Paul Schrader
The Canyons

With $150,000 raised through crowdfunding, bringing to the stage the death of cinema, in the form of a noir written by former prodigy Bret Easton Ellis; starring the most controversial gossip actress and the most famous American porn star in circulation; taking the film to Venice and being (almost) unanimously panned. Unjustly.

This is the strange endeavor that Schrader accomplished in 2013 (already four years, time flies).

The Canyons is indeed one of the most controversial films - I wouldn’t say among the most discussed, in that case it should have been seen by many rather than a few - and mistreated of recent years.

With The Canyons, Schrader returns to talk about the squalor and pettiness in golden L.A. but above all shows in a merciless and pessimistic (or better said apocalyptic) way his vision of Hollywood. In this sense, this film is part of my ideal trilogy of films on the destruction/deconstruction of the Hollywood myth along with the Lynchian Mulholland Drive and Cronenberg's Maps to The Stars, the latter released the same year as The Canyons, with a larger budget and viewed by more people because of the director’s name, but almost equally rejected. A behind-the-scenes Hollywood governed by manipulations, psycho-sexual power games, and violence for a small spot among the extras.

It is clear that it's not a film designed to be pleasant or attractive to a broad audience, nonetheless, it remains evident that Schrader is still capable of creating cinema with style to spare even with more difficulty than means, with an unmanageable and irritating Lohan on set (yet here, her entire existence as an actress acquires, for the first time, a sense), always filming with sublime class and offering the images their own determined soul. The same erotic scenes, abundant, demonstrate the amorality (without making any sort of moralism) of a world in dissolution, of which the future can only be represented by a degrading and desolate ensemble of closed and abandoned cinemas.

Few have appreciated it and, probably, few will appreciate it, but in my opinion, it is an extremely underrated work that deserves to be rediscovered and unearthed from the semi-oblivion in which it seems to have already sunk.

Gus Van Sant makes a (very rare) cameo as Christian/Deen's psychiatrist.