Not content with being a Hollywood heartthrob and acclaimed actor, Ryan Gosling comes to Cannes in the guise of director, writer and producer with Lost River. Does he fare as well off screen as on? Alas, he flounders, but this is a brave effort.
Bones (Iain De Caestecker, who looks a lot like Gosling) lives with mom Billy (Christina Hendricks) and baby brother Franky in a dilapidated house in a run-down town, the eponymous Lost River. Neighbour and would-be girlfriend Rat (Saoirse Ronan) states that Lost River refers to the old town submerged by the reservoir. Her grandma (Barbara Steele) used to live there and her husband died working on the reservoir. Since then she has never spoken, remaining a silent figure, watching her wedding video on a loop while decked out like Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane. She’s not the only element of faded glamour in the film. Gosling takes us to derelict theatres and rundown dance halls, and we see the ghostly and macabre shell of a once thriving town; a kind of submerged and drowning Detroit.
Baby Franky is constantly worried about a monster hiding in closets and under the bed. Neither Bones nor Billy deny the monster’s existence, simply checking for its whereabouts. We are soon to discover that monsters exist and thrive here. Looking for ways to pay back her loans, Billy seeks help from her bank manager Dave (Ben Mendelsohn). However, Dave is not your usual friendly financier – he’s also the owner of a bizarre club that answers the residents’ need for staged gory violence and adult entertainment, with Cat (Eva Mendes) providing a floorshow. Then there’s Bully (Matt Smith), king of this desolate urban realm whose favoured punishment is slicing off his victim’s lips. When Bones crosses Bully, we have to see if he can break the spell cast by the drowning of the town.
The cast all put in perfectly commendable performances, though Mendelsohn and Smith’s characters suffer from a surfeit of evil. In fact, there is a surfeit of everything. It’s a visual smorgasbord with buildings on fire, the underwater world, the weird and wonderful interiors, the strange purple light of the underground corridor in the club, the graffitied walls. The music would not be out place in a Nicolas Winding Refn movie and perhaps this is part of the problem. The director is trying hard to do something different whilst coming up with nothing new. We don’t need those cliched scenes of a woman submerging herself in the bathtub, or a boy running down the middle of an empty road. Gosling’s sympathies lie with the good guys – epitomised by the noble cab driver (Reda Kateb) who ferries Billy to and from work. Perhaps Gosling should have headed in a different direction, to something simpler and more real. For Gosling, Lost River has treacherous waters indeed.
