Gus Van Sant
Last Days

The story is loosely inspired by the death of Kurt Cobain, leader of Nirvana, who committed suicide in April 1994 in his Seattle home and was found a few days later. The action of the film takes place almost entirely in this villa, the home of Blake and a refuge for some of his ‘friends’, a place immersed in nature, far from the outside world and everyday life.

The necessity to hide stems from the fact that these characters are ‘different’, and Blake is ‘different’ too. At the beginning of the film and throughout its duration, he is on the run from the detox center where he was staying, but his is not simply an escape. Rather, it seems like a voluntary estrangement from history, a desire to erase from himself his external existence in a rediscovery of a forgotten intimate and natural dimension. But returning to his home, Blake finds it occupied by strange characters who claim to be his friends, each alienated in their weaknesses. For this reason, Blake finds no comfort or consolation in them, and they themselves seem almost not to see Blake, except to derive something material from him, like money or inspiration for a song. Human indifference seems to be mirrored in the natural world, which surrounds Blake with all its beauty and power but offers no escape route or consolatory effect. Yet there is someone who cares about Blake’s existence. There is someone looking for him who has already understood his intentions. There’s his wife, who specifically hires a private investigator, and there’s the clinic supervisor, whose ominous presence achieves its efficacy thanks to Kim Gordon’s performance, whose involvement in the actual events to which the film refers, lends great power to the admonition she addresses to Blake: “Do you ever feel sorry for your daughter for becoming a punk rock cliché?”...

But even the memory of his affections can’t change Blake’s intentions, all set on remaining true to himself, to his ‘difference’, to his identity, even at the cost of nullifying it. For Blake, a return to the world, to reality, necessarily means compromising with mechanisms foreign to his nature, which has been violated, like his home, by people interested in gain. For this reason, he decides to kill himself, far from everyone. And even if his choice does not appear so clear, indeed, from what transpires in the film, no one really does something to prevent it. Blake's fate seems marked by inescapable destiny. From this point of view, the conclusion is very suggestive, in which Blake’s body is found and taken away, almost to file away the matter, the indifference of which is underscored by a lively background of classical music. And while the news reports give the news, Blake’s ‘friends’ think only of escaping, again, for fear of being accused and to escape their own sense of guilt.

Overall, Van Sant offers us a very personal interpretation of the story of a character on whom it would have been very easy to speculate, whose death, besides leaving a deep void, is an absolute paradigm of universal human solitude, which often leaves one alone to deal with one’s destiny. In this perspective, suicide appears as the only possibility of making a truly conscious choice, and as such, an extreme act of freedom. It would be too easy now to give in to the temptation to insert anecdotes about those dark days of Cobain’s life. It doesn’t seem right to delve into that too. Regarding the last days of his life, I only like to think that he must have finally felt free and reckless, like the rock 'n roll dream for which he lived his short life.