Mala Noche [1985] Gus Van Sant

http://bayimg.com/baJaLaadc Mala Noche (1986) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089537/ Mala Noche (also known as Bad Night) is a 1985 American drama film written and directed by Gus Van Sant, based on an autobiographical novel by the Oregon poet Walt Curtis. The movie was shot in 16 mm, mostly black-and-white. Mala Noche is the first feature film by Gus Van Sant. It was shot entirely on location in Portland, Oregon. Tim Streeter ... Walt Curtis Doug Cooeyate ... Johnny Ray Monge ... Roberto Pepper Nyla McCarthy ... Betty Sam Downey ... Hotel Clerk Robert Lee Pitchlynn ... Drunk Man (as Bob Pitchlynn) Eric Pedersen ... Policeman Marty Christiansen ... Barfriend George Conner ... Wino (as Bad George Connor) Don Chambers ... Himself Walt Curtis ... George Kenny Presler ... Street Hustler Conde Benavides ... Arcade Amigo Cristo Stoyos ... Greek Singer Matt Cooeyate ... Boxcar Amigo Based on an autobiographical novella by Portland street poet Walt Curtis, Mala Noche (1985) was the 33-year-old Van Sant's debut feature. Shot on 16mm for $25,000, it was the first of his bittersweet odes to tender outcasts and remains the simplest and least burdened. Walt, who frames the narrative through his voiceover, is the prototypical Van Sant hero: handsome, vague, and impossibly gentle, poised between cuddly introspection and bright flashes of exuberance. He looks, in fact, precisely like a cross between Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix, the melancholy emo-studs of Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho, a film elaborated from the Mala Nochetemplate. Walt is the father of the Drugstore Cowboy, deconstructed across the ensemble in Elephant, resurrected in the broken poet of Last Days, a denizen of Paranoid Park. Mala Noche sidesteps potential clichés with an attentiveness to class dynamics (even skid row has its hierarchies) and the cultural differences, poignantly underplayed, between the grunge gringo and his object of desire. Van Sant wisely lets Walt control the narrative consciousness, leaving Johnny and Roberto, sympathetic as they are, something of ciphers. The danger here is an unexamined fetishism of type (inarticulate Latino rough trade), but Van Sant finds a tactful, honest reticence in his characterization of the Mexicans and complicates Walt with an awareness of his own privilege. In light of Elephant, we can see Mala Noche as the first act of a mind interested in graphing the knowable contours of experience, the first gift from a scrupulously compassionate artist. The plot is episodic—almost, as in Idaho, narcoleptic, fading in and out of long, dark patches. Heartbreak, sickness, even death come into play, yet tenebrous as it is, Mala Noche has the tone of a daydream and a mildly trance-like effect. It looks fantastic in the fresh 35mm blowup now screening at the IFC—every broken bottle, cigarette butt, and scruffy chin rendered in John Campbell's appealingly rough, high-contrast cinematography. (Campbell would be DP on Van Sant's Idaho and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues.) Underseen but not exactly neglected, Mala Noche isn't in the same league as the recent smash IFC revival of Killer of Sheep. But this small, sensitive, wondrously likable debut occupies a nearby nook in the DIY pantheon. Mala Noche was Van Sant's first feature, but even here his empathy for fringe-dwelling outsiders and his passionate absorption in the poetic possibilities of the medium are on full display. In places the film has the jazzy abandon of early Godard (particularly when the men jump into Walt's car for a joy ride in the country). And late in the film, as Walt is searching the streets for the missing object of his desire, there's an inspired recasting of the Harry Lime entrance in The Third Man. Though the picture is a modest, handmade item, there's nothing underdeveloped here in the filmmaking sensibilities. The movie, which is based loosely on a novella by Portland poet Walt Curtis, is a walk on the wild side, but even at its most tragic, the vision isn't despairing, possibly because there is such a feeling of romantic elation in the images. Partly the film is fueled by Van Sant's romanticism of losers; it's fascinated by the poetic allure of poor beautiful boys riding the rail into the promised land and ending up dead, crumpled on the pavement in the middle of a street, thousands of miles from home. It's Van Sant's conception of Walt, and the diffident self-awareness in Streeter's performance, that holds these feelings in balance and saves the movie from softheadedness. It lets us see how Walt inflates his infatuation with Johnny for dramatic effect. He's obsessed, yet still he's playacting, hyping his own emotions because that's how he feeds his romantic conception of himself. Nowhere is Walt's place of choice; for Johnny and Pepper, it's a prison they carry with them. And Van Sant navigates the distinctions between these two worlds with intelligence and invigorating style. This is a knockout debut. Mala Noche has also given modern gay films (from Mysterious Skin to Hellbent) a language through which to frame gay existence. Lonely and disconnected but deeply in need of human contact, these are the men Annie Proulx meant to characterize in Brokeback Mountain but which Ang Lee senselessly whitewashed. To call Van Sant’s seminal film trashy or backwards—or simply a “time capsule”—is to ignore the insights into gay life it still holds today, when it’s more or less impossible to point out a single “tasteful” gay film that’s worth watching.

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