I had seen “elephant”, director Gus Van Sant’s last movie before this one and despite some weaknesses I liked it. What I especially liked was the quietness and the casualness he told his story with. “last days” works the same way. The camera simply follows the actors, dialogues are rare, casual and often off-topic in a way. At one point the camera shows a Boys II Men music video on a tv set for a whole minute or two. The strength of this movie is that it doesn’t seek sense where there is none. Everyone who walks into this movie knows that Blake, the protagonist, will be dead in the end. Can suicide make sense? This would be a case for Emile Durkheim. Anomic suicide. Somehow what you want and the way the world is don’t match any longer. Inner and outer world are out of tune with each other. Of course there is reasons: a possibly dead, at least not satisfying relationship, bandmates that rank success over their lead singer’s psychological wellbeing, drugs…

The house in the bewildered forest is a metaphor for the morbid artists inner being, for what others might call soul. Weird things happen, the sounds don’t always the pictures, some things happen in the wrong order. Visitors from the outer world appear rarely and communication just won’t work. The four housemates are strange people just as their host is with the slight difference that they won’t be dead in the end. They are out of step with the world, always wasted, practicing free love beyond gender restraints, listening to The Velvet Underground while MTV shows contemporary boy groups. This little planet hidden in a forest is refugium for musicians, artists in the art of life where they can hide from all this sense imposed on them by others.

At one point Blake is going to town, to a live show. He meets an old friend of his but he doesn’t realize the strain the musician is suffering. He talks to him about rubbish while he slowly fades away. Cobain in his suicide note wrote he’d “better burn out than fade away”. For the outer world Blake will have burned out. In the inner world he just ended a long time of fading away. The whole movie he is already half vanished…

Everything Blake is wearing is a direct quotation of a certain style of Kurt Cobain’s. Michael Pitt’s whole acting is so affectionate, with so much passion for his role. He is so authentic that it is frightening. I think the biggest compliment this movie could be made and that I make by now is that I am sure that Cobain would have liked this movie. It speaks the language of the 1990s underground. The music is great; especially the music Blake is playing himself. The four housemates wear their actors’ real world names. Reality and fiction blur. How much of a statement about the real Cobain is this? In the end one of the housemates got no alibi for the point of death. No review I read mentioned this so far but I want you to recognise it when you watch it. This might be a statement, a conspiratorial hint by the director…  [jan]

www.lastdaysmovie.com/