This awkward moment: What's wrong with Gosling's directorial debut

Text: Nailya Golman, Interview

It's been a day for everyone on Facebook to share the news about Ryan Gosling's directorial debut shown in Cannes with the posts "My movie shot!" or "they scold you, look!" (under this comment, I remember exactly, there was a link to Dazed - a fascinating combination of style and taste). We will not pretend that we are not interested - our film was shot, girls. Stupid, but how lovely.

The plot is as follows. Lonely mother Billy (Christina Hendrix) raises two children in a rickety house in some forests near Detroit and tries to earn a living by taking a model in a fetish club to Eva Mendes and Ben Mendelsohn (a wonderful Australian supporting actor, you definitely saw him in "Casino robbery" and in the "Place under the pines"). While at night she cuts off her artificial face with a scalpel for the joy of the public, her eldest son staggers through the ruins, quarrels with the only dangerous guy in the district (Matt Smith), finds a flooded city nearby and walks by the hand with a neighbor from the house opposite (Sir’sa Ronan finally playing a normal person, not an infantile fool). Almost immediately, everything becomes so bad and dangerous for everyone, which is clear - it is necessary to throw it down, but for a long time nobody brings it down.

It is difficult to resist the temptation to disassemble Lost River into components - the problem is that after this analysis it is not quite clear what remains of Gosling himself. First, the film opens with a five-minute direct quotation from The Tree of Life, and then, towards the end, it sends a distinct hello to "Holy Motors Кара" Corporation of Karax. There is also a sudden jamb of glowing neon bicycles in the middle of an empty Detroit suburb - hello “Otvyazny vacation” (“Lost River” was shot by the same operator). Hero "from the movie" Drive. "Thirdly, the tricky angles and streams of bright colored light - blue scenes, red scenes, pink, purple, green. This is very much like the last film of Gosling's big friend, God forgive" which was featured on the same Cannes festival last year, and which Gosling probably learned by heart - he played a major role there.

Maybe Ryan just didn't have a lot of time watching movies before.

To be honest, there is a feeling that the train to Croisette as the main star of Refn films (Drive also had a great success here), the new director understood what he wanted and could, and then came to Refn for advice, and he shared the recipe with him : domineering mother, multicolored lighting, incomprehensible mystical enemy, someone from Chromatics at the sound desk. It is noteworthy that all the explicit references that we have already mentioned are also sent mainly to the main Cannes hits of recent years. Maybe Ryan just didn't have a lot of time watching a movie before, like in the past three years. In any case, to remove the "Lost River", it would really be enough to watch the 2010s. In itself, this is not such a big trouble, but everything else the film has a very boring and very convenient construction for a novice director: a vacuum vaguely mystical chronotope, a detached tale, a personal art ghetto where you can put only your favorite motifs and play with them as much it will fit in that Gosling does, safely ridding himself of one of the filmmaker’s most difficult tasks - to revive the world on the screen instead of coloring an artificial designer with multi-colored lighting and highlighting houses that are still burning in the frame.

Although the noise, of course, around the premiere was great. The audience in the hall stood with elongated necks and iPhones ready ten minutes before Gosling with Christina Hendricks (Eva Mendez, interestingly, did not come) appeared in the doorway - star fever captured even the stiff Cannon public. However, after half an hour a third of the hall quietly went to do more interesting things, because it is difficult to seriously watch the Gosling film. It has its strengths (the last twenty minutes, for example, are significantly better than anything else, as if by the end of the movie he really understood what he wants to say), but in general, what Lost River looks like usually looks like the first and the second short films of interesting directors in his youth. An awkward moment is, in fact, that, due to its status and circumstances, Gosling showed his “thesis work” in the second most important competition of the most prestigious film festival in the world. That's what you get when you’re everybody's darling.