•
Rating: "This road goes all around the world."
Mike Waters is an orphan who prostitutes himself, takes drugs, and suffers from a severe form of narcolepsy. He is searching for his mother, whom he will never find and continues to dream of in his Baudelairean artificial paradises. Around him, a company of drug addicts, drunks, and vagabonds gathers, among whom is Scott Favor, the son of the mayor of Portland, disgusted by his father and thus descended into the underworld in protest. Between Mike and Scott, a deep friendship forms that becomes love for the former and remains affection for the latter. Yet, despite their sentimental differences, they live an exclusive relationship that isolates them from the entire community of drifters, including Bob Pigen, the big boss, who is also in love with Scott. Favor decides to help Mike in his search for his mother. In Idaho, Mike discovers he is the child of incest, as revealed by his brother-father Dick, who finally tells him of his mother's escape to Rome. The two set off, and Scott finds his soulmate, Carmela, in a decaying country estate. Upon returning to the United States, everything has changed: Scott's father is dead, and he retraces his steps, claims the inheritance due to him, and conforms to his father's image only to marry Carmela, a decision that will heartbreak Pigeon. Mike continues his sad life, accompanied by pain and loneliness.
Gus Van Sant is at his beginnings (1991) with a cult work of independent cinema, ultimately the area in which the American director gives his best. For his third film, he partially readapts Shakespeare's "Henry IV", retrieves the road movie and beat culture, exhumes and readapts the common gay imagery to his needs. The focus on which the film is based is the character of Mike, identifying in the primary and purified sense of the term "protagonist". His figure sums up and concentrates all the themes Van Sant intends to tackle: the absence of family as the main reason for an unstable and tormented adult life, narcolepsy as a metaphorical expression of existential discomfort, the search for a point of reference that is increasingly distant, lovelornness. Paradoxically, the character seems not to have lost that kind of childlike purity in illness and his activity as a gigolo, purity perhaps also suggested by his ethereal and delicate physical appearance. With the necessary differences, in Mike's narcolepsy, one could glimpse the epilepsy of Dostoevsky's Prince Myshkin, more of a casual than premeditated reference. River Phoenix (Mike, Coppa Volpi in Venice, prematurely deceased) proves to be an exceptional actor who manages to occupy the scene without resorting to hammy tricks and exaggerated facial expressions. Purely plausible. In contrast, Keanu Reeves (Scott) gives a mediocre performance, except for the scene where he acts in "Henry IV", farcical but convincing.
Van Sant's stylistic refinement becomes evident, almost mannered, in the sex scenes between Scott and Carmela (Even before that between the two main characters and a German met in a hotel) achieved through a series of still frames capturing the actors immobile in the act, devoid of action. Elegance and originality compromised by some grotesque factors, primarily Mike's incestuous origin, yet the abundant cultural references, from "Falstaff" to the already mentioned "Henry IV", save it in injury time.
Family is a recurring theme in Van Sant's work. Anyone who has already had the opportunity to appreciate his cinema will have surely noticed the recurrence of the subject in question: in "Elephant," for example, just look at the relationship between the albino protagonist and his alcoholic father and the subtle polemic against two fundamental institutions such as school and family itself. Even with "My own private Idaho," the director connects much of Mike's discomfort to the lack of a comforting familial environment and his mother. During his narcoleptic attacks, Waters imagines an entirely isolated house where he lives with his mother and Scott. The illness thus qualifies as a Tacitian "necessary evil": the protagonist lives in a dreamlike dimension, unconscious of a parallel reality that allows him to escape. A character different from the usual druggies present in numerous films that pretend to be independent cinema under the false belief that a bit of sex, drugs, and alcohol suffice to create a sincere, indescribable, and committed work. Like "My own private Idaho".
P.S.: The Italian translation of the title, besides having little to do with what it substantiates, might lead one to think it is a gay-porn-type and similar. I should have mentioned it in the preface, but I'll leave a postscript to express my complete disdain for the use of translated titles, especially when they are not literal translations.
"The prince, motionless, sat beside him on the bed, and, with each cry or outburst of the sick man's delirium, he hurried to gently run his trembling hand through his hair and over his cheeks, as if to caress and soothe him. But he no longer understood anything of what he was being asked and did not recognize the people who had come in and surrounded him. And if even Schneider himself had now arrived from Switzerland to visit his old pupil and patient, he too, remembering the state the prince sometimes found himself in during the first year of treatment in Switzerland, would have made a gesture of discouragement with his hand and would have said, as then: - Idiot! -."
Loading comments slowly
