious Bettie Page and Infamous), it’s the sort of material that also seems to draw in some of our finest actresses of a certain age, especially those who continually crave adventure and edge. Given that Joan Crawford is long gone, I can’t think of a better choice for the star role of Savage Grace than Julianne Moore—yet at the same time I think it might just be the worst, or at least the least enjoyable performance I’ve ever seen Moore give. But then, are we even supposed to enjoy this movie? Even the somber enjoyment of more closely understanding some bleak, troubling aspect of human nature?

Narrated by the real Tony Baekeland, Savage Grace dramatizes the story of his life leading up to his notorious arrest in 1972 at the age of 25. It says a lot about Baekeland’s life that the real star of his story is actually his mom, Barbara (Moore), heiress to the Bakelite fortune, an uncultured, desperately unhappy society woman who, after being abandoned by her understandably demoralized husband (Stephen Dillane) for her son’s girlfriend, focuses all of her overbearing energies on her only child, who she constantly needles, travels all over Europe with, lives with and, as it turns out, has sex with. Tony himself (played by the suitably stunned-looking Eddie Redmayne, once more, as in The Good Shepherd, the psychologically under-developed son) is rather a wisp of a boy next to her, nervous, uncertain, largely unloved and internalizing more rage than most of us will ever know.

For those of us who aren’t survivors of incest but always suspected it made for a pretty miserable home life, Savage Grace, the antithesis of Murmur of the Heart in more ways than one, certainly confirms that and some. But I suppose what’s truly terrifying in this utterly tawdry tale is not the aberrant sex itself but the suffocating mothering from which the sex is but one manifestation, and hardly the most toxic. Savage Grace is really a sort of horror movie about the stifling effects of family and affluence, one beautifully photographed in exquisite locales and filled with beautiful people, where the monster just keeps coming back to embarrass herself and everybody else with her incredibly awkward attempts to seem sophisticated before throwing yet another shrill hissy fit.

I didn’t actually know Baekeland’s story before seeing Savage Grace, which is just as well—at least there were some surprises. But these surprises, like Kalin’s craftsmanship, itself a bit overdone and noodlely, didn’t make Baekeland’s story any more enlightening, just grotesque, sad, jarring, intermittently fascinating and ultimately kind of pointless.

The woozy sublime of Paranoid Park: better late, and on DVD, than never

There’s a wonderful little moment—or, come to think of it, a few moments—in Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park (2007) where one teenage skater turns to another and, offering a tough, big bro-type scrap of consolation, explains to his nervous companion that “No one’s ever really ready for Paranoid Park!” I’ve seen the movie twice now, heard this line at least four, or was it maybe six times, and each time it struck me like a little flit of verbal white light, like a bemused lighting cue whispered over a headset, and it made me laugh. The speaker of the line is referring to a legendary local skate park peopled by “the hardcore freaks” of Portland, Oregon. But, gauging its distribution history, he might as well have been talking about the movie itself.

Van Sant’s previous three films, the post-Hollywood "death" trilogy of Gerry (02), Elephant (03) and Last Days (05), all enjoyed some sort of substantial run on numerous screens across the country. Sadly, Paranoid Park, a movie that employs a similar structural circularity and a number of the same chronology-lapping techniques, that possesses the same sensitivity to the corporal experience of moviegoing, and, like its predecessors, revolves around the trauma flowing from some central act of violence, never made it to many venues outside the major centres. It’s a shame, even non-sensical, because it’s perhaps the most all-round successful, the most singularly Van Sant, and certainly the most accessible of the bunch, featuring an identifiable protagonist, startlingly naturalistic performances from its young cast, superb doses of Van Sant’s trademark humour, and a hazy, fluttering, dream-like parade of gorgeous images captured under the heavy, overcast, low-lying heavens of the Pacific Northwest.

Now available on a no-frills DVD, Paranoid Park is narrated by Alex (Gabe Nevins), a slim, unassuming kid with a hell of an endearing deadpan. Condensing and rearranging the events from the young-adult source novel by Blake Nelson, Van Sant structures his film via the dictates of Alex’s troubled stream of consciousness. We see Alex settle down to try and sort out his feelings in writing, his words appearing on paper drawing us into the timbre of his subjective experience. He was involved in an accidental death, afraid to go to anyone about it, knowing he could be blamed. As he tries to find his version of events, his mind is drawn back and forth, sliding across fragmentary memories of his interactions with girls, with his separating parents and with his little brother, and his infatuation with the undulating half-pipes, fat sneakered derring-do and tumble of bodies at Paranoid Park. Van Sant, requiring only our relaxed alertness to catch the basics, glides through the turmoil puzzle of Alex’s conscience in a shuffling dance of image, movement, music, exposition and reverie, of faces, repetition, backward sounds, blended film stocks, inexplicable background noises, failed interrogations, blood and sex, and crouched kids cascading slow motion over unseen crests. I don’t know, maybe it sounds like broccoli, but I’d be surprised if most of you weren’t at least a little beguiled.

Sumptuously photographed by Christopher Doyle (In the Mood for Love, Last Life in the Universe) and Rain Kathy Li, the montage and modulation of visual information is essential to the nature of Paranoid Park, yet its refreshing way of conveying the frontiers of inner and outer life is finally most dependent on Van Sant’s knack with kids. Much can be made of the innate homoeroticism of Van Sant’s directorial gaze, which so often in his films is directed at sensitive, awkwardly handsome young men—indeed, it’s the subtle and distinctive nature of this gaze that has made Van Sant’s work so inviting to male audiences who normally have a hard time finding an in-road into gay-themed movies. But not enough credit is given to Van Sant’s compassion toward his subjects, the exuding of his genuine, unobtrusive engagement and belief in young people. From the direct-to-camera confessions of the young hustlers in My Own Private Idaho (1991) to the easy rapture of teens playing basketball in Finding Forrester (2000), when I watch Van Sant’s young men I feel a connection to the confusion and ephemera of youth that few filmmakers bother to nurture, if they ever even think about it.

In Paranoid Park Van Sant’s knack is felt most readily in the space afforded to his actors. Nevins’ flat cadence, his hesitations and understated delivery of emotionally sticky content aren’t examples of lazy screen acting but its opposite: his seemingly artless handling of text speaks with great tenderness toward the character’s uncertainty and anxiety about what’s happened and what it means to his still unformed identity, giving off a buzzy adolescent hum that’s tough to manufacture. I think the film’s most outstanding performance however comes from Lauren McKinney, whose admiring Macy slyly gains Alex’s confidence with a playful attentiveness, exactly half-child-like and half-womanly, that’s touching, funny, and grounded in a way that Nevins’ Alex necessarily isn’t. If there’s a moment in Paranoid Park where we might wish we could linger longer, it’s probably the one where Macy guides Alex along the street, him hanging on to her bike seat as he rides his skateboard. But such moments are all too fleeting, and that’s part of what makes this sort of little story feel so alive and true to the experience of its cast.

Rough trade, distant trains and sumptuous darkness: Gus Van Sant's beguiling debut

Now is a pretty-much perfect moment to celebrate Gus Van Sant. Van Sant’s films entered the cultural consciousness when I was still in my teens, and I for one can trace my response to his work from my complete marvel at the winsome singular stylings and melancholy infatuation with marginalized young hipsters and hustlers that marked Drugstore Cowboy (1989) and My Own Private Idaho (91), to my increasing disappointment over Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (93) and To Die For (95), my exclusively abstract admiration for his Xerox of Psycho (98), and my sense of outright betrayal over the unapologetically commercial Good Will Hunting (97) and Finding Forrester (2000), to my ongoing fascination with his return to form(alism) with Gerry (02), Elephant (03) and Last Days (05). This leads us finally to Paranoid Park, his latest and in many ways finest film, which gleans a revitalized sense of humour and dreaminess from his earliest work and weds it to the time-curling narrative schemes of the recent preceding “death” trilogy, capping a diverse and adventuresome two decades of making movies in and out of the Hollywood system.

The movie that started it all however is one I’ve only just seen after many years of hearing about it. Mala Noche (85) was Van Sant’s feature debut and the film that put him on the map. Though based on the autobiographical novella by Portland, Oregon street poet Walt Curtis, Mala Noche feels distinctly indebted to Jack Kerouac –not to mention Robert Frank– in its youthful tale of longing, aimlessness, wry Americana and skid row communion. It’s seductively oneiric, flat-out gorgeous to gaze at, decidedly loose with narrative but utterly assured with tone, a jewel in the crown of 80s indie cinema, impressively resourceful in its imaginative use of a miniscule budget (personally financed by Van Sant) and non-existent gear. And its now available in a lovely new package from The Criterion Collection.

Shot by John Campbell like some primitive noir, with hard white spots illuminating faces and objects amidst pools of sumptuous darkness, Mala Noche imparts mood from the get-go, with fetching, stubbly liquor store clerk Walt (Tim Streeter) telling us through elegant voice-over of his overwhelming crush for a Mexican drifter named Johnny (Doug Cooeyate). Johnny speaks no English but he gets the gist of Walt’s cheerful advances with little trouble. Walt quickly surmises that his chances of beguiling Johnny into any sort of sexual union are way slim, and opts for offering up a straight money for sex exchange. Johnny still doesn’t bite (maybe because Walt only offered $15), but he does go along for numerous rides through the country in Walt’s beat-to-shit sedan, so long as his traveling companion Roberto (Ray Monge) is in tow. They also share a gleeful night of drinking, eating and dancing in the kitchen of Walt’s apartment before Johnny disappears as casually as he arrived.

In the end, bedding Roberto –a one-night stand of sweaty, coarse man love, conveyed in tight close-ups of fields of dimly-lit flesh and one filthy-looking jar of Vaseline, unfolding to the strangely soothing sounds of distant trains and church bells– is about as close as Walt ever gets to the object of his affection. But in truth Johnny is a remote if ferally charismatic figure, more a type than a fully realized person. Even Walt himself admits his awareness to being drawn to Johnny at least partly through sheer exoticism and racial fetish: this shaggy-haired wetback makes for a certain cliché of dark-skinned rough trade and easy exploitation, yet there’s no denying the romantic sense of connection Walt, the self-confessed (comparatively) rich gringo, aspires toward. His story, however slight with regard to events, is as thoughtful as it is coolly audacious, and a sheer pleasure to sink into for its 77-minute running time.

Criterion’s disc comes with a good, hour-long doc on Curtis as well as terrific interview with Van Sant, who regales with stories about the winding road that led him to filmmaking, his relationship with Curtis and the Portland poetry scene, his enthrallment over reading weirdly formatted Stanley Kubrick screenplays at the American Film Institute, and the unique conditions under which Mala Noche was made. There’s also a very good essay on the film by Dennis Lim, who does a remarkable job of contextualizing Van Sant’s impact on gay cinema and the almost singular universality of his approach to gay themes.