100 Road Movies by Jason Wood;

Author:Jason Wood;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2007-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Dir: Walter Salles; Prod: Michael Nozik, Edgard Tenembaum, Karen Tenkhoff; Scr: José Rivera; DOP: Eric Gautier; Edit: Daniel Rezende; Score: Gustavo Santaolalla; Principal Cast: Gael García Bernal, Rodrigo de la Serna, Miá Maestro, Mercedes Morán.

My Own Private Idaho

US, 1991 – 104 mins

Gus Van Sant

Emerging just prior to Gregg Araki’s The Living End (1992), Van Sant’s third feature marked a formative moment in the New Queer Cinema movement of the 1990s. Possessing an edgy, independent sensibility and frequently reaching back to the American cinema of the 1970s with its elliptical narrative and emphasis on psychological and emotional malaise, My Own Private Idaho refuels and re-politicises the road movie through its filtering of the exploration of mobility as rebellion and personal quest through a gay sensibility.

The film focuses on the friendship between two male hustlers in Portland, Oregon, who come from different sides of the tracks. Mike (Phoenix, from whose perspective the film is largely told) is a gay narcoleptic who, having been abandoned as a child, has grown obsessed with finding his mother. Scott (Reeves) is the rebellious son of a high-ranking family who hustles men and women mostly to embarrass his father, whose fortune he is soon to inherit. Though resolving to take care of his friend and help him in his quest to find his mother (a journey that will ultimately take them from the Pacific Northwest to Italy), Scott gently rebuffs Mike’s declaration of affection. Surrounding Scott and Mike are the waifs and strays of Portland, who live out of an abandoned hotel with their spiritual leader Bob (Richert), an ex-thief and hustler. Believing that Scott’s inheritance will benefit them all – when in reality he will probably use the money to escape his bleak existence – Scott is cast as Prince Hal to Bob’s Falstaff.

With its stunning rendering of dawn and dust landscapes and the frequent use of extreme long shots of deserted highways (cars rarely feature here), the film is imbued with vintage visual road-movie iconography. In narrative terms, the use of intertitles including ‘Idaho’, ‘Seattle’, ‘Portland’ and ‘Roma’ emphasises the fact that the film is structured along the lines of travel from one place to another. However, Van Sant also offers a number of new configurations. There are documentary-style inserts of interviews with actual Portland street kids (harshly contrasting with the film’s trance-like quality), the playful references to Shakespeare, and dreamlike shots of the sky and fast-motion cloud photography, as often as not used to emphasise Mike’s narcoleptic condition and his imminent drifting into unconsciousness. The film’s surrealist bent includes shots of salmon leaping upstream (to suggest both imminent orgasm and, in the film’s final montage, Mike alone on the road again) and houses crashing in Zabriskie Point (1970)-style slow motion onto an open road. Another ingenious touch is when the studs adorning the pages of gay porno magazines playfully come to life and address the spectator.

The death of Phoenix shortly after completing the film, united with Van Sant’s surreal and ambient aesthetic, lends My Own Private Idaho the feel of an elegy for the aimlessness of youthful alienation.

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